July 17, 2014
A favorite line of
Official Washington goes: “Perception is reality!” — a misguided notion
that makes the U.S. mainstream media particularly vulnerable to
“perception management.” And no one does that better than the Israelis when
justifying the slaughter of Palestinians, as Danny Schechter notes.
By Danny
Schechter
There is an art of
war and there is an art to selling war – to one’s own people and to the world
at large.
Israel is a master
on both tracks. When we speak of the “only democracy” in the Middle East, it is
often forgotten, perhaps deliberately, that the country is run by a War or
“Security” Cabinet. It is, and has been, in effect, a military regime with as
many powerful religious fanatics as its Iranian nemesis.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu
Since proclaiming
its “independence” in 1948, it has remained dependent on a
large, now over $3 billion per annum and counting,” foreign aid” payment from the
United States, far, far MORE than many poor countries that desperately
need that aid but don’t get it.
Supplementing this
subsidy, Israel has its own advanced military industrial and technology complex
upgrading and customizing weaponry in military and aerospace industries.
Its current
escalating war on Gaza is only the latest, following on the heels of
seven “recognized” wars, two Palestinian intifadas, many reprisal operations
and countless covert operations including interventions and assassinations.
Its capacity to
punish and its willingness to use advanced weapons in areas dense with
civilians like Gaza is terrifying – and it is so by design. The United States
may have used “shock and awe” in Iraq to launch its war there, but Israel has
routinized it with 2,360 air strikes in its 2008-2009 “Cast Lead” campaign in
Gaza alone. So far there has been well over l,000 sorties in this latest bloody
blitzkrieg. Is it any surprise that of all its military branches it is the Air
Force that is dominated the most by extremists and West Bank settlers.
And, in all of its
conflicts, Tel Aviv invents and then seizes a constantly reinforced “moral”
high ground, immediately positioning itself as a victim and defending its
actions as DEFENSIVE. That view is then relentlessly streamed 24/7 to the
public by lobby groups, PR firms and government agencies to and through a
well-orchestrated network of political allies and supporters worldwide.
This is not new,
says Israeli historian Ilan Pappe: “The Israeli propaganda machine attempts
again and again to narrate its policies as out of context and turns the pretext
it found for every new wave of destruction into the main justification for
another spree of indiscriminate slaughter in the killing fields of Palestine.”
As in all of
its conflicts, propaganda operations designed to win over the press and public
opinion, enjoy as much priority as its military operations. Today, military-led
units and student groups/cyber armies attempt to dominate the on-line discourse
about the war, repeatedly emphasizing prefabricated, market-tested
message points, like blaming Gaza for rejecting a cease-fire that it is
repeatedly claimed Israel supported.
In these propaganda
dispatches, there is little or no mention of the human slaughter borne by the
Palestinians, the lack of proportionality in the casualties and the alternative
approaches that might resolve the crisis (and the underlying injustices).
The major U.S.
media seems to embrace the Israeli narrative without question or without
independent reporting or analysis, much less critically.
Here’s Bloomberg
News: “Israel Renews Gaza Bombing After Hamas Rejects Truce Plan.”
Here’s the Washington Post: “While Israel Held Its Fire, Hamas did not.” On and on, around the clock.
In many of these
accounts, Hamas is described only as “militants,” not a party or elected
government. The perennial message: Israel is being reasonable, while Hamas is
irresponsible and even wants the death of its own people. It’s always all their
fault! You never hear what Hamas is saying – or trying to say – except in
selected snippets of overheated rhetoric used to demonize them.
Israel has moved
beyond PR to PM, or “perception management.” Inside Israel, Neve Gordin says
the situation is worse, with repeated calls for MORE military
escalation amid neo-genocidal demands for a final solution as in “destroy them
all, once and for all.”
In a piece on
“Israel’s War Echo Chamber,” he writes: “the public debate today is not whether
or not to stop the air strikes but rather whether or not to deploy ground
forces. In an opinion column, Channel 2′s military correspondent Ronnie Daniel
claimed that only ‘a ground operation will extract a heavy enough price from
Hamas’ in order to ensure a longer period of peace for Israel. The following day
Channel 2′s anchor pondered: ‘We wanted Hamas to fall on its knees and so far
this has not happened’; and Daniel responded, ‘So far it’s not happening, and
the conclusion, in my opinion, is that it has not received enough.’”
Amira Hess, the
gutsy Israeli correspondent for Ha’aretz, explains: “Both sides (Hamas and
Israel) say they are firing in self-defense. We know that war is a continuation of politics by
other means. Israel’s policy is clear (if not to consumers of Israeli media):
Cut Gaza off even more, thwart any possibility of Palestinian unity and divert
attention from the accelerating colonialist drive in the West Bank.
