fugitive peace

Well, although some Israelis think Israeli television shouldn’t pay any attention to Palestinian suffering, it of course continues to broadcast telephone interviews with Palestinians in Gaza. And yesterday the viewers got more than they bargained for. Dr Izzedine Abu al-Aish, a gynecologist who had trained and worked at Israeli hospitals, had been speaking regularly to Israel’s Channel 10 during the war. They rang him up for another talk just after just after the army, in response (it said) to sniper fire nearby, had bombed his house in the northern Gaza strip. Three of his eight daughters and one niece were killed.  The reporter stayed on the line with him as they went on air. You can watch the broadcast here. It’s all in Hebrew and Arabic, but you don’t need to speak either of them. The sound of raw grief is the same in every language.

For a glimpse of the huge gap between how the world sees Israel’s offensive in Gaza and how Israelis see it, I recommend first Ethan Bronner’s piece today in the New York Times, and then this email that I received and translated from the Hebrew (the emphases are mine). It represents a centre-right viewpoint — which could be said to be the mainstream these days, since Likud is set to win the next election — and makes very clear what this sector of Israeli society thinks of the casualties being inflicted on the Palestinians. (The email’s author says that it was submitted to Ynet, an Israeli news website, but rejected).

[…] There are new images on the screen.
Muhammad from Gaza and Ibrahim from Gaza and also a pediatrician from Shifa Hospital [in Gaza].
Worried interviewers summon up all their motherly feelings in the course of an interview:
Oshrat Kotler [a TV anchor], with a look of pain and a tear welling up in the corner of her eye:
“Muhammad, how are things with you? Is everything all right? How’s the family? What do you do when the power goes out? How are the children coping? What do you tell your kids? Ah… the Israelis are bombing because Hamas is firing missiles at them… and Hamas is firing missiles at the Israelis because the Israelis closed the crossings…”
“Muhammad, we’ll be coming back to you later in the programme, to ask you how you and the family are doing.”
“Muhammad… we hope you get through this.”
And Micky Chaimovitch [another news anchor], in a heart-rending interview with Ibrahim that keeps getting cut off […]
“Ibrahim, how do you feel over there… in the dark… with the bombing… what do you do when they’re bombing? Do you have shelters? Do you have food?”
If it wasn’t real, it would be funny.
We got out of Gaza, we put a border fence between us and them, we’re at war with them, with the people sitting behind that fence. Maybe someone can put a stop to these stupid interviews?
Why do we have to keep humanising them?
I don’t understand these constant attempts to show the other side of the story.
Sometimes you wonder whether these are really Israeli TV stations.
Our suffering is what’s supposed to interest us. We’re not talking about preparatory peace talks where we’re supposed to recognise the other side, to see that they’re just like us.
This attention paid to the suffering of the other side reduces the level of identification with your own people.
A picture of a girl crying in Gaza that’s always flashing on the home page of Ynet [an Israeli news website] instead of a picture of soldiers in combat/a destroyed house/children in Sderot suffering from panic/empty southern restaurants/lines of cars making their way northwards makes one wonder a great deal about whoever put the picture on Ynet’s front page.
We’re at war, our goal is to stop the missile fire, to destroy Hamas’s capabilities.
Of course not all the Gazans are bad people and Hamasniks, but at the moment this really shouldn’t interest us. We’re fighting for our existence.
We have wonderful soldiers who are fighting in Gaza and trying to undo a little of the disaster of the disengagement (by the way, has there yet been one politician who has admitted that the disengagement was a fatal mistake?)
We have a home front that stands with them and is wishing for the victory of the Israel Defence Forces.
So please, stop imitating al-Jazeera and al-Manar.
No more Gazan interviewees on the Israeli state networks, no more pictures on the internet that provoke sympathy but not our sympathy.

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.

© Copyright 2009 Haaretz. All rights reserved

Picture: Hadar Naim

Yesterday the unthinkable happened. I stood in front of a large audience at a conference in Tel Aviv and said that I thought Binyamin “Bibi” Netanyahu was Israel’s best choice for prime minister. (Actually I said “most interesting”, not “best”, but if we’re being honest, what’s the difference.)

If my Palestinian friends find out they will stop talking to me. Maybe most of my Israeli friends too. Politically I’m somewhere to the left of Meretz. Was I out of my mind?

It was the Globes annual business conference, and I was speaking about Israel’s long-term economic prospects. The main problem, I said, was political stability. Governments change so often that it inhibits serious policymaking.

I took the world financial crisis as an example. Israel should not be feeling the pain much. Its markets were hardly exposed to the strange financial instruments that have brought the rest of the developed world to its knees. Its exports will suffer, but that should only produce a mild slowdown. But the banks are panicking and shutting down credit, ignoring the Bank of Israel’s sharp interest-rate cuts, and that is causing the whole economy to shudder. Growth will be around 1.5% next year by the Bank of Israel’s estimate; in per-capita terms, that’s a recession.

