Gideon Lichfield's blog

I spent yesterday in Haifa. By one estimate, over half its population has gone to stay with relatives further south, and the city is so quiet that it feels as if it is stuck in a perpetual early Saturday morning, a sort of Groundhog Hour.

When the sirens go off, you have about one minute until the rockets hit. The first couple of times you hear them, it is truly scary. In most conflict zones there are some fairly well-understood lines dividing where's safe from where's dangerous—they just never show you the safe bits on television. (Even in Beirut, for instance, a lot of people outside the Hezbollah neighborhoods are more or less carrying on with life as normal.) In some of them, being visibly identifiable as a foreign journalist is better than having a bullet-proof car. But there are no safe areas in Haifa, and Fajr missiles can't read the sign on your windshield that says "PRESS".

But not every alarm is followed by rockets: the warning system covers a wide region, and sometimes there are false alarms. Yesterday there were nine warnings but only one wave of rockets. And a missile has to pretty much score a direct hit on the room you're in if it's to kill you.

And so, as in any extreme situation, people get used to it. One time, the siren went off when we were at the site where, a couple of hours earlier, a missile had struck next to a building. The shrapnel had done this to it:

And you would think that after seeing this any sensible person, on hearing the siren, would at least run indoors to avoid ending up like a Swiss cheese. Well, the bystanders—including, I note, several policemen—decided that the appropriate shelter from an incoming missile is the same as for a passing rain shower: 

Later that day, the alarm sounded as I sat with some people who were enjoying the unusual peace and quiet on the outdoor terrace of a restaurant. Everyone gathered up their belongings, a few took their drinks, and we trooped into the restaurant's cellar bar for a couple of minutes. While we waited, a Palestinian diner found some black humor in Hassan Nasrallah's apology for killing Arab-Israelis as well as Jewish ones. "If I get back outside and my lunch is not there any more," he warned, "I will demand an apology from Nasrallah in person."

Gideon Lichfield, Passport's esteemed guest blogger and Jersusalem correspondent for The Economist, offers up another dispatch today on the moral minefield of assessing degrees of 'civilian'.--CO

Proportionality? Passé. The mot du jour is "civilianality". While the rest of the world debates whether Israel's attack on Hezbollah is "proportionate" in light of the fact that the Lebanese are suffering about ten times as many civilian casualties as the Israelis, Alan Dershowitz proposes weighting the numbers according to how "civilian" the civilians really were, ie, how complicit with Hezbollah. Just as passive accomplices to a crime are not free of guilt, he argues, nor are those who allow terrorists to store their rockets in the basement. And as to those who just happened to be living next door:

The Israeli army has given well-publicized notice to civilians to leave those areas of southern Lebanon that have been turned into war zones. Those who voluntarily remain behind have become complicit. 

I like Dershowitz's free and easy use of the word "voluntarily"—as if deciding to pick up your family at a moment's notice, abandon friends and relatives who may depend on you, leave behind a home and belongings you may never see again, and flee along roads that are being bombed daily, using transport that hundreds of thousands of other people are competing for, requiring money that you may not have (I've heard anecdotally that the cost of a taxi trip from Beirut to Amman has gone up from $200 to $3,000), is like choosing which flavor of yoghurt to have for breakfast. (More after the jump.)

Passport is honored to introduce a new guest blogger: Gideon Lichfield, The Economist's correspondent in Jerusalem.--CO 

"Why do so many Israelis support the attack on Lebanon?" a journalist who had just flown in asked me.

I've spent the past few days trying to make sense of it. My friends abroad are horrified. In response to the kidnap of two soldiers, Israel is hammering half a country, sowing with its bombs a wrath that it will surely harvest some day. But most Israelis don't seem to care. My leftist friends who speak out feel ostracized.

There are the obvious reasons. The country is under the biggest attack in over thirty years. Israeli television concentrates on the death and destruction at home from Hezbollah's rockets. And every nation backs its boys in war, at least when the war is just beginning. Deeper, though, is a sense of vindication. When Israel was young and fought for its life, it was feted. When its soldiers began to fire on boys throwing stones, it became reviled. For two decades now, its main theatre of war has been the occupied Palestinian territories, a twilight zone where you cannot always see clearly the line between aggressor and defender, militant and civilian, right and wrong.

And now here comes Hezbollah—unashamedly hostile, unmistakably dangerous, and unambiguously on someone else's turf. Someone who didn't do the job of taming them as promised. For six years after its last troops left Lebanon, Israel kept mostly quiet when Hezbullah taunted, fired, kidnapped. Long enough. Those guys had their chance. They blew it. Time to go in and finish the job. And this time, nobody can say it was unprovoked.

Fine, fine; but why so hard? Why bomb the airport, the highways, the homes; why blow up relief convoys, block the ports, kill hundreds of civilians (but hardly any Hezbullah fighters, so far) and turn hundreds of thousands into refugees? Never mind right or wrong: now even Lebanese who hated Hezbollah are uniting against Israel. How does this help?