When it comes to academic conflict analysis, the prevailing school of thought is that the Arab-Israeli conflict is among the most convoluted to be solved. Ever since the 1948 war, not a single cogent plan has ever been in place to stabilise the regional tensions. Both the Oslo Accords and the Camp David Accords never escaped the realm of peacemaking fantasies.
Academics argue that conflicts involving a hellbroth of religion, politics, economy, geopolitics, ethnic psychology, and regional science can only be settled through the use of force. And this is what we are most likely headed to right now. By the looks of it, Israel has already lost, albeit not yet militarily. It has failed to sell its narrative to the general public.
World’s Worst PR Ever
The incursion into Israel teed off with the launch of 2,500 to 5,000 unguided Qassam pipe rockets and involved at least 2,500 militants. They unleashed a massacre in kibbutzes bordering Gaza, slaughtered a lot of civilians, including hundreds at the music rave site, sexually assaulted the Israelis, looted their homes, and abducted people – a track record that is worthy of strong condemnation rather than empathy, one would think. But that is arguably not the way Operation Al-Aqsa Flood will be remembered. What is more likely to be etched in popular memory is the ensuing IDF’s attacks on Palestinian hospitals. Lo and behold, it was Israel that sustained a massive and brutal attack. Those were Palestinian militants who had honed the modern warfare skillset and came after Israeli civilians. And they will keep coming. Mind you, it is not an interpretation — that is what they actually said.
Why do then media outlets all over the globe keep yammering about Israel killing innocent Palestinians? Hamas has somehow got away with decades of showering the cities of Ashkelon and Ashdod with unguided homemade sewage pipe projectiles, using civilians as human shields and setting up control centres in residential blocks and hospitals. Astonishingly, they have been treated as victims all the while.
Over the decades, Israel has enjoyed quite a lot of success in many areas. They are even believed to have designed their own nuclear weapons. But the one thing that could never handle is PR. Back in the 1920s, despite the pogroms in what was then the Mandate of Palestine, public opinion largely favoured the Arabs. Both the media and the general public indulged in the exact same take at a time when pogroms were raging on in Europe. The Jewish leaders seemed reluctant to make new friends or even earn a bona fide reputation.
Upon the creation of the State of Israel, things barely changed a notch. The UK was calling the shots in Palestine. Back in the 19th-century international rivalry, commonly referred to as the Great Game, British geopolitical strategists were busy pitting the Arabs against the Turks. Once the Ottoman rule was done with, they captured both the northern and southern parts of the region. By late October 1917, the Brits seized Be’er Sheva, Gaza and Jaffa. On 11 December 1917, Gen. Allenby-led troops entered Jerusalem. By 1919, North Palestine joined the British Mandate as well. This place was supposed to become home to the Jewish nation-state under the Balfour Declaration. Put differently, the British conquered this land and acted the way they deemed fit, but the public is adamant about branding the Jewish settlers in Palestine as ‘occupiers’. So, the Brits nailed their PR moves just right, while the Jews’ reputation has been taking blow after blow ever since.
The War Rulebook
War is never confined to merely boots on the ground. Far from it, war transcends assorted practical domains, including the economy, politics, education, and philosophical aspects of history. As for the information warfare, it spans not just battlefield preparations but psychological warfare operations too. Battlefield preparations come down to managing the compromise. That is where the European truly excel. For instance, an Austrian national would eagerly recognise Mozart as the greatest Austrian composer of all time and Hitler as the heinous German dictator in one sentence. Meanwhile, their hometowns, both in Austria, are just a half-hour drive apart.
As soon as these compromises are neatly phrased and the public is successfully indoctrinated, you can mount a resounding propaganda campaign. Indeed, some of the things regular Europeans believe in may come as a shocker. Conversely, you can fritter away a fortune trying to boost Russia’s public image abroad and hiring elite spin doctors all you want, but these efforts will draw a blank as these operations will be bouncing off the negative compromise that will foil the efficiency of such campaigns. The number of people executed and tortured by Oliver Cromwell, Cesare Borgia, or King Leopold II of Belgium straight-up eclipses the figures credited to Ivan the Terrible. And yet, it is the latter who is widely considered Europe’s worst-ever tyrant. No amount of advertising or hyped-up ‘Ivan the Terrible’s Season in Paris” will ever challenge this entrenched compromise.