“And Hamas? It
wants to boost its standing as a resistance movement after the blows it took as
a governing movement. Maybe it really thinks it can change the Palestinian
leadership’s entire strategy vis-a-vis the Israeli occupation. Maybe it wants
the world (and the Arab states) to awaken from its slumber.
“Still, with all
due respect to Clausewitz, rational calculations are not the
only explanation. Let’s not forget the missile envy — whose is bigger, longer, more
impressive and reaches farther? The boys play with their toys and we’ve gotten
used to calling it policy.”
In all of this
swamp of hawkish sludge, what do we make of an alternative explanation embraced
by critical writers who follow these events most knowledgably – when we hear
from them at all. Here’s a peace activist, Richard Silverstein:
“Let’s
talk about the faux ceasefire. Really a fraudulent ceasefire. Egypt’s
ceasefire with no one. My Israeli source, who was consulted as part of the
negotiations, tells me that this was not, in reality, an Egyptian proposal. It
was, in fact, an Israeli proposal presented in the guise of an Egyptian
proposal. Israel wrote the ceasefire protocol. The Egyptians rubber-stamped it
and put it out under their letterhead as if it was their own.
“Jodi Rudoren
typically called the ceasefire ‘one-sided,’ meaning
Israel honored it and Hamas didn’t. But it was ‘one-sided’ in a way she
hadn’t considered. Only one-side prepared the ceasefire and essentially
presented it to itself and accepted it. The other side wasn’t consulted.
“The contents of
the ceasefire proposal were a fraud as well. They promised and delivered
nothing. They only called for a cessation of hostilities on the part of Israel
and Hamas. The same document has been signed in the past only to see Israel
violate it almost as soon as the ink was dry. There were no provisions for
easing the Israeli siege. No provision to open the border with Egypt. Most
importantly, the ceasefire didn’t address any underlying issues between the
parties. It was a guarantor for resuming hostilities at the earliest
possible opportunity: these wars have come at two-year intervals over the past
six years. The next one will be in 2016, if not sooner.”
The Israel newspaper,
Haaretz, reported that neither Hamas’ military nor political wings were
consulted. So, if this is not a charade, what is? The goal was not to engage
Hamas in a peace process, but to create a one-sided media narrative as a
pretext and ultimatum for more war. It turns out that Tony Blair, the former
pro-Iraq War British Prime Minister, and representative of the so-called
“quartet,” arranged the phone call between Israeli and Egyptian officials.
This does not mean
that eventually there won’t be negotiations of some kind between the warring
parties. Christiane Amanpour spoke with a former Israeli intelligence chief
on CNN. He called for negotiations with Hamas.
“Hamas is a very
bad option, undoubtedly. But there are worse options than Hamas,” Efraim
Halevy, former Mossad chief, said.
“And we already
know what some of them might be, especially one of them: the ISIS – which is
operating now in the northern Iraq and central Iraq – has its tentacles in the
Gaza Strip too.”
Halevy said that
just as in Europe, ISIS is recruiting in Gaza. It is “inconvenient
politically,” Halevy said, for both Israel and Hamas to admit that they
negotiate. But the truth, he said, is that they have already been doing it for
years:
“We have coined a
new method of diplomacy in the twenty-first century: we don’t meet with them,
we don’t talk to them, but we listen to them. Each one listens to the other
side. Somehow in the end an understanding is crafted. …
“We have had
several rounds with Hamas in recent years, and the previous rounds ended up in
agreements … arrangements, as it was called – ‘arrangements,’ not even
agreements.”’
Who knows if such
an “arrangement” may be possible now, as it seems clear that Hamas has many
rockets yet to fire into Israel.The countries most heavily propagandized by
Israel are blindly supportive, but that is not the case uniformly around the
world. Israeli fanaticism slowly but surely erodes global support for its
posture.
Right now, thanks
to bullish TV news programming, war has become a form of militainmentfor
Israeli spectators. The Atlantic’s Debra Kamin reports from the Golan Heights:
“People come here every day to see the show,” says Marom, 54, a retired Israel defense
Forces colonel who now works in the tourism industry and regularly brings
groups to this point to gaze down on Syria’s bloodletting. “For people visiting
the area, it’s interesting. They feel that they are a part of it. They can go
home and tell their friends, ‘I was on the border and I saw a battle.’”
Kamin continues:
“High above a valley in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, Israeli tourists
have a panoramic view of this strategically important location, which is also
known as the Gateway to Damascus. Tour groups, fresh from jaunts to the area’s
wineries, cherry markets, and artisanal chocolate shops, stop here by the
dozens each day armed with binoculars and cameras, eager for a glimpse of smoke
and even carnage.”
Has this what we’ve
come to? Sadly, yes,
Newsdissector Danny Schechter blogs at Newsdissector.net and edits Mediachannel.org. He made the film “Weapons of Mass Deception” about media coverage in Iraq, and wrote two books about media misrepresentations there. Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org
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