Why Israel is getting clobbered in the foreign press – revisited
Six years ago I wrote a blog for The Times of Israel entitled “Why Israel is getting clobbered in the foreign press. “https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/why-israel-is-getting-clobbered-in-the-foreign-press/ . The first sentence of that blog states, “It has been obvious for a long time that Israel is lousy at dealing with the international press”. It still is. In fact, given the extent to which Israel has been abandoned by so many foreign countries, it could easily be argued that Hamas’ ability to work the foreign press better than Israel is even greater than it was six years ago.
Moreover, by now it is clear that Hamas is not acting alone. It is part of what Iran, which heads it, calls the “Axis of Resistance”. The Axis of Resistance includes Iran and three of its proxies: Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which is present in the West Bank and, to a lesser extent, Gaza. Iran’s proxies are either entirely or largely financed by Iran, which also gives them advanced missile/drone technology and, in some cases, the missiles themselves.
Hamas, while NOT technically an Iranian proxy, might as well be classified as one. Hamas receives millions of dollars and advanced missile technology from Iran annually. Moreover, Iran assisted Hamas in Gaza in building the sophisticated tunnel system which has been so hard for the IDF to penetrate. Since Hamas is part of the axis of resistance, to the extent that it has prevailed against Israel, the entire axis of resistance has.
All of the members of the axis of resistance believe, as a matter of their perverse reading of the Koran, that Allah promised Muslims all the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. This is important when comparing this war to the previous wars that Israel has fought, including the wars against the PLO. In all the other wars, Israel was facing a secular foe which could accept defeat and move on. Because the Axis of resistance believes that it is doing Allah’s work, it will not stop until its religious objective has been obtained, even if it takes decades to do so.
Hamas claims loudly and often that it prevailed against Israel in the recent war In Gaza for two reasons. First, it claims that Israel failed to obtain its objective: to eliminate Hamas from Gaza. That is true. Hamas remains in Gaza, its fighting force is as great as it was in 2023, when the war in Gaza began, and Hamas still has refused to turn over its weapons.
Hamas also claims that it has managed to use the foreign press successfully to successfully perpetrate the canard that Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute “genocide” It further claims that as a result of its doing so, Israel has lost the backing of the entire world, including many members of the public and politicians in the United States. It is impossible to refute this claim, too.
Given the reality that Israel is continuing to get clobbered in the foreign press, I thought it was time to update my earlier blog. I begin by following the money. The beginning of this trail begins with a document that the IDF discovered as it took over more and more of Gaza. It is called the “2022 Operational Program of Hamas’ Information Department” and was intended to cover the years 2022-2025. It provided for an annual budget of approximately $2.24 million. Unfortunately, the IDF has not found actual budgets for the following years, but even a very conservative inference suggests that the total amount of money budgeted by Hamas in Gaza for the period of 2022, 2023, and 2004 would be in excess of $4 million If one uses Hamas’ own budget estimates for 2022- 2024 it comes to over $6 million. Either way, it is a lot of money.
For an interesting comment on the 2022 Operational Program, see, https://www.ynetnews.com/article/hy5e0wk00zl. While that article does not contain figures on what money was budgeted, it does contain discussions of on what the money was spent. The article states in relevant part: “Another significant effort focused on shaping a narrative tailored to international audiences [is] a section titled “Strengthening the Palestinian narrative and creating media discourse for foreign audiences” [which] outlines plans to develop and maintain an English-language news website, distribute campaigns and visual content adapted for Western audiences, publish a weekly English briefing titled “Palestine Report,” and recruit foreign writers and activists supportive of the Palestinian narrative.”
The amount that Israel spends on trying to protect its image to the world is a tiny fraction of that spent by Hamas. Why? I am not sure. Perhaps it is just a feeling among members of the current government that international opinion of Israel is irrelevant. That may have been true once, but the world is a different, much more interdependent, place now, than it was 30 years ago. Then, Israel’s prime threat then came from the PLO, clearly a terrorist organization. In my view, Israel needs to get its act together and get it together fast. It needs to spend money in order to do that.
Money is not the only way in which Hamas works the foreign press. The first is to disguise Hamas members as members of the press itself. Israel has been doing a good job of exposing the Hamas members who do so.
Additionally, over the years, Hamas has intimidated foreign reporters to keep them from being objective. It got so bad that the Foreign Press Association (FPA) castigated Hamas stating, “The FPA protests in the strongest terms the blatant, incessant, forceful and unorthodox methods employed by Hamas.” Hamas’ actions have led to some biased reporting by some of the leading members of the foreign press including the New York Times, the Associated Press, and Reuters. Each of them use experienced Palestinian “stringers” to provide information to their reporters outside of Gaza who then write a story based on that information. That story is posted on the Internet and is read worldwide. The problem with this system is that the experienced Gazan reporters know perfectly well what happens to reporters who do not follow the Hamas line, so the stores they send to their respective newspapers are terribly biased in Hamas’ favor.
I know of only one other way that Israel can combat the obvious advantage that Hamas has in working the foreign press, yet it is a way that has been obvious for years but Israel is too stubborn to change its way of operating. Six years ago I noted that while Hamas goes for the heart by showing pictures of dead children (or more recently, of bombed-out buildings), Israel continues to distribute its information largely through high-ranking IDF officers who, in uniform, give logical explanations, as they are trained to do. Israel could not present a more damaging image of a heartless oppressor if it tried. For a photo see, https://jppi.org.il/en/the-media-was-also-responsible-for-october-7/ Some things never change. It is about time that they did.
