Can Israel win the messaging war?

Hamas knew that an Israeli reaction to the October 7 atrocities would, in time, produce a counterreaction in Europe and the US. That is starting to happen.

An armed Palestinian militant leads a man during the Supernova music festival on October 7. Picture: AFP

“The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.”

– António Guterres, United Nations Secretary-General, Oct. 24

Political opposition has become a learned reflex. Whatever you’re for, I’m against. End of story. But the fact that this same political reflex kicked in hours after Hamas’s videotaped mass slaughter of innocents on Oct. 7 — the assertion that somehow Israel drove Hamas to do it — begs for examination.

There was a time years ago when one explanation would be that people weren’t fully aware of the scope or physical details of such mass killings. Consider the difficulties at the start of World War II to convince some in the West, notably in the U.S., that a plan to exterminate Jews was under way in Germany and Poland.

Today omnipresent mass media and personal video make it impossible to be ignorant of atrocities of the sort that occurred in southern Israel. There is no excuse not to know the details. A striking summing-up of all we have seen and heard was given on Fox News by an Israeli worker still recovering bodies. “I’m a child of Holocaust survivors,” she said, “and I grew up hearing stories of the camps. I thought those were the worst stories. These stories are worse.”

A question that persisted for days was: What did Hamas hope to achieve with what obviously would be seen as a coldly conceived plan to commit unspeakable atrocities — other than the killing of Jews?

The answer has emerged in the days since Oct. 7. It was in great part about the messaging.

“Messaging” has become an everyday word normally associated with branding campaigns.

The aftermath of an attack on the Supernova music Festival on October 7. Picture: AFP

Messaging is an enormous industry whose purpose is to shape public opinion. Ultimately messaging is a euphemism for propaganda, a practice often correctly associated with the Nazis’ Joseph Goebbels, the Reich’s minister of propaganda. Goebbels’s job was to manipulate the media of the time, newspapers and film, to portray Nazism favourably.

It is clear now that a primary Hamas goal was to elicit an overwhelming Israeli military response directed at Gaza itself, with Gazan civilian deaths expected. Hamas knew that an Israeli reaction to the atrocities, such as its current bombing of Hamas sites inside Gaza, would in time produce a counterreaction in Europe and the U.S. That is starting to happen.

A pivotal messaging event was the Oct. 17 “bombing” of al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza.

It has since been established, including in a video analysis by this newspaper, that Israel didn’t bomb the hospital. Note, though, how quickly the blame-Israel assumption fell into place among major news outlets. It mattered that Israel’s role in this bombing was disproved.

But what mattered to Hamas — via the incredible Palestine Ministry of Health — was establishing that initial assumption. Israel was already being pushed off the moral high ground.

At this point, events quickly arrived at a familiar juncture. The media and some world governments were beginning to “balance” the story.

People take part in a 'March For Palestine' in London on October 21. Picture: AFP

In the past 20 years or so, the U.S. press has adopted the belief that it is obligated to give equal space to groups or movements asserting claims of injustice. Everyone in the political messaging business understands how justice claims drive coverage. Hamas’s massacres, while still being reported, are now being balanced — meaning diluted — by the constant narrative of concern for the Palestinians. However sincere that concern, Hamas and Tehran couldn’t care less.

Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin surely saw this inevitable balancing of blame coming when he said while in Israel just after the massacres that this was no time for “false equivalence.”

It remains to be seen if the Biden administration, especially the White House, can hold the line against false equivalence.

Hamas’s release this week of several of its some 200 hostages appears to be primarily another messaging exercise. Hopes raised, Hamas will negotiate for weeks as the wind ebbs behind Israel’s world-opinion sails.

U.N. Secretary-General Guterres gave a speech Tuesday condemning both Hamas and Israel and called for “an immediate humanitarian ceasefire.”

Einav Moshebarda, the niece of Adina, who was kidnapped and is seen in a video being taken by Hamas militants. Picture: Getty Images

State Department spokesman Matthew Miller rightly said a ceasefire “would give Hamas the ability to rest, to refit, and to get ready to continue launching terrorist attacks against Israel.” But a weather vane like Mr. Guterres shows which way the wind is blowing. It is up to President Biden to resist the inevitable conventional wisdom that both Hamas and Israel bear responsibility for any deaths that occur now. From there we move to the familiar modern policy goal known as “stop the killing.” When that moment arrives, Hamas wins.

Also let off the hook will be the American left — the Squad and the students and professors whose reflex in the face of the bloodletting was to defend or justify Hamas. That fell outside even the elastic norms of “balancing,” so they’ve since evolved into a more generic pose of concern for Gaza’s civilians. And a pose it is.

Whether protesting for Palestinians or any other aggrieved group, the left sustains the conceit that their empathy carries greater moral authenticity than that of their opposition. One thing we learned from Israel’s killing fields is what a fraud that is.

The Wall Street Journal