Israel's leaders feel their actions are not being accurately reported in the West, but they refuse to acknowledge the suffering of the Lebanese and the resistance of Hizbullah, reports Eoin McVey from Haifa and Tel Aviv.
Menachem Edelstein's Haifa apartment has all the trappings one might expect of a middle-class technician: tidy, well-equipped kitchen, photos of his wife and children stuck on the fridge, comfortable living room with book-lined presses. There is also, however, a gaping six-foot hole in his ceiling and wall-to-wall rubble covering the floor.
Two hours earlier, a Katyusha rocket, fired from 30-35km away in Hizbullah territory inside Lebanon, hit the roof of the apartment block. Mercifully, the rocket exploded just before impact. Had it exploded on impact there would be much less left of Edelstein's home.
Of more importance, Edelstein's wife and children are not in Haifa. He had, he tells me, sent them to stay with his brother in the safety of Tel Aviv and, the night before, had resisted his wife's plea to return, arguing that she should remain away a few days longer.
Had they been back in Haifa, they would almost certainly have been in the apartment, as very few people walk around the city during the daylight hours, which is when the missiles land. The missiles are not fired at night because the trace left by them would make it easier for the Israeli army to pinpoint the location of the launcher and destroy it.
After the loud wail of the siren warning of an attack, there is very little time; a Katyusha may be in the air for only 40 seconds, not enough time for many, especially the old, to reach safety. A total of 14 missiles landed on Haifa last Tuesday, but there was just one fatality, a 76-year-old man who had a heart attack while running for a shelter.
Katyushas are not precision-targeted. Hizbullah fighters get a launcher into place, point a missile at Israel, fire and quit the scene - quickly. Many of the rockets, it would seem, land harmlessly on empty ground or in the sea.
Haifa is an attractive city. Through various stages in the history of Palestine it was prized by the Ottomans, the British, the Germans, the French and others. It is the third-largest city in Israel, with a busy port, considerable industry and wonderful beaches. Now, though, the port is completely idle and the main shops are closed. Large sections resemble a ghost town. The usual population of a quarter of a million people is down by some 70,000, according to mayor Yona Yahav, as those who can do so have fled south.
"Displaced persons" is how he describes them. "We don't like the word refugees."
The war has already damaged Haifa's economy, but Yahav worries that it may also damage the accord between its Jewish and Arab populations. Haifa is home to Israel's second-largest Arab community after Nazereth, and one-fifth of the university's students are Arab. Haifa has escaped tensions in the past because, the mayor says, it is a holy city for no one.
"Moses, Mohammed, John the Baptist, none of them ever set foot in Haifa," he says. He is jesting about the reason for the tranquillity, but Sheikh Odah, a local Muslim leader sitting alongside him, is in agreement.
My trip to Israel was arranged as part of an intensive PR drive by Israel's ministry of foreign affairs. There are many such trips being organised because the ministry is concerned that Israel's case is not being reported accurately. Scandinavian journalists are a particular target as, the ministry says, the media in their countries are consistently hostile to Israel.
The tour was organised so that journalists could meet representatives of the government and the Israeli defence forces; unfortunately, though, there were to be no meetings with anyone who might have a critical view of Israeli actions.
Such people, however, can be found on the streets of Tel Aviv. There, one finds little opposition to the military action itself but some anxiety about its duration.
Tel Aviv is hardly touched by the war being waged just 50km to the north, and a protest rally draws a crowd of less than 3,000. The army is not in evidence at all, beaches are full, shops are bustling, and the traffic is terrible. Three of the students taking part in the rally admit to me that opposition is largely limited to left-wing students, communists and - rely on Israel for contrasts - some ultraorthodox religious. But, they argue, the longer the war drags on, especially as casualties and economic damage accumulate, their numbers will grow.
Prime minister Ehud Olmert's daughter, they point out with some satisfaction, was among the protesters.
For the moment, Israeli politicians are putting on a united front. An interview with deputy prime minister Shimon Peres makes it abundantly clear that the Israeli politician most associated with conciliation in the past is four-square behind the army. Israel's military campaign will continue until Hizbullah are out of the border area and militarily out of business. Peres is contemptuous of talk about proportionality.
"Was [NATO action on] Kosovo proportionate?" is his reply, blithely ignoring the fact that Kosovo was a terrible human tragedy.
Peres estimates the Hizbullah strength at "about 7,000" and is defensive about the difficulties being encountered by the army. This is a constant refrain from Israelis now. How can it be that after two weeks of bombing south Lebanon to pieces, Hizbullah is still firing off some 100 missiles a day? How can it be that one of the world's best-trained and bestequipped armies, which once could defeat four countries in just six days, cannot put out of business a supposedly ragtag militia which doesn't have a single tank to call its own, much less an air force?
But Hizbullah is no ragtag army. It has had six years to build up a sophisticated network of bunkers, reinforced tunnels and a huge arsenal of weapons. Israel reckons that Hizbullah has 17,000 missiles, but the real figure could be higher.
It has many thousands of reservists.
