Hasbara's Birth: Israel's War on Media Exposed
Editor’s Note: This investigation was previously published by MintPress News, a crusading independent media outlet well worth your time, and consideration. It is now reproduced here, with kind permission.
Ever since Israel’s October 1st invasion of Lebanon, the Western media has been a witting, willing accomplice to the sadistic, criminal assault. Mainstream journalists have worked overtime to whitewash, distort, and conceal the Zionist entity’s murderous rampage, which has claimed thousands of civilian lives, and injured and displaced many more. Serving as Tel Aviv’s perpetual megaphone and apologist is a role for which major news outlets have eagerly volunteered for decades. Their crusade has only become turbocharged following the Gaza genocide erupting.
In the first week of October, Israeli Occupation Forces fired 355 bullets at a car containing a five-year-old, then shot at rescue workers who rushed to save her life. A horrific crime - yet, per mainstream headlines, she was simply a “girl killed in Gaza”. The circumstances and perpetrators of her death, if mentioned at all, were invariably buried at the bottom of reports, well-hidden from the 80% of people who only read headlines, not accompanying articles.
By contrast, on October 15th, Sky News was very keen that its viewers know the names and faces of four “teenage” IOF soldiers “killed” in a “Hezbollah drone attack”, therefore humanizing and infantalising individuals who, by mere token of their service in the Zionist entity’s military forces, are definitionally guilty of genocide. In passing, the same report briskly noted: “‘23 die’ in Gaza school strike”. Their identities, ages, and photos, let alone clarity on who or what murdered them, weren’t provided.
Moreover, the inverted commas incongruously hovering around the number of Palestinians killed subtly undermined that claim’s credibility, while reducing the defenseless child victims to a mere afterthought, compared to the considerably more important quartet of deceased IOF genocidaires. As MintPress News senior staff writer Alan MacLeod put it, “in years to come, students in university departments around the world will be studying the propaganda embedded in this headline. It’s truly incredible how much propaganda has been packed into 16 words.”
The mainstream media’s systematic use of distancing, evasive language, omission and other duplicitous chicanery to downplay or outright justify Israel’s murder of innocent civilians, while simultaneously dehumanizing their victims and delegitimizing Palestinian resistance against brutal, illegal IOF occupation, is as unconscionable as it is well-documented. Amazingly though, ‘twasn’t ever thus. Once upon a time, mainstream news networks exposed Zionist crimes without qualification, and anchors and pundits openly condemned these actions on live TV, to audiences of millions.
The story of how Western media was transformed into the Zionist entity’s doting, servile propaganda appendage is not only a fascinating and sordid hidden chronicle. It is a deeply educational lesson in how imperial power can so easily subordinate supposed arbiters of truth to its will. Comprehending how we got to where we are furthermore equips us with the tools to assess, identify, and deconstruct lies large and small - and effectively challenge and counter not only Israel’s falsehoods, but entire sick, settler colonial endeavor.
‘Neighborhood Bully’
On June 6th 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon. The effort was ostensibly intended to drive Palestinian Liberation Organization freedom fighters away from their positions on the Zionist entity’s northern border. But, as the IOF savagely pushed ever-deeper into the country, including Beirut, it became clear ethnic cleansing, massacres, and land theft were - as in Palestine - the true goal. And throughout the Lebanese capital, news crews from major TV networks and reporters from the West’s biggest newspapers were waiting for them.
The Zionist entity’s rapacious bloodlust and casual contempt for Arab lives had hitherto been by and large successfully concealed from the outside world. Suddenly though, scenes of deliberate IOF airstrikes on residential housing blocks, Tel Aviv’s trigger-happy soldiers running amok in Beirut’s streets, and hospitals overflowing with civilians suffering from grave injuries, including chemical burns due to Israel’s use of phosphorus shells, were broadcast the world over, to nigh-universal outcry. As veteran NBC news anchor John Chancellor contemporarily explained to Western viewers:
“What in the world is going on? Israel’s security problem, on its border, is 50 miles to the south. What’s an Israeli army doing here in Beirut? The answer is we are now dealing with an imperial Israel, which is solving its problems in someone else’s country, world opinion be damned.”
Global shock and repulsion at the Zionist entity’s conduct would only ratchet during the IOF’s resultant illegal military occupation of swaths of Lebanon. In September 1982, an Israel-backed armed Christian militia, Phalange, entered Sabra, a Beirut neighborhood home to many Palestinians displaced by the 1948 Nakba. Over a two day span, they slaughtered up to 3,500 people, while mutilating and raping countless others. Again, unfortunately for Tel Aviv, mainstream journalists were on hand to document these heinous crimes first-hand.
