INSIDE THE ISRAELI PROPAGANDA MACHINE
-HOW “ATROCITY PROPAGANDA" GIVES ISRAEL POWER TO SUBJUGATE PALESTINIANS
-BASED ON PROPAGANDA PLAYBOOK WRITTEN BY HITLER
Pro-Palestinian protester in front of the Israeli consulate in New York City, 2009. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
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Israel is pressing a propaganda offensive aimed at neutralizing international opposition as it prepares to invade the Gaza Strip in response to the deadly attack launched from there by Hamas last Saturday.
The Israeli government published photographs of dead, burned babies on its official X social media account on Thursday.
"Those who deny these events are supporting the barbaric animals who are responsible for them," Israel declared in its post on the Internet-based public square formerly known as Twitter.
The photographs were so powerful they left Pres. Joe Biden's Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, literally speechless.
Secretary Blinken traveled to Israel and met with Israel's right-wing Likud Party Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—also on Thursday. During the meeting, Netanyahu showed Blinken the same photographs and more. Blinken was asked about the photographs during a news conference after the meeting.
"It’s hard to find the right words. It’s beyond what anyone would ever want to imagine, much less actually see."
"So images are worth a thousand words," Blinken added. "These images may be worth a million."
The Telegraph, a British tabloid newspaper, published one of the photographs of the dead babies inside its frontpage Friday morning. England, led by a right-wing government, announced it was dispatching warships to assist Israel.
Meanwhile, President Joe Biden sent two aircraft carrier strike groups. American special operations forces are also on the ground in Israel, assisting its military. A shipment of American bombs, the first of several planned, has arrived, the Associated Press reports.
Aerial photographs of the West Bank (l) and Gaza Strip (r), Palestinian territories outside the internationally-recognized boundaries of Israel but claimed by Israel in its 1948 Declaration of Independence. Photo Credit: via Wikipedia.
Last Saturday's Hamas attack was the single deadliest Palestinian militant attack in the 75-year history of the Palestinian-Israel conflict.
Israel says it wants "peace" with the Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. But its 1948 Declaration of Independence lays claim to all the land in "Eretz-Israel," which includes the West Bank and Gaza. The steady, decades-long expansion of Israeli settlements throughout the West Bank can only be fairly called what it is: colonial expansion.
These facts suggest what Israel really wants is take the Palestinians' land and replace them with Jews.
Palestinians themselves have known this for decades.
They waged the First Intifada against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip from 1987 until 1993. They waged the Second or al-Aqsa Intifada from 2000 to 2005. Palestinians’ waged the First Intifada with rocks. They waged the Second Intifada with bombs. The Second made the First look like child's play. Suicide bombers, some of them female, were a major feature. They blew themselves up on buses, restaurants and other densely-occupied public spaces.
Wafa Idris, 28, was one of them. TIME magazine published her story in "Why Suicide Bombing is All the Rage" in 2002.
Israel responded by walling-off the territories, sending more settlers and undermining the secular Palestinian Authority.
Hamas, officially named the Islamist Resistance Movement, launched its attack from the Gaza Strip—a small Palestinian enclave on Israel's southern border with Egypt. Gaza is one of the most densely populated places on Earth. 2.2 million people are confined there , in poverty. 43% are children under 14, independent news agency Reuters reports. Hamas won a majority of seats in the 2006 Palestinian legislative election and took control of Gaza from the Palestinian Authority in 2007.
Israel withdrew its settlers, military forces and blockaded the border. In effect, Gaza is a 141-square mile open-air concentration camp or prison.
Palestinian militia allegedly flying in powered gliders over Israel’s border wall with the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. Photo Credit: via YouTube.
Last Saturday, Hamas fired thousands of motors and launched more than 2,200 rockets into Israel from Gaza then breached its border defenses. Thousands of armed Palestinian militia raced into Israel. They killed more than 1,300 Israelis, according to the latest casualties figures released by the Israeli government on Friday. They wounded another 3,300. More than 130 Israelis were taken hostage. Scores more are missing.
At least 27 of the dead, and some of the hostages, hold dual American-Israeli citizenship—as many Israelis do.
Israel declared war on Hamas and started bombing Gaza.
"We will take mighty vengeance for this wicked day," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Saturday night.
"I say to the residents of Gaza," Netanyahu added, "leave now because we will operate forcefully everywhere."
"We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza," Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declared in a video published on X Monday morning.
"There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel, everything will be closed."
"We are fighting against human animals, and are acting accordingly," Gallant added.
