Winning the media war
Twitter, YouTube, blogs - Israel has proved a master of networking. Shame
it's being used to promote a bloody conflict
Rachel Shabi guardian.co.uk, Saturday 10 January 2009 15.00 GMT
www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/10/gaza-israel-media/print

One of the things that annoyed Israel about the second Lebanon war was that
it ended prematurely - without a clean Israeli victory against Hezbollah.
The Jewish state considered that this, in part, was the result of a
lily-livered international community balking at the sight of more than 1,000
civilian deaths - not to mention the devastation of Lebanese
infrastructure - and deciding that enough was enough. Consequently, one of
the recommendations of an Israeli committee investigating the war was that
Israel set up an information/propaganda coordination body, to keep those
pesky liberals on message even when bloody images of the victims of Israeli
assaults were relayed across world media.

Israel's war on Gaza was the first time we saw the "hasbara" directive in
action. A body set up to spin (or "explain", if you like) the country's
justifications for the war, it tightly coordinated key messages and worked
on so many levels - mainstream media as well as diplomatic channels,
friendship leagues, YouTube, Twitter and the blogosphere - that the effect
was epidemic. It got world media repeating the Israeli government's core
messages practically verbatim. Those messages boil down to, and I'm
paraphrasing here: "Hamas is a vile terrorist group; they started it, and
you must support Israel's defensive war because we're civilised, just like
you." For just one glimmer of the success rate, check how many of the US
media talking heads collated by the Daily Show use the Israeli government's
own analogy to explain the assaults on Gaza.

Palestinians didn't stand a chance against such coordination. Media monitors
chastised the disproportionate use of Israel spokespeople over Palestinian
ones in coverage of the assault. Campaigners gloomily forwarded emails with
the message: "What we're up against." One email comprised a "language guide"
issued by the Israel Project, advising supporters of how best to describe
Hamas's "Iran-backed war on Israel". Another came from (or was forwarded by)
an Israeli overseas mission, urging supporters to vote in a German
newspaper's online poll on Gaza. The email warned that the longer the
conflict continued, "more people here will be overwhelmed with mercy for
poor Hamasnikkim".

Indeed, that's a core discussion within the Israeli media: how long have we
got before the world forces us to stop? Reports, especially in the first
week, comprised interviews with Israeli correspondents in Europe and the US
commenting on how well the media had swallowed the Israeli message.

While Israeli PR is strong and strategic, Palestinian PR is hopeless. The
rift between the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank and the Hamas
government in Gaza means that there are no clear messages and no real
capacity to counter Israeli officials. Mustafa Barghouti, an independent
Palestinian MP and former information minister, holds this to be as a result
of incompetence and a lack of political clarity. He says that Hamas don't
know how to do media, while the PA "did not behave as it should, as a
representative of all the Palestinian people. Their messages were either
absent, weak or delayed". He laments the continued split between Fatah and
Hamas. "They don't realise that in such a moment of crisis when their people
are being slaughtered, they have to rise above it."

Palestinian commentators point to an obvious imbalance: Israel has barred
foreign journalists from entering Gaza since the start of the war,
effectively pulling the blinds over events within the strip. But Palestinian
analyst Ghassan Khatib says there is another factor at play in the overall
media skew. "Even if the Palestinian side came up with proper messages,
Hamas has been successfully labelled by Israel as a terrorist group and is
portrayed in the western media in a manner similar to al-Qaida," he says. As
a result, western audiences are more prepared to sympathise with Israel -
because it fits the "us or them" binary to which post 9/11 ears are attuned.

What all this shows us is how well Israel understands how western media
works, how best to utilise its blind spots and prejudices. Israel clearly
has the vision, the networking capacity and the resources to use world media
to full effect. If I were the marketing manager of an ailing global product,
I'd be taking notes. And we can only wonder what such talents could achieve
if only the end goal were really peace, not war.