Former IDF spokesperson on how Netanyahu and his government played into Hamas’ hands
Peter Lerner
Amir Tibon writes in Haaretz on 9 July 2024:
Monday, April 8, was another difficult day, like most days since the war in Gaza broke out. A day before, Israel marked six months since the October 7 attack. Negotiations for a hostage deal had hit a dead end, and not for the first time; Hamas launched a barrage of rockets toward Israeli border communities; Hezbollah continued to target communities in the north; and the U.S. and Israel continued to argue publicly about the timing of the IDF’s entry into Rafah.
That day, Lt. Col. (Res.) Peter Lerner, formerly the IDF spokesman for international media, was about to begin his sixth consecutive month in reserve duty. He was preparing for an interview on Australian television channel ABC’s flagship program.
A week earlier, an Australian citizen who volunteered at the humanitarian aid organization World Central Kitchen was killed by IDF fire. In Australia, a country that is generally friendly towards Israel, public outrage spread following the event. Lerner was asked to stand in front of the cameras and present the findings of the IDF investigation into the tragic incident.
For several minutes, he did his best to explain how the IDF investigated the incident, to detail what measures had been taken against the officers found responsible for giving the order to shoot (two of whom were discharged from their reserve duty), and to express sorrow on behalf of the State of Israel.
The studio host, Sarah Ferguson, challenged and pressed him with questions, which did not surprise Lerner. During the long months of reserve duty, he’d grown-accustomed to the critical stance of many journalists around the world towards Israel. But he was not ready for the concluding statement of the interview: “Lt. Col. Lerner, I’m not accepting your view that it’s a mistake,” Ferguson stated. “But thank you for joining us.”
British-born Lerner, who immigrated to Israel as a child, served in the IDF for 25 years in positions related to the international arena. But despite his decades of experience, he was surprised by the senior presenter’s unequivocal statement that she simply didn’t believe him.
“I retired from the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit in 2017, and I was the spokesman for the international media during Operation Protective Edge [the 2014 Gaza War],” Lerner told Haaretz last week in an interview, his first since he was discharged from reserve duty. “As a senior Israeli spokesperson working with international media, I encounter many challenges, but all these years I’ve always felt that in the end, there was basic trust in the IDF. I have never had a case where a journalist declares on air, ‘I don’t believe you.'” [The interview with Lerner was conducted in Hebrew, and quotes were later translated into English by the author].
People inspect the site where World Central Kitchen workers were killed in Deir al-Balah, Gaza, April 2024
Ferguson’s comment received backlash from Australia’s Jewish community. Dozens of letters of complaint were sent to ABC, stating that her unusual remark contradicted the channel’s commitment to delivering the news in a reliable, impartial and unbiased manner. Following an internal investigation, the channel released a short statement concluding that “the broadcast did not violate ABC’s journalistic standards.”
According to Lerner, this incident is an anecdote that reveals the larger story of the international community’s loss of trust in Israel and the failure of the Israeli government to maintain widespread support for the war against Hamas. “Netanyahu promised an absolute victory over Hamas,” he says. “But on the international stage, he and his government led us to defeat.”
No Strategy
After his discharge from the IDF in 2017, Lerner became the director of the international division of the Histadrut labor federation, where he was responsible for relations between Israel’s largest workers’ organization and similar organizations around the world. But on the morning of October 7, when he awoke to sirens and echoes of explosions in the Tel Aviv area, he immediately understood that he wasn’t about to continue doing his regular job in the coming months.
“I received full backing from my boss, [Histadrut Chairman] Arnon Bar-David, to join the IDF for as long as they needed me, without restrictions. But I also didn’t think it would last so long in practice, more than 230 days,” he says.
