The art of deception: How Israel uses ‘hasbara’ to whitewash its crimes

[bnew]

https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/the-art-of-deception-how-israel-uses-hasbara-to-whitewash-its-crimes-46775

The art of deception: How Israel uses ‘hasbara’ to whitewash its crimes

The Israelis have long relied on a public diplomacy strategy to dominate the arena of narrative control and information manipulation.

GETTY IMAGES

As Israel conducts its latest round of aggression against the Palestinians, the prevailing narrative often peddled in mainstream western media outlets continues to be implicitly framed to favour the Israeli narrative.

Under the guise of neutrality, media discourse has been to describe the conflict flaring up in occupied East Jerusalem as “clashes” between “both sides”. Israel’s ruthless bombardment of Gaza leading to the deaths of hundreds of civilians is rationalised as an act of “self defence” in response to Hamas’ indiscriminate rocket attacks and their use of “human shields”.

The Israeli state is deeply aware that perception shapes reality. While it commits alleged war crimes with impunity, it can only do so if there is a powerful enough propaganda machine it can deploy to counter inevitable public condemnation and international solidarity with Palestinians.

Enter 'hasbara’ – Israel’s primary messaging tool.

Hasbara – Hebrew for explanation – is a public diplomacy technique which links information warfare with the strategic objectives of the Israeli state. Public diplomacy is to be strategically conceived as a foreign policy priority, whereby a positive image of Israel is cultivated on the world stage, especially considering the image challenges Israel has continuously faced since its creation in 1948.

While rooted in earlier concepts of agitprop and censorship, hasbara does not look to jam the supply of contradictory information to audiences. Instead, it willingly accepts an open marketplace of opinion. What it seeks to do in this context is to promote selective listening by limiting the receptivity of audiences to information, rather than constricting its flow.

To accomplish its mission, hasbara targets diplomats, politicians and the public through mass media. It is also accomplished through numerous institutes and government agencies, as well as in research centres, universities, NGOs and lobbying firms.

Israel even offers hasbara fellowships, scholarships and grants to foster pro-Israeli advocacy, while a number of individuals from journalists to bloggers work to spin a positive image of the country.



Hasbara 2.0

Following the 2006 Lebanon war and ‘Operation Cast Lead’ two years later, both of which seriously damaged Israeli’s international reputation, there was a gradual shift between 2008 to 2012, to what the scholar Miriyam Aouragh called “Hasbara 2.0”: an assertive digital diplomacy that accounted for web 2.0 technologies like social media and YouTube.

Soon, hasbara-styled initiatives from the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) were being synchronised into a new online branch, with a permanent team operating in liaison with the Ministry of Strategic Affairs in 2008.

In 2012, Israel would announce its war against Gaza on Twitter. During ‘Operation Pillar of Defense’, as Israeli-funneled talking points saturated the US and European media landscape, hasbara made heavy use of the more distilled communication channels of social media. It further exploited browser functions, search engine algorithms, and other automated mechanisms that controlled what content were presented to viewers.

In the process, Israel designed a narrative of itself as the innocent victim of Palestinian terrorism, one that was accorded with the sovereign right of defense against existential assault. This, despite the fact of having initiated the escalation, possessing advanced aerial power against an adversary without one, and unloading more than one thousand times as many tons of munitions on Gazans.

In 2014, Israel’s war in Gaza under ‘Operation Protective Edge’ prompted a much greater pushback to its media narrative, clearly underestimating the extent of the global outrage to their actions in Gaza.

As images of destruction and dismembered bodies of innocent civilians flooded social media, hasbara proponents were forced to re-double their efforts in well-orchestrated PR campaigns that attempted to reframe war crimes with talking points to whitewash any disproportionate use of force – which even ended up being ineffective back in Israel.



Desperate measures

In the event this posturing fails, there are a few well-worn strategies in their arsenal that hasbara engineers have resorted to.

One has been to force the public to make a choice between Israel and Hamas. Today, we continually see this dichotomy played out on international broadcast segments; in doing so, Israel is framed as a rational and innocent actor provoked by an irrational terrorist threat, making any criticism of Israel’s actions de facto apologia for terrorism.

While a number of western governments have designated Hamas a terror organisation including the US and the European Union, Norway and Switzerland, they still maintain diplomatic ties with the group. Australia, New Zealand and the UK only consider its military wing a terrorist organisation. A number of other states outside of the West do not label it a terrorist organisation, and the UN in 2018 rejected a US resolution to condemn it as a terror organisation.

Probably the most common tactic has been to link any criticism of Israeli policies, whether its human rights violations or illegal colonisation of Palestinian land, to anti-Semitism.

One of the strategic threats in recent years has been the growing Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Israeli officials have attempted to smear those who support BDS as anti-Semitic and claim it is linked to terrorism, while anti-BDS laws have been passed in the US.