Small wonder then that the Lebanese army failed to confront the militia and eject them from the border area as promised in 2004 under UN Security Council Resolution 1559.
The Israeli army clearly didn't anticipate that Hizbullah would be as well-armed, as well-hidden and as well-trained as they are proving to be. The army also may have reckoned that Hizbullah would not be prepared for the scale of the Israeli retaliation, expecting instead that the killing and capture of Israeli soldiers would be met with just a few routine bombing sorties.
On the contrary, Hizbullah seems to have been more prepared than the Israeli army. It is a formidable force, using guerrilla tactics which are not easily countered by an army trained mostly to fight set-piece battles out in the open. Hizbullah, say the Israelis, is funded massively by Iran and given considerable assistance from Syria. This, according to a senior government defence analyst, is not just a war against a militia which wishes to drive Israel out of existence, it is a proxy war being fought by Iran and Syria for their own individual ends.
How, then, can negotiations reach a successful conclusion for Israel? Iran and Syria do not deny their role but they have no reason to come to a negotiating table, never mind make concessions. On the contrary, a victory for Hizbullah - and just staying in business would be a victory - would greatly strengthen Iran's standing and encourage Islamic militarism throughout the world.
What Israel is looking for is reasonable but perhaps unrealistic. In an interview, foreign minister Tzipi Livni says that, in accordance with Resolution 1559, Hizbullah must be disarmed and the border area (indeed, the lower third of Lebanon) surrendered and occupied instead by the Lebanese army. In addition, Iran and Syria must promise to discontinue arms supplies. Hizbullah would continue in existence only as a political party. In fairness, it is not much for a country to ask that it be allowed to live at peace with its neighbours.
If this had to be measured only against the demands of Hizbullah, a ruthless militia dedicated to violence, then Israel might get its wish. The difficulty lies in the fact that others have wish-lists too.
On the top of the pile sit the Palestinians.
They have many grievances against the state of Israel including land-grabbing, water rights, the building of a wall/fence, the presence in Israeli jails of 10,000 Palestinians (some of whom have been there for up to 30 years) and utter economic destitution, especially in the tiny Gaza Strip, which is crammed with 1.3 million people.
It seems not to concern many Israelis, including the politicians, that the people they wish to live alongside in peace are suffering acute economic hardship on a scale which deprives them of hope and drives them, reluctantly or willingly, into the embrace of the militants.
Livni, who looks as if exhaustion is next on her agenda, has stuck rigidly to her core demand that Hizbullah be disarmed and never again pose a threat. She quickly entertains the idea of an international peace force to demilitarise the border and is indifferent as to who supplied it. Others said that it could not include US troops (too inflammatory) and should include Turks so that it would not be a wholly "Christian" force.
The argument over proportionality is handled firmly by Livni (the campaign is not in response to abducted soldiers but because "of a threat to the state"), but questions about the issue of Lebanese civilian casualties gets a brusque response. "They are not a goal of the operation, but, in war, they happen," she says.
End of explanation. You are left wondering how well informed the minister is about the appalling images of Lebanese suffering appearing daily on television sets and in newspapers across the globe.
Foreign ministry spokesmen state emphatically that Beirut Airport was blown up because Hizbullah was bringing its missiles in by air. But a senior defence analyst (who cannot be named but who would know) makes it clear that the missiles were flown from Iran to Damascus and thence transported by road into Lebanon. So why was the airport blown up? Was it because missiles might yet be flown in or because somebody decided that some serious collateral damage might push Lebanese moderates such as the Sunni and Christians into taking a harder line with Hizbullah?
Of more consequence are the civilian casualties. There are more than enough independent witnesses to attest to the fact that innocent Lebanese civilians, including children, are being killed in large numbers. Livni and others in her department insist that no civilians were ever deliberately targeted. But cars and trucks leaving Hizbullah areas in convoy, as the Israeli army demanded of them, have been blown up and their occupants killed - and not by a rocket fired from 30km away but by a helicopter gunship immediately overhead.
It is just possible that such casualties were not deliberately targeted. At the very least, however those carrying out the attack (and maybe those ordering it), are guilty of seeming indifferent as to whose lives they are taking as the trigger is pressed.
It is action such as this, along with the intelligence and military failings, which may leave Israel short on results when the fighting stops. It is, I was told this week, the military's great nightmare that the politicians will be forced to agree a ceasefire before the defence forces have finished the job - notwithstanding the fact that, at the present rate of progress, it could be many months and many, many more deaths, before the military could completely break Hizbullah.
The new prime minister, Ehud Olmert, arguably felt that a stiff campaign was necessary to establish his credentials, but he will be thinking again this weekend. It seems unlikely that Israel will be able to disarm Hizbullah wholly and just as unlikely that Hizbullah can be moved out of south Lebanon, where it has considerable involvement in public life. If the gains from this war are to be limited, then Olmert will be seriously concerned about the cost. If the costs end up outweighing the benefits, Olmert's career may be in jeopardy.
David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, often said that "it is not important what the world says, it is important what we do". This time, both are important, but it is what Israel has done which may lose it the war.