Newspaper Watch: Irish Times supporting restraint in war crimes

For three consecutive days, the situation in Lebanon made frontpage headlines in the Irish Times. On Thursday 13 July "Israel promises 'severe response' to Hizbullah" was the headline. The following day it read "Hizbullah retaliates with rocket attack on Haifa". Then, on Saturday, the story was "Hizbullah leader vows 'open war' on Israel". The trifling matter of the Israeli state's massive act of military aggression against a foreign country didn't make the headlines.

If the British army had responded to IRA kidnappings by bombing large swathes of Dublin, destroying huge chunks of its infrastructure – the airport, power stations, water plants and all the major roads – and killing a large number of innocent civilians in doing so, you would hope that it would make frontpage headlines ahead of threats issued by the IRA.

All of these frontpage reports were written from an Israeli point of view. They all served to enormously underplay the scale of Israel's military aggression against Lebanon and overplay the scale of Hezbollah's against Isreal.

For example, the leading article on Saturday 15 July devoted six paragraphs to describing attacks by Hezbollah against Israel, but the only Israeli attack mentioned was the bombing of "the home and headquarters" of Hezbollah leader Nassan Nasrallah. Lebanese civilian casualties were only aluded to in the context of their impact upon foreign opinion and no details were provided.

The point of view of these articles is not suprising when you learn that their author, Peter Hirschberg, is based in Jerusalam and is the editor of the English language edition of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. In times of war, a nation's media tends to rally to "support the troops" and Haaretz is no exception. The editorial in its English edition of Sunday 16 July described the attack on Lebanon as a "just war" and helpfully suggested that the government should declare a "state of emergency" in support of the war effort. Although the paper carried one opinion piece arguing that the aggression was disproportionate and badly directed, this was outweighed by four opinion pieces supporting the war or calling for more extreme measures.

The decision of the Irish Times to run Hirschberg's Israeli perspective on the conflict as frontpage news, without mentioning his affiliation, relegating reports from the Lebanon to the inside pages, is symptomatic of the paper's editorial line on the conflict. On Thursday 14 July the editorial noted that the Israeli actions in Gaza were an example of collective punishment – a war crime according to the Geneva convention – but rationalised this as "a strategy to make the Palestinians accountable for the Hamas government they freely elected". Rather than condemning the crimes or proposing that the criminals desist, the aggression was bizzarely presented as "an uncertain response" by a government lacking "strong, ex-military figures".

On Monday 17 July, the Irish Times again editorialised on the conflict, welcoming the statement issued by the G8 leaders which "called on Hezbollah to release the Israeli soldiers it captured last week and to cease its rocket attacks on Israel, and on Israel to show the utmost restraint in its attacks on Lebanese civilians and infrastructure." This statement, which called on Israel to "show restraint" in its war crimes was only criticised as being "weak as to the political means and agency". p