With Palestine, we are dealing with a similar story. The entrenched compromise is that the Brits are not the archvillains that pierced the heart of the Muslim world by breaking up the common territory of North Africa and the Middle East. The Jews are, though. Never mind that most of them are the refugees in search of a better life in the British-run colony. And that is why when Israel is looking for international supports at a critical juncture, it will be flatly denied.
Archvillains
If quizzed about the shady rulers of the world, most commoners would certainly blurt out ‘Freemasonry’. Secret societies have always stoked popular imagination and been a staple of numerous conspiracy theories, even though in an online-driven world where the ubiquitous use of video cams is facilitated by iffy moral standards, there is not much wiggle room for secret societies. Moreover, if you pursued the subject further, your interlocutor would conspiratorially mutter: ‘The Jews, of course.’ This response does not mesh particularly well with the fact that the hubs of international politics are based in London, Washington DC and New York City as opposed to Jerusalem or, say, Tel Aviv. For whatever reason, English, and not Hebrew, is the international lingua franca. Similarly, cultural trends are predominantly set in the UK, Paris and Hollywood, and not in the sun-scorched sands of Palestine. Many literary classics and film industry hits alike are, in a way, fanfics revolving around the New Testament plots, and not – surprise, surprise – those found in the Torah.
Upon closer scrutiny, we will easily find out that Freemasonry stemmed from the charities unnerved by the French Revolution. According to Mikhail Meshalkin, a lead expert on Freemasonry at the Hermitage Museum, its members were English-born and raised folks who set out to protect Britain and, more specifically, their property from the potentially explosive disenfranchised classes. Although the Freemasons are reputed as those running the world, they were indeed running their respective parts of the world before joining the organisation. Notably, they never praised the Jews. Worse, the latter were never allowed to partake in the national riches as they were viewed as probable instigators behind the revolutionary masses. Today, many would eagerly classify the Rothschild, the Baruch, and the Rockefeller families as Freemasons merely on the basis of their Jewish descent, whether real or misidentified.
Most of those who people tend to associate with Freemasonry had nothing to do with Zionism and even opposed the creation of Israel. For one, the entire Rothschild clan, barring Morris and Edmond, railed against it. But that is where clever information warfare psychological stratagems kicked in again as they skewed public opinion towards perpetuating a preposterous idea of ‘the Mason conspiracy plot’, rendering the following attempts by the Jewish leaders to improve the image of Israelis and Israel futile. As is the case with Mozart and Hitler, the entrenched compromise here portrays the Rothschilds as the effective behind-the-scenes rulers of the UK and the rest of the world. The public is undeterred by the fact that the baron serves a banker with the royal court and, as such, can be sacked from his role at any moment.
Over the past 250 years, the public image of the Jewish people has been steadily deteriorating and no one has ever attempted to buck the trend. This led to the infamous Dreyfus affair, the pogroms and the Holocaust as well as spawned an entire cultural layer of anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists. The creation of the Israeli state was a temporary facelift to that misguided reputation, but the overall declining trend would eventually undermine that positive step. A series of failures in terms of the information warfare strategy have resulted in a lack of proper strategic compromises and led to the Europeans and, above all, Brits – Israel’s closest allies – imputing their botched colonial policies to the Jews. With this in mind, when a newly formed coalition of Arabic states strikes Israel again, the Israeli government may well run out of allies.
Thievish Finger-Pointing
Remarkably, this humanitarian ruse still holds up and is reproduced without any major alteration in each new conflict. Being the actual villains, the colonisers always end up in the backseat, whereas the hotseat gets filled by a different enemy each time in an apt red-herring manoeuvre.