Online, it has translated into pushing prominent social media companies to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of anti-Semitism, which widens potential accusation of anti-Semitism to criticism of Israel.

The weaponisation of social justice issues and appropriation of ‘woke’ language is another frequently adopted strategy. For example the narrative of how Israel is the “only democracy” in the Middle East is repeated ad infinitum; indicating its the lone country which respects human rights and the rule of law in an otherwise regressive and hostile region.

“Pinkwashing” – cynically exploiting LGBTQ+ rights to amplify a progressive veneer and conceal Israeli crimes – has been added to the hasbara repertoire, along with the support for animal rights to “veganwash” occupation.

Ultimately, this discourse is meant to operate in juxtaposition against the “backward” Palestinian – to further dehumanise them among western audiences and soften criticism of Israel.

SOURCE: TRT WORLD

 

[bnew]

Understanding Hasbara: Israel's propaganda machine

With disinformation all over social media and Israel using its considerable resources to get its narrative out, The New Arab looks into the form of Israeli propaganda known as 'Hasbara'.

www.newarab.com

Understanding Hasbara: Israel's propaganda machine​

MENA
4 min read
Sam Hamad

18 November, 2023

With disinformation all over social media and Israel using its considerable resources to get its narrative out, The New Arab looks into the form of Israeli propaganda known as 'Hasbara'.


Israeli military spokesperson Daniel Hagari uses carefully crafted infographics to present Israel's narrative on its war policies [Getty]


Since Israel began its war on Gaza on October 7, attempts to discern the veracity of many of the claims it made about its conduct in the war have been difficult.

One of the main reasons for this is that Israel uses a propaganda function known in Hebrew as "Hasbara" in an attempt to control, shape and distort the narrative of every face of its actions.


What is Hasbara?

The word Hasbara roughly translates to "explaining" in English and was popularised in the early 20th century by the Polish Zionist activist and journalist Nahum Sokolow.

Hasbara shares much in common with other forms of modern propaganda, but it is often considered a description of the more granular, event-by-event distortions and fabrications utilised by the Israeli state to justify its controversial actions and policies.

In the modern era, it often takes the form of videos, infographics and viral social media posts and hashtags released and promoted by the Israeli state.


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Justifying the unjustifiable

In both previous and current Israeli military attacks on Gaza, there have always been excessive civilian deaths and Israel repeatedly targets civilian neighbourhoods and infrastructure.

One of the functions of Hasbara is to justify the targeting of civilian areas and the consequent civilian deaths, as well as to shift blame for large numbers of civilian deaths from Israel to Hamas.

This is one reason why Israel continually accuses Hamas of using schools, hospitals, neighbourhoods and factories as military areas and of using Palestinian civilians as so-called "human shields".

Israel has churned out satellite photos and excerpts of the "confessions" of alleged Hamas detainees to back these claims up, yet none of the evidence is independently verifiable.

Critics argue that this isn't meant to be presented to third parties for scrutiny, but is rather hasbara in the form of weaponised disinformation to fight back against public outrage over perceived Israeli brutality.

In the current attack on Gaza, Israel has taken the "human shields" justification one step further. By issuing mass evacuation orders for every resident of North Gaza, Israel's Hasbara narrative would have you believe it is trying to prevent human shields and civilian deaths.

However, some analysts have argued that issuing such an unrealistic and unworkable mass evacuation order has given Israel the green light to attack civilians, as it can whitewash such attacks by saying it warned civilians to flee.

This, according to analysts, is why Israel's attack on civilian areas has been so ferocious.


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Manufacturing Goliath

One of the key functions of modern Hasbara is to depict Israel as the victim and even the underdog.

To paraphrase Sokolow, who was writing in very different times when Europe was awash with antisemitism, this is appealing to the biblical narrative of David Vs Goliath – the smaller, weaker underdog battling and overcoming the stronger foe.

Critics have noted that while this instance of Hasbara was a more believable narrative during a conflict like the 1967 Arab-Israel war, it is plainly absurd when used against Israel’s modern wars on Gaza.

Israel is a nuclear-armed regional superpower with huge support from the US and Europe. It imposes a siege on Gaza, controlling its water supply, airspace and borders. Yet still Israel persists with the idea that Hamas and Gaza pose a threat to its existence - Israeli officials, including Benjamin Netanyahu, have even drawn direct parallels between Hamas, and sometimes all of Gaza in its current form, and Nazi Germany.


This Hasbara distortion very deliberately confuses the direct motivations of Hamas and other forms of Palestinian resistance. But it’s also supposed to depict Hamas as being somehow as militarily capable as the Nazi war machine.

For example, prior to their recent capture of Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza, Israel went out of its way to depict the medical facility as what it called a Hamas “command and control centre”, from which Hamas allegedly plans its activities.