What’s needed is a fiscal stimulus plan. But with Israel yet again in an election cycle, it’s impossible to get a serious one passed. There is a package, but frankly, it’s a joke.

When Netanyahu was finance minister he did a lot of good things. He introduced sensible fiscal management, which provided greater economic stability - the month-long war in 2006 hardly caused a blip in the economy - and reformed the financial markets; one effect of those reforms was to separate banking, insurance and asset management, specifically to prevent a crisis in one part of the financial system infecting the rest of it.

He also did a lot of harm to the poor and the middle class because, as is often the case with economic reforms, it was the rich that benefited first. The welfare-to-work “Wisconsin programme” got lots of people into work, but it didn’t make them better off, just increased the numbers of the working poor. The number of mortgages has been falling steadily too, which is a bad sign for the middle class’s health. But I’ve talked to some of Bibi’s policy whizkids over the years I’ve been here, and I think they recognise the mistakes.

So if we’re talking about economic policy, he has a more ambitious and intelligent one than his rivals. And a Likud government will be more stable than either a Kadima or Labour one, and more able to make reforms happen. For Israel, this is better.

For the Palestinians, of course, Likud is a different story.

Bibi says he doesn’t want to reach even a vague final-status agreement with Abbas now, as Olmert has been trying to for the past year. He talks instead about something called “economic peace”. This translates as: we’ll try to boost the West Bank economy enough so that they stop wanting to bomb us, and then, once they’re nice and quiet, we’ll think about talking about negotiating about working towards possible moves that might, in the fullness of time, when the moment is ripe, and without prejudice to Israel’s right to bomb the hell out of anyone it thinks is a threat, lead, eventually and in the long run, to Palestinian independence. Oh, and let’s not even mention Gaza.

You can guess what I think of that.

However, the fact is that neither Kadima nor Labour is offering the Palestinians anything better. Olmert’s offer of a “shelf agreement”, along with half-baked measures to boost the West Bank’s economy while strangling Gaza in an attempt to get the Palestinians living there to turn on Hamas, amounts to pretty much the same thing, just dressed up more nicely.

In fact, it’s better for the Palestinians to have an Israeli prime minister who doesn’t even pretend he wants to give them a state than one who claims to be working on it very hard while indefinitely stringing the process along because s/he has nothing else to offer as a policy platform. It may not be better for Abbas himself; his political survival depends on stringing out the process just as much as Olmert’s did and Livni’s will. But if that’s the best he can offer his people, he should go too.

Furthermore: if Olmert were, by some already thankfully remote chance, to reach a shelf agreement with Abbas before the election in February, it would be a disaster for the Palestinians, and for Abbas personally. Armed with that agreement, Bibi would be in an even stronger position to say that there is nothing more to talk about.

(I don’t, by the way, set much store by the argument, typical of certain hopeful leftists, that Israel’s biggest peace concessions have been made by Likud leaders. Netanyahu handed over most of Hebron to Palestinian control signed the Wye River Memorandum when he was prime minister in 1988, but under duress, not because, like Ariel Sharon with Gaza or Menachem Begin with the Sinai, he suddenly woke up and decided that it was the right thing to do.)

The other main thing to give one pause is that Bibi, to whom we owe the immortal fear-mongering line “It is 1938, and Iran is Nazi Germany”, is the man most likely to send Israeli fighters to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities and possibly start another war to bring the entire Middle East down in even more flames than are engulfing it already. But I think if Israel had any window for bombing Iran, it ends when Barack Obama is sworn in. Without at least tacit support from the United States, he can’t do it.

So I say Bibi for prime minister. And by as many seats as possible. The Israeli left needs a total defeat if it’s to rise as a serious political force again.

I just outlined this reasoning to one of my Meretz-voting Israeli friends. He said, “Wow. You’re thinking like an Israeli.”

(And, just to make it clear, this is not the official position of The Economist.)

A small but important lesson about opinion polls.

Three weeks ago Ha’aretz’s pollster, Camil Fuchs, published a poll showing that 64% of Israelis favour holding talks with Hamas in order to get a ceasefire and release Gilad Shalit, the captured soldier. Today the Tami Steinmetz Centre has issued the latest monthly Peace Index. It says that only 25% of Israelis and just 17% of Israeli Jews favour negotiating with Hamas.

Puzzled? So was I. I reported on the Ha’aretz poll a couple of weeks ago as evidence that Israeli opinion is shifting towards talks with Hamas. So I called Ephraim Yaar of the Steinmetz Centre for an explanation, and it turns out to be simple.

