In Israel this week, I flew to the northern border with Lebanon. From a military outpost, I looked over the barbed wire which separates the two countries, and surveyed the attractive, rocky country beyond. In the far distance, Mount Hermon rose, snow-capped and remote.

A thin, shy, clever officer from Israeli military intelligence explained to us what we could see. There, in the middle of a village, was a large white house. It is a home for the physically handicapped, but inside is concealed a Hizbollah observation post, which cannot be attacked without injuring the innocent inmates. To the right were several Christian villages, and a Sunni one, but most of these are now dominated by the Shia, from whom Hizbollah is drawn. A Lebanese army border post was visible to the far right, but neither its soldiers, nor those of the UN force, Unifil, have any serious power.

Further off, straight ahead of us, was the town where the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, popped up last October, using a stadium rally to denounce Israel and display Iranian strength. Since then, that strength has grown. Hizbollah, which depends on Iran for its money and training, and on Syria for refuge and political support, has taken effective control of the government of Lebanon.

Within one sweep of the eye, then, we could see the difference between hope and reality. In 2005, Lebanon experienced its “Cedar Revolution”. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets, protesting against the Syrian/Hizbollah-backed assassination of their prime minister, Rafik Hariri. Just as they are doing this month all over the Middle East, Western television reports celebrated the event. The democratic will prevailed. Syrian troops withdrew from Lebanon. Yet today, six years on, Lebanon has never been a less politically plural place. The Christians believe that they are all but finished; the Sunni minority are embattled; the Shia extremists are back, and in charge.

This example is worth bearing in mind as the West tries to read the current rush of events in the Muslim world. A few days in Israel at this juncture is a good antidote to the sheer gloopiness of our own television reporting.

It is right that the Western media should reflect some of the natural delight most people feel when the powerless come together and protest against their corrupt rulers. We are all touched to see these human yearnings for greater justice.

But as our famous reporters move on to new scenes of action, other players in the drama, to whom we pay scant attention, move in. As they left Tunisia for Egypt, in from London (incredible how often it is our own dear capital which supplies these characters) came Rachid Ghannouchi, the leader of the Tunisian version of the Muslim Brotherhood. Since then, Islamist mobs have attacked prostitutes in Tunis, and a Polish Catholic priest has been murdered.

No sooner had the John Simpsons and George Alagiahs left the excited nights in Tahrir Square in Cairo, than a vast crowd, almost unreported in the West, turned out there to hear Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, who had just flown in from Qatar after years of exile. Qaradawi, an old friend of this column, is sometimes touted as a moderate, and he himself likes the word. He publicly advocates what he calls “the most moderate opinion” that all Muslim women should be subjected to female circumcision without cutting off absolutely everything, as if there is a sort of Blairite “Third Way” for genital mutilation. Qaradawi is the spiritual inspiration for the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood. His presence in Egypt, of course, is timed to get it into power.

Next stop for our cameras was Bahrain, and now to Libya – or rather, to the Libyan border – with reporters screwing up their eyes against the desert sun, and telling us very little that we cannot glean from films shot on mobile phones by protesters. They will stay there as long as there is bloodshed and/or the fall of the dictator, and then slip away without bothering about what happens after.

Our political leaders are similarly scraping the surface. President Obama’s policy seems to track the television images precisely, falling in behind whoever may be the hero of the evening news bulletins and then moving smartly on. Far be it from me to suggest that he should have allowed his foreign policy to die in the ditch for President Mubarak, but the example of how America treats its old friends sharply reduces the incentive to become a new one.

The history of the Cedar Revolution shows a similar pattern. The West was all over Lebanon for a bit, full of helpful plans for monitoring and peacekeeping. But all Hizbollah had to do was to wait, with the patience of the fanatic, until the West got bored – and move in.

In Israel, the attitude is different. Ordinary human reactions are quite similar to our own. Israelis live in a democracy and they believe in it with a passion which, when one looks at the endless disputes generated by their minutely accurate system of proportional representation, can seem too much of a good thing. They recognise, in these stirrings in the Middle East, symptoms of the political modernity that they themselves possess.

Where they are profoundly unlike us, though, is that their attention to the subject is perpetual, because their lives literally depend on it. They don’t just have fun at the party: they are there for the morning after the night before. To change the metaphor, we in the West are like tourists in Middle East politics: we see something interesting, focus with our zoom lens, frame a pretty picture, and depart. The Israelis, by contrast, watch with 24-hour CCTV.

They are therefore much more alert than we are to threat. In my interview with the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, which appears on page 12, he speaks at length about Iran. It is the greatest danger to world peace, he says, especially if it gets the Bomb, and it is “seeking to exploit” the current turmoil. Iran’s proxies and even (see above) its president reach his country’s borders. Its missiles and its proxy operatives can now hit Western Europe. It has put naval vessels through the Suez Canal for the first time since 1979. It is governed by an extreme Islamist ideology. Yet the television cameras which camped in Tahrir Square mostly ignore similar large anti-regime protests in Tehran, and the Western powers do almost nothing to encourage the demonstrators and dissidents there.

It is often said that anti-Israeli feeling is growing in the West because Israel does not, despite its claims, live by Western values. I sometimes wonder if the opposite is the case: Israel, because of the constant threat to its existence, reminds us of the high cost of defending our freedoms. And that, to Western wishful thinkers, is intensely irritating.