By Tuesday, Israel killed around 1,500 Palestinian militiamen inside its borders and reclaimed control of its territory including the Gaza border. It is bombing Gaza with the most destructive air strikes in the history of the conflict. The Israeli Air Force has posted dozens of videos of strikes against what it claimed were military targets in Gaza.
Israel claims to be targeting Hamas but public health officials in Gaza said at least 1,799 Palestinians, including 583 children, have been killed by Friday. Another 7,388 were wounded.
Pro-Palestinian protester in front of the Israeli consulate in New York City, 2009. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
Nation-states have always manipulated information in their contests with other nation-states. The Greeks, for example, used the Trojan Horse to sneak into Troy following a failed 10-year siege. The Romans, historians say, recognized “the importance of information in international affairs, and the need to control the information in an attempt to maintain power.”
America pioneered modern use of propaganda to marshall public opinion during its successful war against Germany and its allies in World War I. A journalist in peacetime, George Creel was appointed by Pres. Woodrow Wilson to chair a new "Committee on Public Information." Creel masterminded the US Government's propaganda campaign. The posters his team created are works of art and persuasion. 100s fill the Library of Congress.
The future Nazi dictator Adolph Hitler was wounded twice serving as a German soldier during World War I. After the war, Hitler blamed Germany's loss on its failure to deploy effective propaganda.
"What we failed to do, the enemy did with amazing skill and really brilliant calculation. I myself learned enormously from this enemy war propaganda," Hitler wrote in his 1925 memoir, Mein Kampf.
Hitler integrated propaganda into Nazi war-fighting doctrine and daily governance.
"Propaganda was to be at the center of any future military and political strategy," says propaganda expert Jo Fox, Pro Vice-Chancellor & Dean, School of Advanced Study, University of London.
Days after Hitler won power in the 1932 German Presidential Election, he told Joseph Goebbels he intended to create a new government agency named the Ministry of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment and he asked Goebbels to direct it. Goebbels accepted. He is remembered as one of the most effective, and notorious, propagandists of the 20th Century.
"The essence of propaganda consists in winning people over to an idea so sincerely, so vitally, that in the end they succumb to it utterly and can never again escape from it," Goebbels wrote in his diary.
Whereas the primary medium of propaganda during the First World War had been posters, radio and film were its main vehicles in the Second. Leni Riefenstahl may have been Hitler's favorite Fascist filmmaker, but Fritz Hippler was Goebbels' man.
"The propaganda has to make complicated things simple," Hippler told Bill Moyers in 1984. "The propaganda has to show the enemy or the other side as a devil and their own side as heaven’s side."
"And then, if you had found the form which tells a complicated thing in the simplest way," Hippler explained, "then, secondly, repeat it! Repeat it every day. Simplify and repetition. That’s the secret of modern propaganda."
Nazi propaganda was so good it was feared by the Allies. American officials countered by creating the Institute for Propaganda Analysis (1937-42). They also commissioned explanatory pamphlets to help Americans decode propaganda, like this one from 1944 composed by professional historians belonging to the American Historical Association.
In 2023, "war is four-dimensional. It is a combination of military, economic, political, and propaganda pressure against the enemy," the Association says. "War is fought on all four fronts at once—the military front, the economic front, the political front, and the propaganda front."
Russian Federation General Staff Chief Valery Gerasimov (second from left) and General-Lieutenant Andrey Valerievich Kartapolov (second from right) in 2015. The writings and published speeches of both men are widely-regarded as updating information-warfare doctrine for the Digital Age. Photo Credit: Russian Ministry of Defense.
Russia pioneered weaponized Digital propaganda when it invaded and annexed the Crimean Peninsula in eastern Ukraine in 2014.
Keir Giles, Associate Fellow of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London, literally wrote the Handbook of Russian Information Warfare. According to Giles, a critical but frequently overlooked component of the asymmetric Russian approach to conflicts with other nation-states is its broad vision of Internet-enabled war-fighting.
“Instead of cyberspace,” Giles writes, “Russia refers to ‘information space,’ and includes in this space both computer and human information processing, in effect the cognitive domain.”
Another pre-eminent Russian information warfare expert is retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Timothy Thomas. Former Russian General Staff Chief Valery Gerasimov was “the first to express the observation that in contemporary conflict, nonmilitary methods are being used at a ratio of 4:1 relative to military methods,” Thomas reported in the US Army's Military Review.
Following Gerasimov, General-Lieutenant Andrey V. Kartapolov, then-chief of the Main Operations Directorate of the Russian General Staff, gave a speech in early 2015 outlining these new “nonmilitary methods." Kartapolov’s presentation was accompanied by a chart titled “Methods and Ways of Conducting a New-Type War: Achieving goals in new-type warfare in combination with the employment of military force or without it.”
