EXCERPT:
The final battleground in Israel’s “spin war” is outside Israel—on internet sites and in overseas newsrooms, especially those in the U.S. and those with a global reach.
Increasingly important among the new media platforms are blogs—especially ones by dissident American Jews such as Philip Weiss at Mondoweiss and Richard Silverstein at Tikun Olam. Weiss has helped to establish and nurture an online community of mainly Jewish writers that speaks with a refreshing clarity about Israel’s occupation and the power of the Israel lobby in the U.S. Silverstein, meanwhile, has broken several important stories about Israel leaked to him by Israeli journalists who could not report the issues themselves because of the increasing use of gag orders and censorship.
The readership for these overseas blogs, including among Israelis, is steadily rising. The sites are also freeing Israeli bloggers to become more outspoken: they can relay back to Israeli audiences information from foreign websites without the risk of being first to break censorship rules.
Also making an impact is the slow rise of non-Western media in English. The most significant is Al-Jazeera, a Qatar-based media company that has now both a website and a TV channel in English. Al-Jazeera, both its English and Arabic channels, is deeply disliked by the Israeli authorities (as it is by the Palestinian Authority). Not surprisingly, the English channel has struggled to find cable distribution deals in the U.S. Still it is demonstrating that a new model of critical but professional reporting about Israel in the mainstream is possible. Other TV channels that are attracting growing audiences are PressTV from Iran and Russia Today.
Perhaps of greatest concern to Israel is that these new media platforms are feeding an interest in a potentially formidable and unifying new campaign against Israel: BDS—shorthand for boycott, divestment and sanctions.
Ranged against these new upstart forces are Israel’s powerful and entrenched lobby groups. As well as political groups such as AIPAC targeting the U.S. Congress and the White House, there are sophisticated media lobbies like Camera and Honest Reporting. Their job is to intimidate reporters in Israel by targeting their less-knowledgeable editors overseas with mass letter-writing campaigns and official complaints. A visit to Camera’s website, for example, shows a long list of the most important foreign correspondents in Israel over the past two decades. Each has been on the receiving end of one or two major complaints—enough usually to bring them into line. Reporters worry that too many such complaints to their bosses will start to undermine the paper’s confidence in them.
But while Camera and Honest Reporting have long been targeting any signs of critical reporting in the mainstream media, new pro-Israel lobbies have emerged to counter threats from the electronic media and the BDS movement. One influential Israeli think-tank, the Reut Institute, has termed these new global forces a “delegitimization challenge” to Israel. The problem was addressed, in particular, at Israel’s annual security convention at Herzliya early in 2010 at sessions entitled, for example, “Winning the Battle of the Narrative” and “Soft Warfare against Israel.” The key message at these meetings was that the traditional Israeli practice of “hasbara”—a Hebrew term usually translated as “explanation” but really meaning “propaganda”—had to be reinvented for the new age.
The Israeli government first identified the threats posed by the new media to its mainstream narratives back in 2005, arguing that the country must “improve the country's image abroad—by downplaying religion and avoiding any discussion of the conflict with the Palestinians.” This led to a new campaign, “Brand Israel,” that has targeted major cities around the world for film festivals and food and wine galas featuring Israeli products. Israel has also encouraged the media to focus on Israel’s innovations in hi-tech industries and stem-cell research.
One venture is Israel21c, whose mission is “to focus media and public attention on the 21st century Israel that exists beyond the conflict.” It is reported to be working closely with AIPAC. Israel21c’s success in manipulating coverage by the mainstream media was signaled by the recent news that CNN had broadcast 15 of the group’s pre-packaged videos over the previous year – “reaching millions of viewers worldwide,” as Israel21c boasted on its website.
In a press release, Israel21c added: “Other encouraging stories chosen by CNN this year describe a mixed Jewish-Arab choir that practices its message of coexistence out loud, and a group of Palestinian and Israeli midwives working together to ensure that pregnant mothers in Israel and the Palestinian territories have safe and natural births. Rather than portraying Israel as a place of conflict and strife, these stories have highlighted Israeli accomplishments in science and technology, arts and culture, and philanthropy.”
The chief target of the new hasbara has been the BBC, the influential British-based public broadcaster that has a large international audience for its TV, radio and internet sites. The popular mood in Britain has turned rapidly against Israel over the past decade, and Israel appears to have been fearful that the BBC might reflect such sentiments. But after much behind-the-scenes pressure from the Israeli foreign ministry and its lobbyists, the BBC has moved in precisely the opposite direction—sometimes to a degree that has shocked the British public and even the British government.
Most notable was its refusal in 2009 to broadcast an appeal for that year’s selected charitable cause— helping the homeless and sick in Gaza after Israel’s 2008 winter attack. The BBC claimed for the first time in more than 20 years of running such appeals—part of its public service remit—that doing so would compromise the organization’s “neutrality.”
Other signs of the BBC’s loss of nerve are its abandonment of truly independent documentaries on Israel. Instead in recent years it has accepted “soft” documentaries from Israeli production crews. Israeli film-makers have had great success offering as their chief selling-point to the BBC various dubious “exclusives”—typically “rare” interviews with senior military people and views inside Israel’s war rooms “for the first time ever.” Israeli film-maker Noam Shalev, who has specialized in these kinds of productions, has made faux-documentaries like the 2006 “Will Israel bomb Iran?” that have offered little more than Israeli foreign ministry propaganda.
“Death in the Med,” the BBC’s investigation in August 2010 into the killing of nine passengers aboard the Mavi Marmara followed the same compromised format, even though it was fronted by a veteran BBC presenter, Jane Corbin. With a largely Israeli crew, Corbin again offered several “exclusives,” including being present during a training exercise by the “secretive” commando unit that stormed the Marmara, and interviews with the commandos themselves. The illegality of invading a ship in international waters was not discussed, nor was Israel’s theft of the passengers’ media equipment. There was no warning that video footage shown in the documentary was selectively edited by the Israeli government. Audio tape of passengers telling the Israeli commandos to “Go back to Auschwitz” that Israel is known to have doctored was presented as authentic, with Corbin even stating that the insults were “a warning sign.”
This approach looks as if it will be a key element in Israel’s future media strategy. As its grip on the narrative coming directly from the region weakens, it will fight harder to ensure that reporters of all kinds covering the conflict come under intensified pressure. But Israel is also likely to try to bypass local journalists as much as possible, selling its image and discredited myths to those least in a position to question or doubt them. Editors from the overseas news organizations should be among those who can be more easily swayed.
Israel may be struggling to keep its critics at bay, but its Watergate moment is still far off.
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