The Ha’aretz poll asked people if they supported talks with Hamas: yes or no. The Steinmetz poll asked them the best way for Israel to deal with the Qassam rockets from Gaza: (1) talks with Hamas; (2) a relatively restrained military response (though Israel’s idea of “restrained”, I should point out, still means several Palestinians killed every week); (3) a bigger but still limited response (ie, like the ground incursion that killed 110 people or so earlier this month); (4) a massive ground operation to reoccupy Gaza; (5) another option of your choice; (6) don’t know.

When you put the question like this, more Israeli Jews support reoccupying Gaza than talking to Hamas (see the table below).

So which poll is “right”? What does the Israeli public actually think about talks with Hamas?

I asked Fuchs. “When you include other options, you’re cognitively giving legitimacy to them,” he says. “What you’re doing is hinting to the person that there are other people who prefer these options.” When there’s only one option on the table, on the other hand, you’re asking them to choose between doing that and doing nothing.

In short, what the two polls taken together say is that if the people could run the government, and had a range of options for dealing with Gaza, more of them would go with a military option. However, if the government says it’s going to talk to Hamas, 64% of the public would support it (though Fuchs thinks the number now would be a little lower than three weeks ago).

Question 1: Should Israel conduct talks with Hamas towards a ceasefire and the release of Gilad Shalit?

Source: Ha’aretz/Dialog

Question 2: What is the best way for Israel to prevent rocket fire on the south?

Source: Tami Steinmetz Centre

I feel sorry for the poor Winograd commission that investigated the second Lebanon war. They’re nice, serious, committed people who tried to give Israel the definitive, all-encompassing recipe for how to make sure it doesn’t screw up a war ever again. It took them:

• 16 months
• Over 270 witnesses and interviewees
  
• 629 pages, including appendices
• 21 pages for the table of contents alone
• 223 instances of the word “fail”, “failure”, “failed” etc
• 286 instances of the word “flaw” or “flawed”
• 14 key recommendations for reform of the army and executive branch

But the press and public are calling the report a sell-out. Why? Because the only thing they want to know is: whose fault was it that so many soldiers died in Lebanon for nothing? Or more specifically, will the person whose fault everyone believes it was, Ehud Olmert, now at last quit? And since he has no intention of doing so, it’s Winograd’s fault for not giving him the push.

There is a Russian saying: kto vinovat i shto dyelat’? — “Who is to blame and what is to be done?” Israelis, being impatient people, only want to know who’s to blame; to hell with what’s to be done, because in a few months time the government will change again and nobody will do it anyway. Which is why, as I wrote in this week’s piece on it, the Winograd report will probably sink into obscurity like all its worthy predecessors.

The mystery about Israel’s air strike against Syria on September 6th, which I wrote about in the current issue, continues to deepen. The story taking hold is that Israel hit material or equipment for nuclear weapons supplied by North Korea. But something still smells fishy.

For a start, the way this story has emerged in public is odd in the extreme. Well-connected Israeli journalists hinted from very early on that they knew what was going on but couldn’t say, a sign that censorship was in effect. (That is censored too, but it has become so obvious that they are now saying it openly.) All last week it was the American media - CNN, the Washington Post, the New York Times - which dripped out the story, mainly with off-the-record comments from American officials.

But today it’s Britain’s Sunday Times which carries it forward, with a lot of enticing details from unnamed Israeli sources about how an Israeli commando unit on the ground guided the bombers; how the Mossad found “evidence that Syria was seeking to buy a nuclear device from North Korea”; how Israel diverted a spy satellite from Iran to Syria; and, interestingly, how the mysterious rise in Israel-Syria sabre-rattling a few weeks ago - which I wrote about in my very first post - was actually the result of Israel’s sending more troops to the Golan “in anticipation of possible retaliation by Damascus in the event of air strikes.”

So, first question: why the Sunday Times? Letting details of the attack leak via Washington last week may have been a way to prevent a flare-up between Israel and Syria or other Arab states. But if Israeli officials have decided that it’s now safe to break silence, why not in the Israeli press?

Second question: is it true? Uzi Mahnaimi, the Sunday Times’s man in Tel Aviv, is a former Mossad man (correction: served in military intelligence) known for having excellent security sources. But as I’ve discussed before, journalists in that position are also susceptible to being fed misinformation and printing it, knowingly or otherwise.

The operational details he reveals are probably accurate. The nukes claim, which seems to have been fed both to Uzi and to his Washington colleague, is more questionable. Newsweek today reports that, yes, Israel showed satellite photographs of northern Syria to officials in Washington, suggesting that they revealed a nuclear project; but that other anonymous US officials “say they’ve seen no credible evidence yet of nuclear ties between North Korea and Syria”.

