Historically Ignorant Israelis Are Easy Prey for Propagandists - Opinion - Haaretz.com
Wars, by their very nature, are spaces where passions are released. It's permissible to do everything that is impermissible in times of peace: kill, destroy, rob, loot, abuse, humiliate, become brutal and go wild. Therefore, to purify military actions, the combating parties apply propaganda, the purpose of which is to justify, conceal, and excuse all unnecessary destruction, wanton killing or harsh repression. The same is true in the Gaza war. Here too, Israeli propaganda is busy inventing justifications and excuses for all the acts committed. The global success is quite limited. People aren't buying it and no wonder. However, the Israeli audience is endowed with two qualities greatly assisting the propagandist: a total lack of self-awareness and the absence of even an iota of historical memory.
- As Israel relies on force, it sets itself up for suicide
- Why Palestinians in Israel, like me, keep marching to protect our land
- It's not only the Gaza Strip that needs rebuilding – so does the Israeli ethos
An example: IDF public relations is always happy to announce an "arms cache" has been found in a school, hospital, mosque, residential neighborhood… Conclusive proof of the monstrosity of the Hamas enemy desecrating the sacred, exploiting hospitals, and concealing weapon of mass destruction in peoples' homes. Ugh! They should be ashamed! We never do that. It is therefore good and righteous that we've bombed their schools, hospitals, mosques and residential neighborhoods. Indeed, we never did such a thing.
We only had secret arms caches during the Yishuv, which of course is not a despicable arsenal. The Yishuv era caches are part of the heritage of our heroic underground. The arms we concealed there were pure, meant to fight the foreign occupier and those who hate us. There were about 1,500 Jewish arms caches in the Yishuv. They were concealed in schools, synagogues, hospitals (including Hadassah), beneath the Torah Ark in an orphanage, in hundreds of people's homes, and dozens of public facilities. But how is this comparable? It's their impure "weapons arsenals," it's our clean and pure arms caches. Shame. Shame.
Another example: One of Israeli propaganda's most successful bluffs excuses the army's brutality arguing Hamas "hides behind the civilian population." Truly terrible. Only they could do such a despicable thing. Again, historical ignorance helps market this hypocrisy. Israel, even now, is close to being a world champion in hiding behind civilians sent to the front. Every myth of "settlement" is built on that. The sanctification of "the plow and the goat" as setting borders is based on hiding behind civilians. They are sent with their wives and children to commit the mission of conquest and expulsion. When, Heaven forbid, they are injured, a marvelous excuse is created to send a conquering army to push back the border and expand the kingdom.
Israeli settlers walk past a structure that was erected for a new yeshiva, in the settler outpost of Homesh in the West Bank, last year.Credit: RONEN ZVULUN/REUTERS
It's hard to find one colonialist who has not used this contemptuous trick. Europeans in North and South America, the English in Australia, the Dutch and French in Africa… always the same way: fast conquest, bring in the conqueror's people, and destroy, deport or enslave the native population. The malignant "settlement enterprise" explicitly declares this is its reason for existing. I fear that Israel is quite wrong to accuse others of hiding behind civilians. To again get permission to apply this argument, you should first clear all the settlements behind whose inhabitants are used to hide behind and conceal its intentions.
We haven't yet talked about the lie of "the number of terrorists killed," or "we didn't mean to harm," or "we warned them to move" before bombing the hell out of them. Maybe in the next chapter.