All eyes turn on Annette Levy-Willard as she strides into Joz and Loz, a Tel Aviv restaurant, late at night. Her tight, short dress, blond hair and coquettish behavior all make an impression. Levy-Willard, senior correspondent and op-ed page editor for the French daily Liberation, has been in Israel for several weeks. She is vacationing and attending the Jerusalem Film Festival.

The Jerusalem Film Festival has special significance for her - the Second Lebanon War broke out while she was attending it last year.

Already on the first day of the war, she traveled up north to report on the conflict. During the 33 days of fighting, she published a wide and varying selection of articles about the war.

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As with every subject Levy-Willard has covered - and there have been many, from the plight of the refugees in Gaza, to the presidential election campaigns in the United States, to the rise of the extreme Right in France - her Lebanon war reports included many human interest pieces.

She described the mood of Israelis following the bombings in the North; she wrote about life in the bomb shelters, about Arcadi Gaydamak's tent city, about the soldiers who fought without food, about the failures of the Israel Defense Forces and about the poor psychological state of an entire nation.

Upon her return to Paris, a friend's boyfriend confronted her in the street.

He shouted, "I hate your articles and I hate you. I'm sure you wrote them from the bar of your hotel or from the beach."

At that moment, Levy-Willard - whose reports have been judged as pro-Israeli because of her name - decided to write a book that would tell the whole story of the Second Lebanon War.

She researched Israeli media coverage of the war and began writing. Within four months, she finished "Trente-trois Jour en Ete: Chroniques d'une Guerre Surprise" ("Summer Rain: A Reporter's Diary of the 2006 War between Israel and Hezbollah"), which was published a few months ago by Robert Laffont Editions.

The photograph on the book's front cover tells the entire story: two dejected and desperate IDF soldiers, one resting his head on his comrade's shoulder.

"The publisher proposed all kinds of pictures of tanks," she says. "However, I knew immediately that I was looking for a picture that would convey feelings."

"I didn't plan on a war during my vacation," Levy-Willard writes in the prologue and describes in a few amusing sentences what her holiday was like before the fighting broke out.

From July 12, the day the war broke out, onward she describes her personal experiences - from the restaurants she ate at and dinners she attended, to her son's surfing, to her conversations with the newspaper staff in Paris who asked her to "go to the war" because she was a woman, to her talks with local politicians and soldiers.

"It was important for me to narrate this in an eye-witness style," she says. "I understood that the French, who had been fascinated by the war in Lebanon, understood nothing about it.

On the one hand, they saw the strong Israeli army and on the other, the poor Lebanese victims. But what was in between, what came between the two sides - Hezbollah - they did not see."

Levy-Willard, who to a large extent balances this picture in her book, stresses that French radio and TV, not press, tilted the balance in favor of the Lebanese and against Israel.

"There is some logic to this," she says. "The footage from Lebanon looked better than that of an empty Haifa. Especially since there were numerous pictures of bodies in Lebanon - something Israelis do not permit. And a body will always be more photogenic than a pool of blood on the ground."

Levy-Willard says the State of Israel will always lose in the French media, and not merely because of the refusal to photograph bodies.

She recalls an interview with a soldier who had just left the battle in Bint Jbail and was shaking all over, clearly in a state of trauma. Next to her stood a reporter for French radio, who completely ignored the soldier's plight and asked him: "Don't you feel arrogant?"

"He in no way wanted to hear what the soldier had to say," Levy-Willard says.

"To a large extent, to this day, De Gaulle's well-known saying about the Israelis, that they are 'a domineering nation that is full of itself,' is still emblazoned on the minds of Frenchmen."

Some members of the French press are also aware of this: A critique of her book in Le Monde stated that "Levy-Willard portrays what has never been seen in the European press - the mood of the Israelis. She allows them to speak. More than that, she listens to them."

Levy-Willard was born in Paris to a "fairly religious" family, as she describes them, all of whom were saved during the Holocaust.

"If my parents were saved, this is because of French citizens, and it is impossible to forget this," she says. "There were always two types of French: Those who gave us up to the regime, and those who saved us. And we have to live between the two."

Her spouse is Dutch producer-director Ludi Boeken, who produced such films as "Vincent and Theo" and "Train of Life." The Bardash brothers' "HaHolmim" ("Once We Were Dreamers") is one of the first films Boeken produced.

"When that film was produced, I stayed at the Hilton Hotel in Tel Aviv," Levy-Willard says, "and there I wrote my first book, 'Moi, Jane, Cherche Tarzan.' Perhaps for that reason, too, Tel Aviv is so important to my life."

She never planned to be a journalist. Because she was a member of the Mouvement de Liberacion de Femmes (MLF), a French women's movement, Simone de Beauvoir commissioned her to write an article for the journal Les Temps Modernes, which she edited.

She holds two degrees, in Law and Sociology - and a third in Feminism, she says with a smile.

"I never wanted children. The proof is that I married very late and had children only at the age of 40." Asked why she nevertheless decided to have them, she says, "because I had already done everything else."

At the end of the '60s, Levy-Willard went to the United States for a few years. At the time, the U.S. seemed to promise change, both in the struggle against the Vietnam War and the feminist revolution.

In later years, she returned several times to the U.S. and wrote two books there: "Chroniques des Los Angeles" ("Chronicles of Los Angeles") and "Chroniques de la Guerre du Sex en Amerique" ("Chronicles of the Sex War in America"), in which she reveals how U.S. President George W. Bush used sex - in his war against homosexuals and to promote "family values" - to distract voters from the horrors of the war in Iraq and get re-elected.

At noon during the interview in her holiday home, Levy-Willard's 18-year-old son Tom is still fast asleep.

"This is Tel Aviv," she smiles. "He was out enjoying himself until 4 A.M."

Her daughter, Julia Levy-Boeken, 22, is known to TV viewers as the character "Niki Goddard" in "Ha'alufa" ("The Champion"), a teen soap opera running on cable TV.

For her daughter, too, the film festival in Jerusalem last year was significant:

At the Jerusalem Film Festival, Julia met an Israeli agent who persuaded her to take a break from her International Relations studies at Sciences PO, the institute for political studies in Paris, and to act instead in the Israeli soap opera.

Her mother is, of course, proud of her daughter's success; Julia has already appeared in guest roles on such American series as "Entourage" and "Alias."

However, the break in Julia's studies makes her mother a little less happy.

"I dreamed that at the end of her studies, she would go to work in the United Nations," she says, making a face, "but she wants to act in the 'Alufa'."

But Levy-Willard remembers her own rebelliousness at her daughter's age.

In her next book, Levy-Willard commemorates 40 years since the May 1968 events in France.

"The truth is that I don't remember a thing from that time," she says. "Before coming, I found an audio cassette in which I told Julia about those times and I plan to use it.

"The members of the present generation see May '68 as if it were something out of the ordinary, but the truth is that for me, as someone who lived through it, it was not like that. We must not forget that we lost."

But already now she knows that she will dedicate the book to her mother and father: "To my father who made me learn how to type on a type writer and to my mother who never taught me how to cook."