So the alternative view going around is that this news cycle is all part of a big conspiracy by Washington hardliners - with ex-UN ambassador John Bolton at the fore - and Israel to push the Iran-Syria-North Korea connection, with the media gullibly playing along.

Thus, the Sunday Times cites Bolton saying that “I’ve been worried for some time about North Korea and Iran outsourcing their nuclear programmes,” but Newsweek gets him to admit that he “never saw proof North Korea was sharing nuclear technology with Syria.” Joshua Landis, who has also clipped several other useful pieces on this issue, lists reasons to think that Bolton is “shooting from the hip”, and Blake Hounshell at Foreign Policy’s blog argues that quotes Joseph Cirincione saying that

If this sounds like the run-up to the war in Iraq, it should. This time it appears aimed at derailing the U.S.-North Korean agreement that administration hardliners think is appeasement. Some Israelis want to thwart any dialogue between the U.S. and Syria.

I’m suspending judgement. Launching an air strike at Syria, especially if there were indeed ground commandos, was risky. It’s hard to imagine Israel would have done it just to lend credibility to a neocon claim about nukes or prevent US-Syria dialogue (if anything, Washington is even more sceptical of Syria’s intentions than Jerusalem is). An alternative hypothesis is that Israel really believed that Syria might have the hot stuff, but only because the neocons led Israel by the nose. But I still can’t figure out why keep the Israeli media muzzled, unless it’s just that they’re less likely than the US press to buy into the spin. At any rate, stay sceptical. Not everything is clear yet.

Human Rights Watch is making no friends these days. Last week it had to scrap the Beirut launch of its report accusing Hizbullah leaders of possible war crimes over last summer’s Lebanon war, after Hizbullah goons threatened to break up the event. Today HRW published the sister report about why Israel killed so many Lebanese civilians. It makes chilling reading. Besides listing each one of the 1109 confirmed victims (mostly civilian) by name, it investigates 97 incidents in painstaking detail, analysing who died, how, and whether they were collateral casualties of a legitimate action under the laws of war, or - more often - victims of an attack that should never have been carried out.

The report’s bottom line: Israel’s claim that most civilians died because Hizbullah fighters were hiding and fighting in their midst is true only to a limited extent. Instead, says HRW, Israel bombed too widely and indiscriminately (including its infamous use of cluster bombs); assumed that all civilians had left their villages after it warned them to; and - most troubling for Israel itself - had to rely on inadequate and old intelligence. After the first few days of aerial bombing it ran out of known targets, and had to identify new ones to keep the campaign going. This led to mistakes such as bombing the civil defence offices in Tyre (killing 14 innocents) in the belief that they were the local Hizbullah headquarters.

There is, however, a moment of light relief in the HRW researchers’ investigation of Israel’s most famous and surreal mistake, when its troops raided a neighbourhood in Baalbek:

The object of the raid remains unclear. However, it appears that the Israeli commandos were looking for someone named Hassan Nasrallah, the same name as the secretary-general of Hezbollah. But the Hassan Nasrallah they found was a 54-year-old local shopkeeper who was not related to the leader of Hezbollah. As soon as they entered the home, they asked the shopkeeper in broken Arabic, “Are you Hassan Nasrallah?”

They took him, his son and three other men back to Israel, where

…Israeli officials repeatedly interrogated the men and accused them of being Hezbollah members. They repeatedly accused Hassan Deeb Nasrallah’s son, Bilal Nasrallah, of being the son of the Hezbollah Secretary-General, even though his father was with him. [my emphasis]

After three weeks Israel, with no official apology or explanation, returned the men to Lebanon. There, a HRW researcher tells me, they promptly came under suspicion of having been turned into Israeli spies, and had to endure a grilling from Lebanese military intelligence. Hizbullah’s reaction is not recorded.

This week’s story is about the likelihood of an Israeli war with Syria, and in part about the role of the media in hyping it up. Israel has some terrific journalists, whose reporting is cynical, spin-conscious and explicit about political agendas in a way that is rare in many other countries. Yet when it comes to what they hear from intelligence sources, quite a few are happy to sprinkle it liberally into their stories without making it clear where it comes from, let alone analysing their sources’ motives.

Intelligence sources are always dubious: spies know that journalists find anything with a whiff of secrecy very tempting, and what they tell you is, by its nature (and on purpose), very hard to check. There’s been a lot in the Israeli media over the past months about what they’re really thinking in Damascus and Teheran–stories like this and this, where it is hard to see how the information can have come from anywhere but the Israeli security establishment. I don’t think the establishment’s agenda is to provoke a war, but rather to cover its backside against accusations that it didn’t foresee one. But as the rash of pronouncements about “we don’t want a war and nor do they” this week showed, it realised that the media spin had started to take on a life of its own.