Win a Battle and Lose a Political War

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In France the Israeli embassy has gone so far as to accuse the press of being antiSemitic. One all too human reason for the zeal with which Israeli attacks have been reported may be that many correspondents were actually in targeted West Beirut. In addition, Nigel Hawkes, foreign news editor of London's The Observer, acknowledges that there may be "a sort of double standard—we may not have the highest expectations of Iran or Iraq, but Israel is perceived as being a Western nation and is expected to conform to Western standards."

But Hawkes agrees with many European and American editors when he says, "The Israelis overall have had a bad press, but it's not a worse press than they had a right to expect." Israel's real problem was neither the bias of correspondents nor poor propaganda packaging, but something far more serious: the lack of a readily convincing justification for the onslaught on West Beirut.