To say the least, the Zionist entity had an international PR disaster of historic proportions on its bloodsoaked hands. The risk that further exposure of its genocidal nature might decisively and permanently shift global opinion in favor of the Palestinians and Arab world more generally was significant. The attack on Lebanon had already spurred Western news outlets to critically reassess other illegal annexations and occupations in which Israel was and today remains engaged. As ABC News reporter Richard Threlkeld commented at the time:
“Israel was always that gallant little underdog democracy fighting for survival against all the odds. Now the Israelis have annexed East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, settled down more or less permanently on the West Bank, and occupied close to half of Lebanon. In the interests of self-defense, that gallant little underdog, Israel, has suddenly started behaving like the neighborhood bully.”
So it was that in the summer of 1984, the American Jewish Congress - a major Zionist lobby organization - convened a conference in Jerusalem, Israel’s Public Image: Problems and Remedies. It was chaired by U.S. advertising supremo Carl Spielgovel, who a decade earlier provided pro bono advice to the Israeli government on strategies for publicly communicating why Tel Aviv refused to adhere to the terms of the Henry Kissinger-brokered 1973 Sinai Accords. As Spielgovel later recalled:
“It occurred to me then that the Israelis were doing a good job at training their military people, and they were doing a relatively good job at training their diplomatic corps. But they weren’t spending any time training information officers, people who could present Israel’s case to embassies and TV anchormen around the world. Over the years, I made this a personal cause celebre.”
The 1984 Jerusalem conference offered Spielgovel, and a welter of Western advertising and public relations executives, media specialists, editors, journalists, and leaders of major Zionist advocacy groups in tow, an opportunity to achieve that malign objective. Together, they hammered out a dedicated strategy for ensuring the “crisis” caused by news reporting on the invasion of Lebanon two years earlier would never be repeated. Their antidote? Ceaseless, methodical, and wide-ranging “Hasbara” - Hebrew for propaganda - for “changing people’s minds [and] making them think differently.”
‘Big Scoop’
The AJC subsequently published records of the conference. They offer extraordinarily candid insight into how multiple Hasbara strategies, which have been in perpetual operation ever since, were birthed. For example, basic propaganda messages were agreed. This included emphasizing Israel’s regional importance to the U.S. and Europe, Western cultural and political values, geographic vulnerability, and supposed striving for peace, in the face of implacable Arab belligerence and intransigence. As Judith Elizur, an expert in “communications” from Tel Aviv’s Hebrew University explained:
“Because the ‘power dimension’ of Israel’s image is so problematic, it seems to me that Hasbara must concentrate on reinforcing other aspects of Israel that have a positive appeal - medicine, agriculture, science, archaeology…We have been too preoccupied with extinguishing political brush fires. We need to devote more of our resources to long-range image-making. We must recreate a multi-dimensional image of Israel which will assure us the basic support we require in times of crisis.”
There was extensive discussion of how to present “unpalatable policies” to Western populations, and counter the perception of Israel as “Goliath steamrolling” across West Asia, against adversaries “outgunned, outclassed and outmanned” with “no capacity to resist.” The necessity of training Jewish diaspora in countering criticism of Israel was considered paramount. AJC’s president lamented that “many American Jews” had condemned the invasion of Lebanon, and “did us a terrible disservice.” Any such future “disagreement” would make it “very difficult for us to conduct Hasbara effectively.”
Joseph Block, Pepsi’s former vice president of public relations, stressed the need for a dedicated, 24/7 Zionist entity press operation “equipped to offer foreign journalists an occasional exclusive or scoop” and engage in other media outreach, in order to balance critical coverage, and get reporters and newsrooms ‘on side’. He suggested that had Israeli officials “briefed NBC and other networks appropriately” and given them “a big scoop” during Lebanon’s invasion, “then a different story would have reached America’s 90 million TV households”:
“News doesn’t just jump into a camera. It’s directed. It’s managed. It’s made accessible. Public relations is a process that makes news available in a particular form. In the US, PR is as important as accounting, the law and the military…As a corporate spokesman for two of America’s top 50 corporations, I wish I had a shekel for every time I said, ‘no comment’ to a reporter. I was always careful, however, not to antagonize or intimidate the reporter. I knew I had to live with him or her.”
Yoram Ettinger, media analysis chief at the Israel Information Center, concurred, declaring that media framing on the Zionist entity’s actions needed to be cemented in advance. “Actions” such as “blowing up houses”, which were “difficult to explain”, could be preemptively justified or at least relativised by placing them “in context”, while “[drawing] analogies that others will understand.” This would serve to “help others to interpret their meaning”, in accordance with Tel Aviv’s own perspectives.
