Two op-eds of mine today try to explain what’s wrong with Israel’s basic strategy in Gaza - in both military and public-relations terms.
In the New York Times I argue that there’s a basic problem with Israel’s notion of “deterrence”.
In Ha’aretz’s English edition I try to explain to Israelis why they never win the PR war.
The pieces are below.
January 8, 2009
Fighting to Preserve a Myth
By GIDEON LICHFIELD
Tel Aviv
SUPPOSE Israel manages to prevent its campaign in Gaza from turning into a repeat of its disastrous war against Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006. Suppose the army does not get bogged down fighting in the narrow streets of Gaza’s refugee camps and international outrage at the spiraling death toll does not force it to pull out with rockets still falling on Israeli towns. Suppose no soldiers are taken hostage and Hamas suffers enough damage to force it to accept a cease-fire on Israel’s terms. Then what?
Israeli leaders say often that the result will be to “re-establish deterrence” against Hamas, and by extension against Hezbollah and others. This harks back to the glory days when Israel defeated three Arab armies in 1967 and fought off surprise attacks from Egypt and Syria in 1973. The trouble is that “deterrence” does not exist.
The effect of deterring conventional military attacks, as Israel did back then, was that aggression found other channels. For more than three decades the main threat to Israel has been not from conventional armies but from guerrilla movements like Hamas and Hezbollah. And these groups cannot be deterred.
During the 2006 war, the Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, said that merely surviving an Israeli onslaught would equal victory for his movement. The same is true of Hamas — even more so, in fact, since it is the only real power in Gaza, whereas Hezbollah is in finely balanced competition with other Lebanese parties. (Indeed, though some Israelis say that Hezbollah’s current silence is proof that deterrence works, the real reason it has not intervened on behalf of Hamas is probably that it does not want to upset the political balance just ahead of the Lebanese elections a few months away.) Deterrence has to be equal to the enemy’s fear of defeat; when the only defeat is annihilation, there is no deterrence unless Israel is prepared to reduce all of Gaza to rubble.
Even if Israel now manages to impose a cease-fire on its terms, the calm will be short-lived unless it is willing to reoccupy much of the Gaza Strip indefinitely. Moreover, as long as Israel plays the role of aggressor in Palestinian eyes, Hamas’s support remains high. And each attack has weakened the relative moderates within Hamas and strengthened its most extremist leaders.
Israel needs instead to abandon its military concept of deterrence in favor of a more pragmatic political one. What could deter Hamas is the fear that by using violence it will lose support among its people.
How to create this? It is worth remembering that Israel launched its operation after the breakdown of a cease-fire that had held, reasonably well, for several months. Each side accused the other of breaching it, both with some justification. Instead of trying to re-establish the cease-fire, Israel’s leaders, driven by the need to bolster their ratings ahead of an election in February, decided to try to strike a decisive blow against Hamas.
What Israel should do now is work for a cease-fire on terms that allow both sides to save some face. It should then do something it has done far too little of in the past: improve Gazans’ living conditions significantly. The aim should be to construct a long-lived state of calm in which Hamas has more to lose by breaching the cease-fire than by sticking to it.
In the longer term Israel will have to accept that Hamas is no fringe movement that can be rooted out and destroyed, but a central part of Palestinian society. This will be the hard part, not least because of the opposition from Hamas’s secularist Palestinian rivals, Fatah.
But even though Hamas’s stated goal is Israel’s destruction, it has said many times that it would accept a truce extending decades. Some former Israeli security chiefs argue that such an accommodation — a peace treaty in all but name — would eventually oblige Hamas to accept Israel’s existence, or else lose its own base of support. It is a gamble, certainly. But the alternative is more innocent lives lost, more extremism and ultimately more trouble for Israel.
Gideon Lichfield, a correspondent for The Economist, was the magazine’s Jerusalem bureau chief from 2005 to 2008.
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
Last update - 02:21 08/01/2009
Israel’s PR war
By Gideon Lichfield
It had to happen at some point. The army attacks a civilian building identified as a source of fire; dozens of civilians are killed, and what little sympathy Israel enjoyed in whatever war it’s currently fighting evaporates. It happened in Qana during the Second Lebanon War, and yesterday a school in the Jabalya refugee camp became a global symbol of indiscriminate Israeli aggression.
When these things happen, Israel is quick to respond on the public-relations front. It didn’t take long before we foreign correspondents started getting text messages from the Israel Defense Forces on our cell phones. One said that the school was targeted because it was “a source of mortar fire.” Another informed us that video footage was available of rockets being fired from another UNRWA school several months earlier. A third told us the names of the Hamas operatives who were killed along with the children and mothers cowering nearby.
I frequently get asked by Israelis, “why aren’t we winning the PR war? Why don’t people understand that this is what we have to do?” Many are convinced that there is something wrong with Israeli hasbara (public advocacy), that the spokespeople aren’t effective enough, or that the Palestinians have a huge and demonically efficient propaganda machine.
When I hear this I have to explain that Israeli hasbara is so sophisticated that there is still no adequate word for it in English; that some of Israel’s spokespeople could talk the hind legs off a donkey and then persuade the donkey to dance the hora, and that the Palestinians barely even know what a spokesman is, let alone be able to provide one who is available when he needs to be and knows anything about what is actually going on. So why isn’t Israel winning the PR war?
Partly, of course, it’s because the numbers are against it. Six hundred Palestinians dead versus nine Israelis, as of today’s figures: There’s just no way to make that proportion look pretty. Retired generals can drone on all they like about what “proportionality” really means in the laws of war, ambassadors can helpfully point out that many more Germans were killed than British in the Second World War, but these are theoretical notions; on television, what looks bad looks bad. (Nor do I really buy the argument that if Israel’s casualties were more visibly bloody - if, say, the media showed the gory pictures of the few people who have been hit by Qassams instead of holding them back to keep the home front from getting agitated - then you could counter the stream of barbaric images from Gaza. There’s just no competition.)
But the deeper reason is this: Israeli hasbara is perpetually trying to answer the wrong question: “Why is this justified?” Of course, it’s natural for either side in a conflict to try to explain why it, and not the other side, has the moral high ground. But, especially in a conflict where both sides have been claiming the moral high ground for decades, nobody in the outside world is all that interested. From a foreign correspondent’s point of view, it makes for boring journalism: “The Israelis said this, but the Palestinians said that.” And since we’re all studiously trying to be “neutral,” we’ll always balance your view against theirs; so the fact that you make more of an effort to explain than they do doesn’t really matter.
The question the foreign media really wants answered is invariably not “who’s in the right?” but “how will this round of fighting improve the overall situation?” And on that point, Israel never has a convincing argument. Given the country’s long history of engaging in wars that kill many more of its enemies than its own citizens but only buy a few months or years of calm, it’s a tough call to explain how this latest escapade will change the strategic balance, bring peace and prevent the need for another such bloodbath further down the line. Often that’s because there is in fact no good reason: Wars are fought for short-term gains. And it doesn’t help that with the constant competition for power within Israeli coalitions, it’s easy to interpret this war, like many others, as a political imperative, not a strategic one.
And so when the question the world is asking is not “who’s right?” but “what works?” the consistent impression Israel leaves is that it kills people because, at best, it simply doesn’t have any better ideas, and at worst, because some Israeli leader is trying to get the upper hand on one of his or her rivals. And no amount of hasbara can make that look good.
Gideon Lichfield, until recently The Economist’s Jerusalem correspondent, will be moving to the weekly’s New York bureau.
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