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TO THE EDITORS:
Noah Pollak’s essay “Show of Force” (Azure 30, Autumn 2007), is both timely and welcome. Supporting his arguments with concrete examples, he successfully analyzes the shortcomings of Israel’s information policy. Although the facts which he presents are generally known, his interpretation and insights are creative and refreshing.
According to Pollak, Israeli policy- makers do not really understand the media war and its importance, or why Israel needs an effective integrated strategy. In short, the Israeli officials who deal with public opinion in the international media are “out of their league.” Here it would be helpful to place Pollak’s fine paper in historical perspective.
Israeli policymakers have never quite grasped that media warfare is a form of war—i.e., political war—whose objective is to isolate the Jewish state from its friends and to delegitimize it. This problem dates from Israel’s earliest years, when David Ben-Gurion refused to take international public opinion into account as a factor in policymaking. During this era, Israel enjoyed considerable good will abroad, and its enemies were not organized. Gradually, the Israeli establishment internalized the view that in policymaking, military considerations took absolute precedence, even to the exclusion of diplomacy, not to mention information policy. During the post-1967 era of arrogance, Moshe Dayan said it all: “Israel has no foreign policy, only a defense policy.”
With the First Lebanon War in 1982, Israel began to feel the force of hostile news coverage, and after the outbreak of the first Intifada in December 1987, the rules of the game began to change. Israel now faced a popular uprising instead of an army in the field. Because of political considerations, which now included international public opinion, it found itself unable to find a military solution that would pacify this revolt. Subsequently, the Palestinians quickly learned to exploit the media in this asymmetrical war. For them, favorable public opinion helped compensate for military weakness. As a consequence of a lack of imagination and incompetence, Israel’s leadership did not come to grips with this new political and media challenge. Indeed, the pain of this setback enhanced the desirability of any negotiated arrangement.
Prior to Oslo, in May 1993, Shimon Peres, then Israel’s foreign minister, terminated the country’s information policy with the confident exclamation, “If you have a good policy, you do not need public relations, and if you have a bad policy, public relations will not help.” It is important to grasp the assumptions behind this statement, because they reveal a fundamental misperception. The architects of Oslo were convinced that if Israel could reach an understanding with its Palestinian “partner,” real peace would ensue. Then, in an “end of history” type of scenario, all would be well, and there would be no further need for public relations.
Such views fail to take external reality into account, particularly the fact that the Palestinian objection to the Jewish state is existential. As Professor Yehoshafat Harkabi wrote in the 1970s, the other side has “an unlimited grievance, which the [Israeli] opponent cannot redress to its liking and yet stay alive.” In other words, the Palestinian war against Israel in the media and otherwise will remain a constant, whether Israel has a “good policy” or a bad one.
An additional dimension of the problem relates to Jewish identity. For some members of Israel’s secular elite, who look upon themselves as urbane citizens of the world, the thought that others could hate them because they are Jews is simply unbearable. Their solution is to seek refuge in a type of agreement that would enable them to avoid issues of identity by purchasing acceptance with “painful concessions.” The prevalence of this state of mind, which can be defeatist and fatalistic, suggests that Israel’s problem with the media war goes beyond its inability to determine the type of war in which it is engaged. Indeed, it is all the more serious, because this confusion of identity can undermine the will to win.
Pollak has performed a service by keeping the problem of Israel’s weakness in the media war before the public. This subject merits serious attention in its own right. At the same time, the poor performance of Israel’s official institutions in safeguarding the country’s legitimacy and facing the media challenge may be symptomatic of a deeper cultural and social problem.
Joel Fishman
The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs
Jerusalem
The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs
Jerusalem
TO THE EDITORS:
Israel has an “image problem,” asserts Noah Pollak. The problem is certainly not new: Since the outbreak of the second Intifada in 2000, and especially during and after the Second Lebanon War, I have heard multiple complaints from Jews and-—perhaps especially noteworthy—non-Jews about Israel’s self-destructive public conduct. Pollak appropriately delineates its most worrisome aspects, such as “gratuitous apologies and self-criticism,” along with “a reflexive assumption of guilt” in response to unmitigated aggression. Israel’s sworn enemies have never renounced their underlying objective to annihilate the Zionist entity; yet Israelis are unable to make a case for their fundamental right to self-defense. Conversely, they have been prone to bemoaning their own belligerence, repeatedly demonstrating servility before overtly hostile international public opinion upheld by a politically correct media. To a great extent, this self-deprecating behavior has contributed to Israel’s grotesque image as a state in which the propensity towards violence borders on sadism.