The Conference hoped such efforts would mean “our American friends will be able to take a more activist posture as amplifiers of our policy,” and assist them in “tucking away the house problems in a back room.” It was also suggested Zionists on an individual and organisational level serve as a rapid reaction force, deluging news outlets with complaints en masse should their coverage of Israel be at all critical. One attendee boasted of their personal success in this regard:
“One day CBS News Radio reported that an American soldier had been hurt by stepping on an Israeli cluster bomb at the Beirut airport. I called CBS to point out that no one had established the bomb was an Israeli one. One hour later CBS reported that an American soldier had stepped on a bomb; this time the report omitted any reference to Israel.”
‘Frequent Violations’
Another deeply impactful recommendation emanated directly from Carl Spielgovel. Namely, constructing a “training program that will import carefully selected information specialists” from Israel to U.S. advertising and PR agencies, and major news outlets, to teach them the tricks of the trade, ensure Hasbara was conducted to full effect, and forge personal relationships between Zionist entity officials and the organizations to which they were seconded.
In turn, these “specialists” would be advised by a U.S.-Israeli council of “wise persons who can project different scenarios and how to cope with them,” on issues such as “annexation and Jerusalem.” Spielgovel keenly stressed he was “not suggesting that we make policy,” but rather “we should make the best minds available to help elucidate the consequences of certain policies.” This would guarantee the American people would never forget Tel Aviv was Washington’s “staunch political and military ally.”
Spielgovel further suggested future AJC conferences on the topic should include input from “young people” and people of color, in order to better market Tel Aviv to diverse “constituencies”. After all, “Hasbara needs to implant in the consciousness of the world the day-to-day existence” of Israeli citizens,” therefore requiring daily “stories in the arts, business and cooking sections of US newspapers.” Accordingly, a dedicated Hasbara program for cultivating expert Zionist propagandists Stateside has operated ever since.
Such was its success, before long the operation was expanded to include school and university students globally, to serve as aggressive Zionist entity advocates and apologists in classrooms and on campuses. Often, graduates of these Zionist entity-funded initiatives go on to enter influential professions, including journalism, where they continue to spread the gospel of Hasbara, and preach Israel’s innocence. The impact on Western media reporting on Palestine in the West has been dramatic.
To a significant degree, the vision of Tel Aviv as “the gallant little underdog democracy fighting for survival against all the odds” has been restored. Despite the ongoing 21st century Holocaust in Gaza, little to no attempt is ever made by mainstream outlets to even vaguely contextualise resistance to brutal Zionist annexation, imperialism, invasion, and occupation. Israel is almost invariably described as acting in “self defense”, against attacks from “terrorists”. And Western journalists know there may be consequences if they fail to toe the line.
The rapid reaction force mooted at the 1984 AJC conference is very much operational in the present. A veritable army of Hasbara-trained individuals and Zionist lobby organizations stands constantly ready to harass and threaten news outlets if a story is framed the “wrong” way, and/or portrays Israel in a remotely negative light. As a senior BBC producer once told veteran media critic Greg Philo:
“We wait in fear for the telephone call from the Israelis. The only issue we face then is how high up it’s come from them. Has it come from a monitoring group? Has it come from the Israeli embassy? And how high has it gone up our organization? Has it reached the editor or director general? I have had journalists on the phone to me before a major news report, asking which words can I use - ‘is it alright if I say this’?”
An October exposé by Al Jazeera based on testimony from BBC and CNN whistleblowers revealed extensive “pro-Israel bias in coverage, systematic double standards and frequent violations of journalistic principles” at both networks, in no small part due to internal concerns over how certain coverage might be perceived and responded to by Zionist entity officials. Yet, independent activists and journalists are not subject to such institutional concerns - and ever since October 7th 2023, they have challenged Hasbara propaganda with devastating effect.
Were it not for diligent sleuthing by MintPress News, The Grayzone, Electronic Intifada and others, egregious slanders peddled by the Zionist entity from the Gaza genocide’s inception - such as Hamas committing mass rape or beheading infants - might never have been comprehensively incinerated, and still today serve as “context” for Israel’s annihilation of innocent Palestinian civilians. Meanwhile, untold numbers of concerned citizens online have energetically rebutted Western narratives on the conflict in real-time, each and every day. This may have helped foment backlash in mainstream newsrooms.
It is a deeply poetic justice that the same techniques of information warfare perfected under Hasbara’s auspices have been turned on the Zionist entity, and its public defenders. These methods allowed Israel to get away with its slow motion erasure of the Palestinian people over many decades, with at least tacit consent from Western populations. Those days are over, and will never return. Israel’s former propaganda targets and victims can now beat Zionists at their own game, with the most potent forces of all on their side - truth, and justice.
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excellent article!
That explains a lot...
Mind you, all Kit's articles explain a lot.