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Israel has constructed a systematic policy of propaganda, 'hasbara', that depends on its citizens - the extension and 'mouthpiece' of the state - to act as its voice. But this rationalisation of Israeli policy rests on shaky foundations.

Conflict & security 'Hasbara': an exercise in the impossible Israel has constructed a systematic policy of propaganda, 'hasbara', that depends on its citizens - the extension and 'mouthpiece' of the state - to act as its voice. But this rationalisation of Israeli policy rests on shaky foundations. By Tanzil Chowdhury Published: August 29, 2014, 8:08 pm | Share 5481142 (1).jpgIsraeli warplanes pound Gaza. Demotix/Mahmoud Essa. All rights reserved.“The explanation” is a calculated translation of the Hebrew term ‘hasbara’, that describes the systematic policy of propaganda that bleeds throughout Israeli society. To rationalise its every action and inaction, even its citizens, when travelling abroad, are encouraged to act as mouthpieces of the state. The hasbara machine is most dynamic in the crescendos of the illegal occupation and blockade such as we have seen unravelling before us over the last month. But it moves beyond mere silencing tactics, equating criticism of it’s government with anti-Semitism or exceptionalising suffering. It is not enough however, to say that Hasbara manipulates the truth to manufacture consent. A recent article in the Independent, ‘The Secret report that helps Israel hides facts’, is both revealing and indicting. Whilst it still remains that Israeli spokespersons have not been taken to task on this document, the following statements, by no means exhaustive but familiar to many, canonise and characterise the reasoning of statesmen, military personnel and impassioned advocates. “Israel has a right to defend itself”Derived from its democratic mandate that the government has (and by extension the army) an obligation to defend its citizens, this is perhaps the most regurgitated of the hasbara mantra. It’s undoing, however, is that the very same argument can be extended to the democratically elected Hamas government in Gaza. Failure to accept this argument is a failure to accept the virtue of democracy. What is perhaps most startling about this claim is not only that it undermines the right, recognised under international law, for occupied peoples to resist, but for Israeli PR, it toys with people’s ignorance, advocating the idea of ‘self-defence’ and an association with being the weaker party.“Hamas is indiscriminately firing rockets into Israel”And as a result, it is deliberately targeting civilians and causing their deaths. The current death toll, in which Palestinians outnumber Israelis circa twenty to one, would illustrate a different story. At a conservative estimate, 70 percent of the deaths in the Gaza Strip are civilians. Of the 50 Israelis, the heavy majority are combatants. Based on these figures, it would suggest something very much to the contrary, that in actual fact, Israel’s military execution is indiscriminate. This embodies one of the great successes of the Hasbara program, establishing rocket attacks causa prima, that seek to rationalise much of its disproportionate conduct.“Hamas is bent on escalation and uses human shields”Channel 4 recently conducted a fact check on the claims that Hamas uses human shields and hides its missiles in civilian buildings. It concludes that claims that Hamas coerces its citizens as human shields are entirely misleading; many simply decide to either stay in their homes (indicative of the Palestinian ‘sumud’, regardless of warnings from the IDF, or are simply not given enough warning, with others believing that staying indoors is safer). The report also cites that some claims of weapons being stored near civilian facilities may be true but accepts that, dense as the Gaza strip is, it is also inevitable. But perhaps more explanatorily illuminating are the inferences of the Channel 4 report; it entertains a well-known debate amongst public international lawyers on the law of force and ‘asymmetric warfare’.International law, perhaps wrongly, assumes a liberal idea of sameness, entirely decontextualized, entirely de-situated, entirely de-historicised, of the legal parties to a conflict, maintaining that they must adhere to the same standards despite huge disparities in their respective abilities to fight conventional wars. Think of these rules as thresholds rather than laws. Certainly, this is a potential slippery slope, but Hamas not only have to fight a ‘war‘, they have to do so under the assumption that it has the military urbanity of a properly formed state. We can perhaps ‘forgive’ a government of a state that does not legally exist, given that Israel, one of the most powerful armies in the world, the largest recipient of US aid and a regional nuclear hegemon, ‘struggles’ with maintaining such legal integrity. Let us not forget that the Zionist militias, Irgun, Haganah and Stern Gang - the same groups that killed British officers in the King David Hotel bombing, that would later integrate into the IDF, employed similar tactics. And although the IDF’s ‘Neighbour Procedure’, which used Palestinian civilians as human shields, was banned by t...