Israel's 'dream of Israeli and Palestinian children playing together'
is somewhat hypocritcal when you look at the 230 children killed in
Gaza
To many readers the New York Times coverage of the war in
Gaza comes across as neutered or as having a pro-Israeli bias. But not
to Ron Dermer, the Israeli ambassador in Washington, who lambasts the paper
for failing “to mention that a million Israelis were in bomb shelters
yesterday as 100 rockets were fired at our civilian population.”
Mr Dermer is considered so close to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu that he has been called “Bibi’s brain”. He is also a former
student and employee of Frank Luntz, the Republican strategist who
produced
a confidential booklet in 2009,
promptly leaked, advising Israeli spokesmen how best to manipulate
American and European public opinion. “Don’t confuse messages with
facts,” Dr Luntz advises the spokesmen as he explains how facts should
be selected and best presented to make Israel’s case.
It is a
sophisticated document based on wide-ranging opinion polls, suggesting,
for instance, that the removal of Israeli settlements from the West Bank
should be denounced as “a kind of ethnic cleansing”. Dr Luntz stresses
that spokesmen must demonise Hamas, but above all emphasise that they
feel for the sufferings of Palestinians as well as Israelis. As a sample
of what they should say, he gives: “The day will come when Israeli
children and Palestinian children will grow up together, play together,
and work together side-by-side not just because they have to but because
they want to.”
The problem about this approach is that it sounds
particularly hypocritical when, according to Unicef, 230 children have
been killed in Gaza, an average of ten a day, and 2,000 have been
wounded by Israeli bombs, shells and bullets. Israeli spokesmen are now
denying their responsibility for the most notorious and televised
atrocities such as the strike on the UN hospital last week. This is an
old PR tactic, though not one recommended by Dr Luntz, which is sometime
referred to as “first you say no story, then you say old story”. In
other words, deny everything in the teeth of the evidence on day one
and, by the time definitive proof of the massacre comes through, nobody
notices when you have to admit responsibility.
Video: The latest from Gaza
A
problem here is that propaganda that works in a short war comes back to
haunt you in a longer one. This is now happening in Gaza. Israeli air
and artillery strikes and Hamas mortars and rockets are often presented
as if they balanced each other out in terms of lethality. But the most
important statistic here is that some 1,100 Palestinians have been
killed as opposed to three civilians in Israel.
Despite his
tutoring by Dr Luntz, Mr Dermer only speaks these days to the converted.
Attending a Christians United for Israel Summit in Washington he
replied to protesters who called him a “war criminal” by saying that
“the truth is that the Israeli Defence Forces should be given a Nobel
Peace Prize”. Stuff like this may explain why a Gallup poll shows that
among Americans aged between 18 and 29 some 51 per cent said Israel’s
actions were unjustified while only 23 per cent said they were.
For
all the good advice of Dr Luntz there are signs of Israeli leaders
getting rattled. Mr Netanyahu complained on CNN that Hamas wants “to
pile up as many civilian dead as they can” and “to use telegenically
dead Palestinians for their cause.” Even the best propaganda machine
cannot explain away massacres of civilians as happened in Lebanon at
Sabra and Shatila in 1982 and at Qana in 1996 and 2006.
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