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The New Arab Staff

There’s no doubt that Hamas has bases, though there is no evidence that it has any kind of base at Al-Shifa, the very designation of such bases as “command and control centres” is a deliberately exaggerated distortion.

If Israel can make you believe Hamas has something as sophisticated sounding as “command and control centres”, you might think Hamas has advanced military capabilities which means it has some level of parity with Israel.

The Hasbara terminology is supposed to make people believe Israel is fighting a war for its national survival that also, in turn, justifies the ferocity of Israel’s military attacks on Gaza.

It is supposed to transform Palestinian victims of the massive military force unleashed on them by Israel into necessary "collateral damage" in a war against a force as strong and dangerous as Nazism.

 

[bnew]

'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.

www.opendemocracy.net

'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.

Tanzil Chowdhury

29 August 2014

Israeli 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 the Supreme Court in 2005, this was a deeply contested decision by executive ministers.

“Hamas want to see the evaporation of the Israeli state”​

Such reasoning from the hasbara tool kit locks its victim into a circle, forever frustrated, supplanted covertly by that inexorable and inescapable axiom that ‘one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter’. Despite the democratic aspirations of the Palestinians being realised in 2006, Hamas’ democratic legitimacy has been undermined by the ‘single most democratic state in the Middle East.’ How Israel can expect anything near its recognition when it refuses to recognise the democratic will of the people it illegally occupies, is beyond belief. Accompanying this paradoxical logic, is an exercise in hyperbole, presupposed by some sense of parity between Israel and its foe, embedded in a narrative in which it is in a perpetual state of existential crisis.

“Hamas rejected the Ceasefire”​

Fair ceasefires are often the fruits of an even war. The recent ceasefire rejections stipulated nothing about the crippling Israeli blockade (referred to as ‘collective punishment’ by avowed Zionist, Judge Richard Goldstone) or opening up the crossings in Rafah to allow essential food, medical and building supplies in. Indeed, in 2008, the Egyptian-brokered ‘tahdia’ ceasefire was violated when Israel failed to comply with the conditions of easing the (illegal) blockade. The truth is, Hamas, as a crucial party to the negotiations, was ignored by both the governments of Egypt and Israel. But, as with everything that dictates this affair, Israel’s occupation and blockade, is conveniently evaded. Instead, it is justified as a security measure to prevent further attacks.

“The real crisis is in Syria and Iraq”​

The Arab Awakening has provided ample ammunition for hasbara’s ‘deflection strategy’. Mitchell Barak, former adviser to Shimon Peres, speaking on Al-Jazeera’s Inside Story, provided a masterclass demonstration that has characterised this approach on both a macro and micro-level; indeed, a short chat with any national or student Palestine advocacy group will tell you that they are often met with similar rebuttals. Another brief, but by no means insignificant point, is that Israel’s Islamaphobic rhetoric homogenizes Islamic political thought, suggesting Hamas, Hezbollah and Isis are in the same boat.

“If there have been war crimes, we’ll investigate it”​

Words of commendation, a partial (though hollow) admission of guilt, a determination to reflect, introspect, potentially own up to mistakes, can absolve even the most oppressive and domineering of us. Herein lies another facet of the hasbara strategy; rhetoric and tokenism. It humanises the Israeli narrative, infusing it with humility and re-enforcing its claim as the most ‘moral army in the world’. Making concessions (particularly ones that will most likely not be pursued) is infinitely effective in manufacturing consent. But Israel’s latest rejection of an independent UNHRC inquiry into violations in the latest Gaza invasion is more representative of their intentions.

Contingency plan: Hamas is a terrorist organisation​

Much is said about Hamas’ outdated charter, one which has been contradicted and rejected by its own leaders. The reality is that it exists as merely a relic, one which few Gazans pay little attention to; but one which creates alarm and panic from a party whose threat is embellished. But If we really want to talk about charters that are currently threatening a just peace, pay a visit to the charters of Likud and Yesh Atid, the two largest parties in the Knesset, which both support the settlement of ‘Judea and Samaria.’

We may say that, amongst other things, hasbara is characterised by a few manoeuvres and methods; trying to create a sense of symmetry in the conflict (what we may call ‘mirroring’), diverting attention away from its own war crimes by incorporating other suffering (‘deflection’) and imbuing its own policy with unsubstantiated and populist humility (‘tokenism’).

Extracting all the politics from this, taken purely on the empirical data, the death tolls, casualties, the representation of women and children in these figures, and the respective military capabilities of the sides (Palestine has no army, aviation or naval force), at the very least, one must come to the conclusion that this is not a ‘battle of equals.’ It is by some Herculean effort, that Israel is able to preach to the unconverted that, in the face of insurmountable evidence to the contrary, that there is a level playing field in this ‘conflict’. They may even convince you that this is a ‘war.’