Israel’s propaganda war

On May 14, the official Twitter account of the Israeli military tweeted a “pop quiz” video, inviting viewers to “imagine” that they themselves were the Israeli armed forces deciding what to do in response to rocket fire from the Gaza Strip. The answer options were: “A. Nothing[.] Allow terrorists to destroy Israeli cities,” or “B. Target the terrorists who fire the rockets.”

According to the military, there was “only one right answer”: option B. In reality, a more accurate answer would have been something like: “C. Bomb Gaza to smithereens and massacre entire Palestinian families in ‘response’ to rockets that are not even capable of destroying Israeli cities – and that are only being fired at Israel because Israel has spent the past 73 years massacring and otherwise tormenting Palestinians.”

Nearly 250 Palestinians have thus far been killed, including 66 children, in the Israeli assault that began on May 10. As usual, the Israeli military Twitter account has served as a valuable weapon for conducting a parallel propaganda war to bolster the physical one.

The account, which currently boasts 1.5 million followers, is largely dedicated to inverting the roles of victimiser and victim to portray Israel as the latter – in theory a formidable task, given that “victims” do not usually violently erect their country on other people’s land and subject the rightful inhabitants to ethnic cleansing and slaughter.

The completely disproportionate destruction in Israel and Gaza means that the Israeli military is often reduced to tweeting about air raid sirens, with helpful colourful maps: “Every red dot marks sirens in Israel over the last 30 minutes: Israel is under attack.”

If the red dots were not traumatising enough, a tweet on May 11 encouraged Twitter users to listen to an audio clip of “SIRENS IN TEL AVIV” and to “imagine hearing this sound and having seconds to run for your life.” On May 12, another tweet announced: “It’s 3 AM and more rockets are being fired at Tel Aviv. Families are being woken up & rushed to bomb shelters.”

Never mind the lack of air raid sirens or bomb shelters in Gaza. Imagine being, say, six-year-old Suzy Eshkuntana, pulled from the rubble of her Gaza City home seven hours after an Israeli air attack killed her mother and four siblings. Or imagine being Eman Basher, a teacher with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, who on May 13 tweeted: “Tonight, I put the kids to sleep in our bedroom. So that when we die, we die together and no one would live to mourn the loss of one another.”

The Israeli army is all about “imagining”, but only from Israel’s invented perspective. Another epically sensational video tweet, titled “Imagine This Was Your Reality”, purports to show how “ALL OF ISRAEL IS UNDER FIRE” via a montage of rockets, flames, and people running. The video incites viewers to “imagine if it was Washington”; “Imagine if it was Paris”; “Imagine if it was London”.

Meanwhile, this same army continues to inflict an apocalypse of cinematic proportions upon the Gaza Strip. Imagining Israel as the victim requires a good deal of imagination, indeed.

Excerpted: ‘From the Twitter trenches: The Israeli army’s propaganda war’

Aljazeera.com