Show of Force

In the end, the only massacre that had been committed was conducted by the UN, international aid organizations, and the international press—a massacre of the truth that was intended, exactly as the UN envoy had so smugly declared, to destroy Israel’s moral standing in its fight against the Palestinian terror offensive.

Most recently is the case of the Second Lebanon War, the fallout from which has concentrated Israeli attention on military and political failures. This self-criticism has largely ignored a third failure, namely the ease with which Israel was once again defeated in the media. Within days of the start of the war, and without conscious coordination, Israel’s enemies set about undermining Israeli self-defense: Kofi Annan announced, with no evidence whatsoever, that Israel had intentionally killed four members of unifil; human rights groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW) churned out scores of reports condemning Israel’s war effort, alleging war crimes, and largely ignoring Hezbollah (Kenneth Roth, the executive director of HRW, accused Israel of waging “indiscriminate warfare” and added, with no credible substantiation, that “In some instances, Israeli forces appear to have deliberately targeted civilians”); and journalists gave flood-the-zone coverage to Lebanese civilian casualties, producing false reports on the Qana bombing, doctored photographs, and news stories that were arranged and directed by Hezbollah. In its battlefield tours for reporters, Hezbollah went so far as to fabricate ambulance drive-bys, as apparently the payoff from using these vehicles as props for the international press was preferable to using them to help wounded Lebanese.

The Israeli response to the calumnies so predictably sent its way was sometimes adept, but too often fell back on familiar and self-destructive tactics: Gratuitous apologies and self-criticism, servility in the face of hostile journalists, and an inability to make the basic case that Lebanese civilian casualties were one of Hezbollah’s central goals in the conflict, precisely because of their propaganda value. Astonishingly, after the Qana bombing Israel pledged to suspend its air campaign for 48 hours, a gesture to its enemies and allies alike that at the highest levels of government there festered a deep ambivalence about the war effort.

By the halfway point in the conflict, the narrative of the war had been skewed from one in which Israel was defending itself from attack by an Iranian-backed terrorist organization to one in which Israel was, once again, savagely killing civilians. A survey by Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center found that of the 117 stories the BBC ran during the conflict, 38 percent identified Israel as the aggressor, while only 4 percent identified Hezbollah as such. As Harvard’s Marvin Kalb reported in a recent study, “On the front pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post, Israel was portrayed as the aggressor nearly twice as often in the headlines and exactly three times as often in the photos.”

The pattern revealed by these events displays a disturbing record of Israeli failure, but also suggests a course of corrective action. Whether the crisis was al-Dura, Jenin, Lebanon, or the Gaza beach explosion, the Israeli response distinguished itself by the same blunders: A reflexive assumption of guilt; pre-emptive apologies, unnecessary self-criticism, promises of investigation, and suspension of military action; a weak-kneed treatment of precisely the kind of incendiary charges that require a forceful response; the assertion of innocence only after the media storm had passed; and finally, the refusal to push back rhetorically or otherwise against the individuals and organizations who have turned slandering Israel into such a disgracefully undemanding sport.

Several reforms, both conceptual and structural, are imperative. The first is in regard to the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit, the small group within the Israeli military that handles media relations. In wartime, its citizen soldiers are charged with the weighty responsibility of explaining Israeli military actions to the world. More than any other, the Spokesperson’s Unit is in desperate need of expansion and improvement. It must become one of the most elite units in the IDF, proactive, creative, and aggressive—in other words, a match for Israel’s equally determined foes. A branch office should be created in Jerusalem, where a large contingent of the foreign press corps is located, in order to encourage the cultivation of relationships with journalists. Its staff should be re-configured to consist of professionals who have extensive experience in the media, journalism, and public relations. Currently, the unit is composed largely of young conscripts and older reservists who, to put it bluntly, are simply out of their league. The new Spokesperson’s Unit must include a task force dedicated to aggressively—and very publicly—debunking false and biased media coverage. Finally, a liaison office should be created in order to coordinate media strategy and message between the IDF and the government, with the goal of crafting a unique communications strategy to complement every major military operation.

For these changes to leave their mark, the Israeli government itself must adopt a more disciplined communications process. Today, Israel has no united communications infrastructure; each government ministry and branch of the IDF offers up its own spokespeople to the press, and the result is an anarchy of statements and messages that frequently leave Israel on the defensive and appearing guilty in the face of unrefuted accusations.

On the conceptual level, Israeli strategists and spokespeople must come to understand the immense influence of symbolism, theater, and the repetition of defining anecdotes in modern warfare. This means that Israeli war planners must consider the role played by those NGOs and news organizations engaged in deliberate false reporting. These actors can no longer be conceptually grouped as third parties or neutral observers during conflicts; they are deeply implicated in the warfare itself, and as parties to a conflict their presence must be treated with the utmost seriousness.

For over a year, the IDF has been conducting air strikes in Gaza that are intended to thwart Kassam rocket fire into Israel, and because Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists intentionally operate among civilians, these strikes invariably kill bystanders and create damaging news stories. It would be extraordinarily easy for the prime minister, for example, to hold a press conference in Sderot in front of a school destroyed by Palestinian rocket fire and explain to the cameras that while Israel is striking Hamas in order to protect the lives of Israeli children, Hamas is sending its children on suicide missions to operate those very same rocket launchers. Every time thereafter that Israel strikes at terrorists in Gaza, Israeli spokespeople could hammer home the damning fact that Hamas uses children in terrorist attacks. Repeated often and forcefully enough, the average Westerner may not be inspired to like Israel, but at least he will come to understand the nature of its struggle—and the macabre reality of Palestinian “resistance.”

Finally, it is long past time that Israel pushed back against the worst of the journalists, activists, and NGO employees who have made a cottage industry out of operating in the Jewish state under false pretenses. More disturbing than the fraudulent coverage of al-Dura, Jenin, Lebanon, and the Gaza beach explosion is the fact that Israel did nothing to punish those who so eagerly participated in the dissemination of propaganda. The journalists who wrote sensational fabrications of an Israeli massacre in Jenin kept their press passes, and the offices of the news organizations for which they worked remained open. In the same manner, the human rights and NGO activists who provide journalists and the UN with their fig leaf of false objectivity consistently retain their work visas. In refusing to hold this rogues’ gallery of repeat offenders responsible, Israel succeeds only in emboldening the ambitions of those who have made careers out of working to destroy Israel from within its own borders. Should Israel expel journalists simply on the basis of negative coverage? Absolutely not; the freedom to criticize remains the essence of democratic debate. But there is a fundamental difference between criticism and defamation, and the Israeli government should make no apologies for refusing to make its country a haven for unscrupulous activists masquerading as reporters.

At the heart of the problems of organization and discipline that are so prevalent in Israel’s failure to address its image problem, there is ultimately a conceptual failure in the inability to recognize the changed nature of modern warfare. In our age of global communication and the disproportionate influence of easily manipulable photographs and video, a new theater of war has been created, one in which the battle is not fought over territory or against armies and terrorists. The battle is over images, narratives, and beliefs, and the tactics and strategies required to fight it bear little resemblance to conventional war. The stakes for Israel are far greater than the repercussions of one particular crisis; what hangs in the balance is Israel’s strategic position among democratic nations; its ability to sustain its own sense of moral clarity and national confidence against its enemies; the perseverance of Zionism as the animating ethos of the Jewish state; and the fulfillment of the central aspiration of creating a country in which Jews no longer feel intimidated by their assailants. Israel cannot change its enemies, but it must change how it fights them.

Noah Pollak

September 1, 2007

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