Public bask in spoils of TV war

"I don't think the operation will stop the Katyusha rockets," said Iwo, the owner of a delicatessen in Shamai street in Jerusalem, writes Patrick Cockburn. "Only the Syrians can do that - the bastards."

Israelis overwhelmingly approve of the decision of the government to launch an air and artillery offensive in south Lebanon last week. Differences only emerge over the likely effectiveness of the attacks in achieving their declared aim of stopping the Katyusha attacks.

At the other end of the street, Elan, who manages a television and electronics shop, also believed that Israel's five-day old Operation Grapes of Wrath would not alone prevent Hizbollah, the Lebanese guerrilla movement, from firing rockets.

"I think we are going to send in ground troops," he said. "I think we are going to do it after there is not a single Leba nese left in south Lebanon." He thought that this would ensure that there would be no Israeli casualties because "the shelling and bombing will have cleaned everything by then".

The popularity of the operation is explained by the fact that most Israelis see it as a defensive measure. This is not affected by the disproportion between the few dozen Katyushas fired by Hizbollah on a single day and the 4,000 shells fired by Israeli artillery and over 200 airstrikes.

Regardless of how effective the operation is going to prove many Israelis simply want to hit back. "They shouldn't have let Hizbollah develop this chutzpah," says Shaul, who said that General Ariel Sharon should have been allowed to finish the job of pacifying Lebanon during the invasion of 1982.

Shimon Peres, the Israeli prime minister, says that the aim of the offensive is limited. As a result, there have been none of the protests seen during the 1982 invasion. To Israelis, Hizbollah is associated with Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the Palestinian Islamic organisations which carried out four suicide bombings in February and March which killed 63 people. All three movements are seen as a common enemy.

So far the war has been cheap for Israel. Israeli parents are not worried that their children will be killed. In Jerusalem there is little of the sense of emergency which was visible after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin last November or after the suicide bombings earlier this year.

For most Israelis it is a television war. Electoral politics, too, plays its part. An assistant in Iwo's shop argued: "The war is geared to the election on 29 May."

Israeli and international television exaggerate the sense of threat felt by Israelis close to the border, because it focuses on the small number of people who were wounded or shocked by an explosion. After a rocket had hit a eucalyptus outside an apartment house he owned in Kiryat Shmona at the weekend, Yoel Spongin said: "Now look at these people who lived here. None of them are crying." Nevertheless, the public mood could change. "What would have happened," asks Professor Israel Shahak, a political commentator, "if the Katyusha which hit the roof of that shelter had penetrated and killed all the children inside?"