My Take | Why Israel’s propaganda war has been just a complete mess
- Messages of extreme response and moderation need to be calibrated for different audiences, an impossible task in our world of social media
It’s really not about arrogance or incompetence, even if there have been strong elements of both at times. The reason for the mess that the Israeli government and its usual apologists have made has to do with the competing, even contradictory messages they need to deliver to different audiences.
For the domestic angry public, which sees the government of Benjamin Netanyahu as essentially discredited, it needs to deliver vengeance on the Palestinians, not just Hamas.
But that’s not enough for the far-right extremist or the “Greater Israel” segments which make up the base of Netanyahu’s coalition government; only a convincing attempt – even if unsuccessful, and for lack of better terms – at genocide and ethnic cleansing will do.
In both domestic cases, the rationale is that if Hamas and perhaps some other terror groups delivered the worst atrocities against Jews since the second world war, we will make sure the Palestinians get the worst Israeli revenge since the Nakba, that is, their displacement and dispossession in 1948. It’s the biblical eye for an eye, or rather 10 eyes or more for every one eye.
In Israel, no one ever loses a political career by being too extreme on the Palestinians.
However, there is the all-important United States, which has to arm Israel and finance the war on the Palestinians. While Washington has long been in Israel’s pocket, there is still the American public, which is terribly diverse, both ethically and politically, to worry about.