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“Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.” —Andre Gide Does pro-Israel... Read More

inFOCUSIsrael (Spring 2015) The Theory and Practice of Hasbara Eric Rozenman • February 28, 2015 SOURCE Share FacebookTwitterEmailPrint “Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.” —Andre Gide Does pro-Israel hasbara (Hebrew for information) matter? It was early in the first intifada, the 1987-1992 Palestinian “uprising” against Israel. News media coverage featured images of rifle-toting, helmeted and mask-wearing Israeli soldiers fighting stone-throwing Arab teenagers trying to ward off tear gas. The frequent calls went something like this: “I’ve been a supporter of Israel for years. But these pictures! They make us look so bad! How can I criticize the media? What can I tell my children?” I was editing Near East Report, the weekly newsletter published in conjunction with AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. “Tell them the demonstrations aren’t spontaneous but have been taken over by the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] and that terrorists fire from among the children,” I said. “Tell them if this were happening in an Arab country, the security forces would massacre the rioters.” “That’ll just sound like pro-Israel propaganda,” callers lamented. Having fought the 1975 Soviet-inspired, Arab League-promoted UN General Assembly resolution equating Zionism with racism and lost, Israelis and some American supporters of the Jewish state adopted a “sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me” approach. They forgot that all war is preceded, accompanied, and followed by psychological warfare. Now, finding objective truth to be an insufficient, even abstract response to subjective, emotion-laded images and their simple but pernicious storyline—Israelis as new Nazis, Palestinian Arabs as new Jews—they sought a hasbara silver bullet. That none was at hand could be seen in the choice of the winning entry in a 1988 European editorial cartoon contest. It was a simple, obscene inversion of the iconic Holocaust-era photograph showing a frightened, cap-wearing Jewish boy, his hands in the air, a German soldier’s rifle pointing at his back. The cartoonist merely replaced the child’s cap with a kefiyeh and transformed the soldier into an Israeli trooper. Bingo! The decades’-old Soviet campaign to tar Zionism—Jewish nationalism—as fascist bore fruit among European intelligentsia. When the nationalisms of Nasser, Arafat, and Saddam Hussein with their pan-Arab claims failed and their Kremlin sponsor collapsed, competing versions of Islamic supremacism—sponsored by the Iranian government, wealthy Saudis, and others—seamlessly adopted the Israeli-as-Nazi, Palestinian-as-Jew political pornography. The mold was set for right-thinkers in academia, the media, and even show business to peddle soft-core scenarios with Zionists as imperialists, Jews as colonialists, and Palestinian Arabs as oppressed, indigenous people. This hardened into “the Palestinian narrative,” the media’s default filter. The Second Intifada A telling example of how the “words will never hurt me” shortsightedness destructively lingered came in the first days of the second intifada, 2000-2004. Video shot by a Palestinian cameraman for a French television channel purported to show an Arab boy trapped with his father in crossfire between Israel Defense Forces and Palestinian gunmen in the Gaza Strip. He was shot to death, or so it was said. Israel, with no more than a cursory review, conceded that yes, its soldiers might well have killed the child. Images of the “martyred” youngster, Mohammed al-Dura, traveled across the globe. They turned up as partial, implicit justification in an al-Qaeda montage of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York City’s World Trade Center, in images of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl’s beheading and in mass marches in European cities that featured “Down with Israel” and “Death to the Jews” banners. Much later, after independent examinations cast doubt on the French television account and even whether al-Dura had been present during the firefight, an IDF re-enactment concluded that if any bullets struck the child and his father, they quite likely had been fired by Palestinian gunmen. This was far too late; CH Spurgeon’s observation that “a lie will go round the world while the truth is pulling its boots on” (Mark Twain often is credited with the saying, demonstrating among other things the lasting importance of good p.r.) continued to apply to Israeli hasbara failures. Until perhaps the infamous “Jenin massacre” allegation of 2002. In the spring of 2002, Palestinian spokesmen—including the frequently quoted, rarely reliable Saeb Erekat, the Palestinian Authority’s chief negotiator—charged Israel had massacred hundreds of Palestinian Arabs at Jenin in the West Bank. Erekat told CNN he knew of 500 dead. Many major news outlets headlined such claims. But not for long; Israeli double-checking confirmed 52 Arab dead, al...

The Theory and Practice of Hasbara – Jewish Policy Center