Numbers, Clusters, Chutzpah

Israel has spent a lot of time recently trying to convince the world that the number of civilian deaths in Lebanon has not been as high as the Lebanese, Palestinians and International Red Cross have been saying it is. Presumably, Israel hopes that many people will somehow consider it less brutal to kill one thousand innocents than it is to kill ten thousand, and will conclude that the Israeli invasion was not so bad after all. Ignoring the fact that Israel invaded a country with which it was not at war and killed hundreds, at the very least, of its civilians, and ignoring uncontested evidence that countless Israeli bombs and shells fell on apartment buildings, schools, hospitals, foreign embassies (six at the latest count) and shopping centers—very frequently in areas uninhabited by Palestinians—Israeli spokesmen have claimed that in no war in history has there been a more "humane" approach to minimizing casualties. (In the meantime, in between "cease-fires," Israeli gunners continue to lob shells randomly into West Beirut to keep the pressure on).

Then, there are the cluster bombs—deadly, U.S.-made anti-personnel devices which under special agreements with the U.S. are never supposed to be used near civilians (whether or not the guerrillas are "hiding behind them," as the Israelis like to say). Israel used the bombs illegally once before during 1978, and apologized for having made a 11 mistake." This time, it has announced with a straight face that its use of cluster bombs has not in any way contravened its agreements—despite the testimony of objective American witnesses in Lebanon who have reported the dropping of cluster bombs on a sanitarium for elderly invalids (no, there wasn't any PLO ammunition dump in the cellar), and on the Burj Burajneh refugee camp, where guerrillas and civilians live together.

The Israelis have a word for the kind of brazen approach they have adopted in telling us of their concern and their skill in avoiding civilian casualties in Lebanon: chutzpah. We hope that not too many people are taken in by it.