Mideast crisis--Blog from Jerusalem
It didn't get better. On Tuesday night, al-Omary was taken alone to the police station for six hours of questioning, he said. "They said there were claims that our broadcasts are helping Hezbollah," he said. "That's ridiculous. My work doesn't help Hezbollah. What about the Israeli stations that even name the address of the house [that was hit]? I want them to tell me, what are we broadcasting which is different from the others?" Al-Omary asserted that his network is being harassed for its coverage and because "it's easy to bother the Arabs."
I called Miki Rosenfeld, a spokesman for the Israeli police. "[Al-Omary] has the right to say what he wants," he said. The issue is under investigation, he added. Channel 1's Bar Shalom said he did not know the details about the detention of Al-Jazeera's crews, but what's certain, he said, is that "the [authorities] suspect them immediately. They never suspect me."
July 17, 2006
Jerusalem—When Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers and killed seven others in a July 12 cross-border raid, sparking an aggressive Israeli military reaction on Lebanon, a Jordanian friend of mine changed his MSN messenger user name to "F*** Hezbollah."
It stayed like that for three days as Israel pounded the southern neighborhoods of the Lebanese capital and the southern part of the country, where many supporters of Hezbollah live. Hezbollah volleyed Katyusha rockets and longer-range missiles on Israeli villages and towns. "Hezbollah f***ed up big time," he wrote me later, calling the group "pawns in the hands of the Syrians and the Iranians."
Indeed, he was not the only Arab who felt that way. Despite strong criticism of Israel's military operation in Lebanon, many Arabs—from the man in the street to the man on the throne—blamed the Syrian and Iranian-backed Shiite militia for starting the dangerous back-and-forth conflict.
A Bahraini blogger, known for speaking his mind at 'Mahmoud's Den', ridiculed the Lebanese government: " Sorry, how many armies do you actually have, Lebanon?" he wrote Sunday. "Make up your effing mind and either amalgamate all of these "resistance fighters" under your army's banner or disband them. You are a sovereign nation, right? So what the hell are you doing allowing "resistance fighters" to "defend" the South? Isn't that your army's job?"
Some Lebanese criticize their compatriots. Sami Hermez, a Lebanese academic doing research in Ramallah, tried desperately to call his family when the conflict began. Writing on electronicintifada.net, he said that Lebanese are angry at Hezbollah, which claims to be a resistance movement defending Lebanon. "Lebanon was doing just fine before Hezbollah decided to act," screamed his mother, when he was finally able to get through to her on her cell phone.
Arab and Muslim leaders often try to maintain a single stance in regards to Israel. But Hezbollah's act last Wednesday created a crack. Saudi Arabia, for one, lashed out at Hezbollah last Thursday, calling its attack inside the Israeli border "irresponsible adventurism ... that risk[s] putting in danger all the Arab countries and their achievements before these countries have said a word." Egypt and Jordan also expressed implicit criticism of Hezbollah, which gets its backing from Iran and Syria.
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