Appalled by what seems to be an ongoing policy blunder, people offer explanations. They tend to justify Israel’s self-imposed vulnerability by objective challenges, arguing, for instance, that the country’s economic constraints require “moderation” and “compliance” with the Western line of thinking, lest it invite aid cuts and/or trade sanctions from abroad. Another compelling argument holds that Israel has no choice but to succumb to foreign public-opinion pressure so as to avoid moral ostracism, detrimental to the country’s already damaged international status.
While legitimate, these concerns help little to understand the absurdity of habitual self-condemnation, which all but defeats Israel’s purpose of securing respect in the community of democratic nations. Practical considerations are only part of the story: When dealing with ostensibly rational justifications for self-destructiveness, we should recognize them as rationalizations of obscured yet vital motives. I would like to suggest that behavior patterns we attribute to personal psychology may also serve as paradigms for revealing the roots of irrationality on societal and national levels.
Consider, for instance, Stockholm syndrome, a well-known phenomenon in which hostages—helpless and under extreme threat to their lives—begin to show signs of loyalty to their captors. Victims are known to become emotionally attached to their victimizers, defending them even after no longer in captivity. Psychologists see this paradox as a defense mechanism, a means for the victims to come to terms with relentless fear: If successful in intricate mental ploys to develop pseudo-sympathy for their torturers by attributing to them various would-be positive characteristics, the hostages provide themselves with a simulation of safety. This is an essential psychological defense for the frantic mind of someone overcome by anxiety—as well as the collective thinking of people living under the perpetual threat of terror and impending war.
I certainly do not claim that everyone in Israel is a victim of Stockholm syndrome. I do, however, want to propose that many Israelis who blame themselves for being blown up by suicide bombers may be showing signs of this very aberrancy. As do those who seek to placate terrorists with apologies and other manifestations of “good behavior.” We do not yet understand the effects of Stockholm syndrome on the level of the collective consciousness; still, it is reasonable to suppose that the weak-kneed vulnerability, compliance, and self-denunciation we so often see among Israelis are some of them.
Now, I do not dare venture into the “Israeli vs. Jewish identity” dilemma; this open-ended discussion is relevant here only in connection with the country’s image troubles. Whether and to what extent Israelis are primarily Jews, as opposed to citizens of Israel, is unclear for many Israelis today—-a convoluted issue that renders the subject of appearance in the eyes of others a self-image problem. Bluntly put, Israelis are not sure who they are and what their attitudes should be, including those with regards to the country they call their own.
Indeed, ambivalence seems to have become the norm. I remember a conversation with a twenty-year-old aspiring Israeli musician who, in the fall of 2000, used some feeble excuse to evade military service. “I could not care less about the Intifada; all I want is to play my trumpet.” And yet, he was indignant when I asked him why he could not do so in, say, Chicago. “Why should I move to Chicago? This is my country,” he said, and added, “Only I want Jerusalem to be… like Chicago.” And so he went on pretending that he lived in some “normal place”—as do many other Israelis, for whom “normal” has come to mean “Western.” (And Jerusalem, presumably, must accommodate them by becoming a little less “Jewish.”)
It is a truism that fear gave serious impetus to diaspora Jews to learn the art of mimicry: For the sake of security, be less conspicuous and hide who you are. Perhaps we are masquerading now for an opposite reason, and wear the mask of citizens of the world to conceal the fact that we no longer know who we are. Israeli intellectuals are particularly prone to assume this identity and impose it on their audiences via the media and in the classroom. They promulgate it as a new, “post-Zionist” ideology. It is mandatory not only for anyone who wishes to belong to the intellectual community, but also for state and military leaders, and it reverberates in their awkward efforts to explain Israel’s national security measures.
Who has not been warned that he might not know the distinction between his face and the mask, should he wear it long enough? As a people, we have thus managed to confuse ourselves about our identity, and are paying the price typical for unsettled souls—embarrassment and tenuous self-esteem. Not surprisingly, we consequently fail to evoke the respect of our allies and our enemies, to whom our damaged self-image is being communicated.
Anna Geifman
Boston University
Boston, Massachusetts
Boston University
Boston, Massachusetts