The chart outlined the tactics employed in this “new-type” war:
Pressuring the enemy politically, economically, informationally, and psychologically
Disorienting the political and military leadership of the state-victim. Spreading dissatisfaction among the population
Intensifying diplomatic pressure and propaganda to the world community
Covertly deploying and employing special operations forces, cyber attacks and software effects
Russia put these theories into practice during their 2014 invasion of Ukraine. The result was that Russia, while publicly denying it was invading Crimea, was able to covertly insert unmarked military forces and mercenaries into the country, deny it was doing so and seize control of the territory before the Ukrainian military and the West could organize much less deploy effective opposition.
Besides conventional military or “kinetic” forces, “Russia relied on nonkinetic options such as propaganda, disinformation, and denial and deception to influence internal, regional, and global audiences,” according to a 2017 report by strategic cyber-intelligence analyst Emilio J. Iasiello.
Russia learned from past lessons, Iasiello says, “how pervasively the Internet could disseminate news from legitimate and semiofficial organizations as well as personal blogs. Russia now supports journalists, bloggers, and individuals within social media networks who broadcast pro-Russian narratives.”
There are currently 16 pro-Russian social media accounts on Telegram alone, with more than 500,000 followers each, blogging Russia's war against Ukraine, according to data collected by the Alliance for Securing Democracy. Four of the accounts have over 1 million followers and the most-read has almost 3 million. Pro-Russian bloggers are taken so seriously one was assassinated in April. Another was killed with a car bomb in 2022.
Instead of posters, radio, films or television, today's propaganda primarily reaches people through social media and the miniature computers complete with screens called "Smartphones" most people carry most of the time. Social media, in fact, is an ideal medium for the propagandist because people tend to distrust government, corporations and other institutions but trust their friends, neighbors and colleagues.
Anti-German “atrocity propaganda” based on questionable reports that German soldiers bayonetted children during their invasion of Belgium in 1914. Photo Credit: Life via Wikipedia.
Israeli leaders' rhetoric dehumanizing Palestinians as "animals" and the photographs of dead babies allegedly killed in last Saturday's Hamas attack, spread on social media then published by traditional media, is a specific kind of propaganda scholars of propaganda call "atrocity propaganda."
Creel, America's chief propagandist in World War I, disfavored highlighting alleged enemy war crimes but others exploited them to create an especially powerful kind of propaganda. For example, the British Bryce Committee Report on "Alleged German Outrages." It cataloged reported German war crimes with powerful first person accounts that were presented as unquestionably true.
"First World War atrocity propaganda is primarily focused on the atrocities committed by German troops as they invaded Belgium in 1914," Fox, the propaganda expert, says. It is "a specific propaganda technique that sought to garner support for war and provide a moral explanation for it, by highlighting the crimes and atrocities committed by the enemy."
Judged by standards for effective propaganda set by Hippler, the standard-setting Nazi film-maker, the Israeli social media post including the photographs of dead babies was a two-fer. It implicitly reduced Palestinians to Devils and elevated Israelis into Angels as only Devils could kill babies. It also explicitly dehumanized Palestinians as "barbaric animals," legitimizing violence against them.
Finally, consistent with Russian information-warfare doctrine, the Israeli propaganda photographs successfully pressured the political leadership of the US to side with Israel. After Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu showed American Secretary of State Blinken the photographs on Thursday Blinken struggled to find the words to describe what he had seen but not the official American response.
"We stand shoulder to shoulder with the people of Israel," Blinken declared.
"I’m standing here today," he added, "to make clear as that as long as there’s a United States, Israel will never be alone."
With the US standing by Israel with two aircraft carrier strike groups, ready, it's fair to wonder what comes next.
In the short run, Israel's effective deployment of propaganda won it what military planners call "operational freedom." Stated plainly, Israel can now do whatever it wants to the Palestinians. Instead of equal-handedly using "diplomacy" to force a negotiated end to decades-old blood-letting, the US is giving Israel the green light to kill more Palestinians and the bombs to do it with.
Meanwhile, Israelis are updating atrocity propaganda for the Digital Age.
One group of self-identified “technology and advertising professionals” is offering virtual tours of what it calls “Israel’s Ground Zero.” Like World War I’s Bryce Commission Report peddled alleged first-person accounts, the Hamas Trail of Terror Tour promises viewers a chance to “witness the harsh reality civilians faced during the attacks.”
All for just $19.
Homepage for Hamas Trail of Terror virtual tour. Photo Credit: screengrab via www.hamastrailofterror.com
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