The War of Words

 Published in the Jerusalem Report, issue dated 10 June 2024

Anyone following the course of Israel’s struggle against Hamas would, hand on heart, have to admit that Israel is not winning the war of words. One commentator thinks it is “remarkable how effective the opponents of the Jewish state have been in arm-twisting something close to the entirety of the Western intelligentsia into accepting Hamas’s framing of the war.”

            It was the Hamas-inspired term “collective punishment” that the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Karim Khan, used in his application on May 20 to issue arrest warrants against Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and defense minister, Yoav Gallant.

He states as fact in his application that Israel indulged in “collective punishment of the civilian population”.  This is a totally unproven charge, emanating from Hamas’s anti-Israel publicity office, and assiduously disseminated to the world’s media.  Khan substantiates it by charging Israel with deliberately starving the Gaza population, willfully causing them great suffering or serious injury, willfully killing and intentionally directing attacks against them, murdering and persecuting them.

            Note the words “deliberately”, “willfully” and “intentionally”.  The idea of some secret Israeli plan to attack the people of Gaza sails perilously close to historic antisemitic tropes, and is nothing more than personal biased opinion which, like the charge of genocide, is unprovable because untrue.  It is to be hoped that the ICC judges charged with examining Khan's arrest warrant application perceive his anti-Israel charges for what they are.

            The anti-Israel lobby has succeeded in turning the overriding issue of the Gaza war into a recital of  civilian casualties and deaths caused by Israeli callousness. The figures provided by Hamas have been universally accepted and quoted without question, even by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).  On May 6 it issued Hamas-inspired figures of women and children killed in Gaza – approximately 9,500 women and 14,500 children.  Two days later it quietly announced that the number of verified deaths was now 4,959 women and 7,797 children (defined, incidentally, as anyone under 18 and thus inevitably including Hamas fighters).  In short the verifiable death toll has been reduced by more than 50% for both – a fact not referred to by Khan.  He makes no mention, either, of the huge efforts of the IDF to warn civilians of upcoming military operations, and get them to evacuate dangerous areas.

            Khan sidesteps the fact that civilians have been in the crossfire because Hamas – not Israel – has put them there. He does not mention that it has embedded its fighters, its weaponry, and its command centers in the heart of the civilian population, both above and below ground.

It seemed that President Joe Biden, pressured by domestic problems in an election year, sought to placate Arab American and Muslim voters by rowing back on his previous unequivocal support for Israel’s self-defense attack on Hamas.  Biden’s announcement early in May that he had paused a shipment of 3,500 bombs to Israel, and would not help with a ground invasion of Rafah was, the New York Times reported, “a sea change in US policy that Arab, American and Muslim leaders have demanded for months.” However, his immediate and unequivocal condemnation of Khan’s move in the ICC as “outrageous” puts the US-Israel relationship back on track.

Pro-Hamas propaganda adheres to the philosophy of Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking Glass: “When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.

Take the word “apartheid” – a term that antagonistic propaganda has very nearly succeeded in smearing on Israel. People who lived through genuine apartheid in South Africa have testified over and over again that nothing of the sort exists in Israel. Where are the segregated entrances to public facilities, where the “No Arabs” notices? Where are the shops, the cinemas, the sports arenas in which Israelis and Arabs cannot mix freely? Arabs sit in Israel’s parliament and occupy senior positions in the judiciary. Arab nurses and doctors work side by side in Israel’s hospitals with Jewish colleagues.

Palestinian Arabs living in Areas A and B of the West Bank are wholly or partially self-governing. The position for Palestinians in Area C is certainly less than satisfactory. It is a legacy of the Oslo Accords, agreed by Yasser Arafat on behalf of the Palestinian Authority but never fully implemented. None of this counts when “apartheid”, twisted out of its true meaning, is used as a convenient weapon against Israel, and is taken up by those who wish the Jewish state ill.

It has been said that a fair proportion of activists on student demos or pro-Palestine rallies chant: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” mindlessly, not understanding its implications. The river is the River Jordan, the sea is the Mediterranean. The area between them is where Israel is located. Allow Palestine to take it over, and there is no Israel. So what they are demanding is the annihilation of Israel and the slaughter of its people.. Hamas propaganda has succeeded in getting hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people to call continually for this.

Another weapon in the propaganda war is “genocide”. The true definition, in accordance with the Genocide Convention, is quite clear. To constitute genocide, there must be a proven intent on the part of perpetrators to physically destroy a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. The evidence offered for Israel’s genocidal intent often includes statements made in the heat of the moment by Israelis, some quite eminent, immediately after the horrifying events of October 7. These “wild and whirling words” cannot be taken as, and do not represent, the policy of the state of Israel. The Jewish state has never had the remotest intention of destroying the Palestinian people. Its actions over the 76 years of its existence, starting with the Declaration of Independence, provide ample evidence of that.

Israel’s true intent, as stated in the Declaration, is to “foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants…it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.” Those are the principles at the heart of the state of Israel, however much fallible human beings may have fallen short of living up to them.

          Yet, by sheer repetition, the outrageous suggestion that Israel is intent on genocide gained such acceptance that it made its way to the International Court of Justice (ICJ), whose ruling on the charge was immediately twisted and misinterpreted.  Most of the world believes that the ICJ determined that the claim that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people is plausible, and that it will issue a final judgement on this in due course.  This is simply not the case.

The record was put straight on April 26 by Judge Joan Donoghue, who was president of the court during the hearing.  In an interview on the BBC to mark her retirement, she said: “I’m correcting what’s often said in the media.”  She explained that, contrary to the widely-held misconception, the court's ruling was not that the claim of genocide was plausible.  What it actually determined was that the Palestinians had a “plausible right” to be protected from genocide.

Reporting of her statement has been very limited.  So the idea that Israel faces a charge of “plausible genocide” in the ICJ remains firmly embedded in the public consciousness.  It is reiterated time and again by anti-Israel speakers.   

Israel’s enemies are very well aware of the key role that words can, and do, play in their on-going conflict with the Jewish state. Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, recently emphasized the importance of using propaganda, especially in the context of the Israel-Hamas war.

On March 26. during a meeting with Iranian poets in Tehran, Khamenei asserted that influencing the information space and using it against adversaries can be just as effective as military strength.  He went further. All war is a media war, he said, and it is the side with the greater media influence that will come out on top.

During his meeting with Hamas leader-in-exile, Ismail Haniyeh, on the same day Khamenei especially praised the Palestinian militias’ media efforts in shaping public attitudes and narratives in the Muslim world.  Khamenei boasted that Palestinian militias’ media outlets have outperformed the Israeli media throughout the Israel-Hamas war.

The working philosophy of Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, proves itself repeatedly:  “Tell a lie often enough, and it becomes the truth.”  Israel, a thriving democracy, bases its publicity (or hasbara) on telling the truth, not lies.  That, unfortunately, cuts no ice in this war of words.