To recap, Hezbollah, following the Hamas playbook, kidnapped two Israeli soldiers, Israel demanded their return, and when that request was ignored, Israel attacked the kidnappers. Lots of people got hurt.

This would all seem to be quite straightforward, even for European journalists — except that “attack” business. To many Europeans, Israel attacking terrorists because they have committed acts of terrorism is illogical because, er, because what’s the United Nations for? In fact, the Israeli effort to provide Hezbollah with the housing and lifestyle it so richly deserves has many anti-Israeli “progressives” scratching their heads in wonder. Normally, for example, one reads newspapers for answers. Not on the Left. At the the Independent, where confusion reigns in effusive style, the editors were so perplexed by the world around them that they had nothing but questions for their readers, including one on the front page — “Middle East: Who backs immediate ceasefire?” (Correct answer: “I do, sir!”) — and another over a main news story: “Why is there not a murmur of protest from Washington?”

For answers, readers could simply have done what other journos do: Go to the source, which, for reporters in southern Lebanon, is — well, Hezbollah. On Thursday, the BBC World Service’s embarrassing daily rant, Newshour, had a ’Bollah-fest, opening with an interview with a Hezbollah member of the Lebanese parliament and continuing with Roger Hearing’s nervous report (audio file) from what was claimed to be the scene of an Israeli attack on a Hez-bunker. It was tough going for Hearing, and for his listeners, as he visited “such a scene of devastation, one worse than I have ever seen in any of my years of reporting.”

Hearing: “We were taken right into the heart of this devastation to see what had happened. Stepping over debris…”

Man with a high-pitched voice: “We’re just ordinary people!”

Hearing: “Clearly very angry, a Hezbollah man standing in front of an apartment building.”

There’s some news: Hezbollah men are angry, yes. My question is why is the building still there? Hearing at least admitted he didn’t know what he was seeing (I reported on the BBC’s John Simpson’s unqualified use of enemy propaganda here) other than the worst devastation in any of his years of reporting and all that. And he did repeat that the whole show was put together by Hezbollah — which is more than Le Monde’s Cécile Hennion was willing to allow when she took what was obviously her tour of Hezbollah’s little corner of hell. France is of course crouching behind the U.N.’s peasant skirt and demanding a ceasefire, as are most European countries who still don’t get what all that fuss over Jews is about.

You can’t blame journalists for being confused by all this. Reporters prefer simple stories even they can understand. Alas, the Israeli-Hamas-Hezbollah quarrel is more complicated than education funding or trade tariffs, even, so the guiding narrative is still being teased out of the story. The Guardian’s Tariq Ali offers a shortcut by blaming the Israeli action on their Nazi-like belief in “its racial superiority” and on the Israeli rejection of the elections that saw terrorist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah given political power — although some may find Israel is objecting more to their terrorist acts than their political policies. It also doesn’t quite explain, as Georges Malbrunot reports in Le Figaro, why so many Arab Sunnis think Hezbollah got it all wrong in Lebanon.

The more likely theme as it emerges will not focus on long-term implications or anything as complicated as that. It will focus on making the U.S. and the Israelis be nice. To do that, it will feature a tortured logic that floats on helium-filled theories such as “proportionality” — a metric concept without a useful table of equivalencies, but one which resembles a playground complaint: “Hey damn! You didn’t have to hit so hard!” The main idea behind proportionality is that mighty Israel is being unfair by bombing poor Hezbollah just for kidnapping a couple of Israeli soldiers, a sentiment voiced by an American in that Independent story cited above: “Outside the cavernous US government-run holding centre in Nicosia, Mohammed Shami shook his head. ‘I feel embarrassed to be an American. They have given Israel the green light to destroy Lebanon. What they are doing is wrong; it is immoral.’”

But behind the dark cloud of Israeli destruction is a silver lining, one discovered by The Guardian’s Jonathan Steele. According to Steele, Israel is actually losing: “While both Hizbullah and Israel have blundered, Israel is likely to come off worse. Its military planners appear not to have expected Hizbullah to retaliate so fiercely to the first Israeli bombs after the two soldiers were seized.” “Seized” is apparently the non-criminal version of kidnapping. This theme offers the hope that if there is no cease-fire, Israel will continue losing until every last Hezbollah terrorist has been blown to bits.

Why this all should be so confusing to so many in the EuroPress is itself mysterious. It’s not like Hezbollah has been opaque in their motives. In fact, they’ve been very forthcoming about their rationale for kidnapping Israeli soldiers, as Tariq Ali suggested and as this piece in Le Monde demonstrates. They want their fellow terrorists out of jail. This isn’t a story about Israeli race-war or even a war over land. This story is a story about a prison break.

And the real question for those who want the redevelopment of southern Lebanon to cease isn’t the one they endlessly ask the Israelis: “When will the attacks have gone far enough?” Or the one they tirelessly ask the U.S. government: “When are you going to make Israel knock it off?”

It’s the one they should ask their Hezbollah tour guides: “Why don’t you release those guys you kidnapped?”

— Denis Boyles is author of Vile France: Fear, Duplicity, Cowardice and Cheese.