16 March 2011 By Ramzy Baroud When the Libyan people took on their reviled
dictator, Moammar Gadhafi, Israeli officials seemed
puzzled by the alarming and unprecedented trend of
popular awakenings in the Arab world. Israel's Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, has
claimed that these awakenings are only proof of the
‘weakening' of the Arabs – even at a time when
international consensus points to the opposite
conclusion. According to Israeli daily, Haaretz, Lieberman has
claimed, "the Arab world is becoming increasingly
weakened." Worried perhaps that all rational analyses will
show how Israel's decade-long aggression has been a
major contributing factor to instability in Middle
East, Lieberman decided to dismiss the notion
altogether. "Whoever thinks that the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict is part of the problems
in the Middle East is trying to escape reality," he
said. It must be a strange ‘reality' which Lieberman
subscribes to, but he isn't the only Israeli official
that sees the world through such tainted logic. While Lieberman has settled on the realization that
"it is clear to everyone…that the greatest danger they
are facing is not Zionism, but rather Hamas and
Jihad," Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
pushed into a different direction involving Iran and
post-Mubarak Egypt. Addressing the Conference of Presidents of Major
American Jewish Organizations in Jerusalem, Netanyahu
labored desperately to link some imagined Iranian
designs into the future of Egypt. "The leaders in the
West and the leaders in Tehran do not want the same
future for Egypt," he claimed, according to the Jewish
Tribune (February 24). "American and European leaders want an Egypt that
is free, democratic, peaceful and prosperous…On the
other hand, leaders in Tehran want to see an Egypt
that is crushed by that same iron despotism that has
crushed human rights in Iran for the last three
decades," he said. One is accustomed to hearing the flawed historical
references of Israeli officials, but Netanyahu's
latest comments are truly baffling. Tehran's political
involvement in Egypt was and remains nominal. Yet
again, Israeli officials are interpreting the Middle
East solely from the self-serving viewpoint of the
Israeli political establishment itself. This Israeli discourse is as old as the Israeli
state. The initial narrative was predicated on the
assumption of a unified party of ‘Arabs' hell-bent on
destroying a small, beleaguered Israel. The former
represented all that was evil, extremist and
anti-Western, and the latter embodied all that was
good, democratic and civilized. Maintaining this illusory discourse continues to be
essential for Israel, for it serves multiple purposes
and has long been the backbone of Israeli official
hasbara, or propaganda. Even as the Israeli army
demolished much of Gaza and killed and wounded nearly
7,000 Palestinian civilians in the 22-day military
onslaught of 2008-09, the propaganda continued in
full-force. It suggested that the loss of so many
civilian lives was a price worth paying in order to
uproot Islamic ‘extremism' (as represented by Hamas).
Although Israeli propaganda has always been
relentless, the Israeli official message in the face
of popular Arab uprisings seems befuddled and unclear.
The reason for this might be the fact that the current
push for democracy – using largely non-violent means -
in several Arab countries, took Israel by complete
surprise. The Arab peoples' desire for reforms and
democratic change is utterly inconsistent with the
image of Arabs shrewdly crafted by Israel and its
friends in Western media. This image suggests that
Arabs are simply incapable of affecting positive
change, that they are inherently frenzied and
un-democratic. Thus Israel, ‘the only democracy in the
Middle East', can be trusted as an oasis of stability
and democracy. Israeli officials tried to infuse this tired
message following the uprisings in North African Arab
countries, but this time it seemed incoherent and was
quickly overshadowed by the chants of millions of
Arabs for democracy, freedom and social justice. Another reason behind the current failure of Israel
to capitalize on the ongoing turmoil is that Israeli
propaganda tends to precede - not follow - such
upheavals. Israeli hasbra is most useful when Israel
takes the initiative, determining the nature, scope,
timing and location of the battle. The official propaganda that preceded the war on
Gaza seemed more institutionalized than ever. Former
Israeli ambassador to the UN, Dan Gillerman was
reportedly summoned by Tel Aviv to lead the PR effort.
He said that the diplomatic and political campaign had
been underway for months. The Guardian's Chris McGreal,
reporting on the campaign from Jerusalem during the
war, quoted Gillerman as saying, "I was recruited by
the foreign minister to coordinate Israel's efforts
and I have never seen all parts of a very complex
machinery - whether it is the Foreign Ministry, the
Defence Ministry, the prime minister's office, the
police or the army - work in such co-ordination, being
effective in sending out the message." Israeli hasbra had then worked in tandem with the
Israeli military, leading to a most coordinated
campaign of war and deceit. But when the Arab people
revolted, starting in Tunisia, the belated Israeli
response was confused. Israeli officials warned, yet again, of some
Islamic extremist menace at work involving Hamas and
Hezbollah, and others warned of an Iranian plot. Some
praised their fallen Arab allies, while taking pride
in Israel for being a fortress of stability, while
others called to speed up the ‘peace process'. Some
denied any association between the absence of peace
and Arab revolution. Meanwhile, Israeli Deputy Prime
Minister Silvan Shalom, who duly accused Iran of
attempting to exploit the situation, chastised Western
countries for disowning their beleaguered allies in
the region. The fractured nature of the latest round of Israeli
official propaganda could partly be blamed on the
element of surprise. Israel, which bought into its own
dehumanization of its Arab enemies for so long,
couldn't fathom such scenarios as popular non-violent
revolutions underway in the Middle East. But even if a solid, streamlined, and certainly
well-financed Israeli hasbara campaign is launched to
better manage Israel's crisis, one wonders if it could
really make much of a difference. If a multi-million
dollar campaign to hide or ‘explain' the bloodbath
wrought by Israel in Gaza in 2008-09 have largely
failed, Israel cannot possibly succeed in hiding the
fact that it is no longer the ‘only democracy in the
Arab world' - or that it was ever a true democracy to
begin with. - Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net)
is an internationally-syndicated columnist and the
editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is
My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold
Story (Pluto Press, London), available on
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