During this period, he gave more than 750 interviews to media outlets all over the world, likely more than any other Israeli. “Out of those many hundreds of interviews, there were only two days when I had good news to tell,” he says sadly. “Once with the release of the hostages Fernando Marman and Louis Har in February, and a second time right before the end of my reserve duty, with the release of Noa Argamani, Shlomi Ziv, Almog Meir and Andrey Kozlov. Apart from these two cases, it was a matter of going on air every day, several times a day, to talk about difficult and painful things.”
Lerner divides the war roughly into two main periods. In the early days, he says, Israel enjoyed considerable international support and clear legitimacy to fight Hamas. “There’s a sentence I repeated over and over again, and at that stage it was really true: decent nations and decent peoples stand by us. There was a clear understanding that Hamas is an evil and dangerous organization, and Israel must act against it. There was an inflow of leaders from around the world who came to express solidarity, and there was an openness among journalists and editors to present the Israeli side extensively.”
This good will, he says, dissipated within just a few weeks. “Part of it is an inevitable result of the ground incursion into Gaza and the price the war exacted on civilians on the other side,” he says. “I can’t complain about that because it’s clearly my role: to deal in the international arena with the consequences of a just war that we are waging against a terrorist organization that operates within a civilian population. That’s why I came forward.”
But Lerner also attributes much of the shift in the international attitude towards the war to what he describes as the government’s mismanagement, pointing to two main interconnected problems. “One problem is the fact that there is no political strategy for the war, even after nine months of fighting on two fronts,” he says.
“It’s not the army’s role to formulate such a strategy, but as a spokesperson, I began to receive questions on this as early as October 10. What are your goals, what are you trying to achieve, what is your plan for the future? And very quickly, I realized I didn’t have answers to these questions, not because [the political echelon] hadn’t decided yet, but because they simply weren’t going to decide,” he adds.
He compares his situation in interviews as the war dragged on and the government refused to set clear political goals, to “a soldier going on guard duty without any ammunition. I go up for interviews on the most influential and important channels in the world, and I don’t have the arsenal I need to deal with the interviewers’ questions. All I could say was that I was simply speaking on behalf of the military and that these questions are the government’s responsibility. But the government also had no answers because, politically, it wasn’t convenient.”
If all this wasn’t bad enough, Lerner also blames the political echelon for causing real damage to the war effort, through a long series of statements that undermined international support for Israel and diminished what he calls its “legitimacy space.” Some of the examples he cites are worth lingering on because of the way they impacted Israel’s standing abroad.
“A few days into the war, Hamas damaged nearly all the power lines connecting Gaza to Israel,” he recalls. “They essentially plunged Gaza into darkness with their own hands. We had an opportunity there to come and say – Hamas is harming the civilians of Gaza, and we, Israel, will try to fix that, but only if they stop firing. Instead, then-Energy Minister Yisrael Katz made populist statements about cutting off their electricity and not supplying them with fuel.
“Now, instead of the world understanding that Hamas is cutting Gaza off, the minister’s remark rose to the top of the headlines, and suddenly the whole world was blaming us for harming the population,” he says.
In the end, Israel repaired the power lines and reconnected Gaza. “Look at this terrible management – we were subjected to criticism, and in the end, we also made the repairs. There’s no sense in that.”
Playing into Hamas’s hands
Lerner describes government ministers as “a bunch of pyromaniacs who talk nonsense,” and brings as an example Likud minister Avi Dichter comparing the evacuation of the Palestinian population from northern Gaza at the beginning of the war to the Palestinian Nakba of 1948.
“In every interview, we try to convey the message that the population needs to evacuate temporarily so that we can fight Hamas without harming civilians. And then he comes and says – no, this is a Nakba. Leave aside for a moment that I, and many other reservists, did not enlist to carry out a Nakba. That is not our army. He, a minister in the government, doesn’t even think for a second how this is perceived in the countries whose support we need during the war.”
Another example Lerner cites is the statement by Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu about dropping an atomic bomb on Gaza. Lerner, normally a reserved man, becomes heated when he talks about this incident. “As an IDF spokesman, I see myself as representing the soldiers, the bereaved families, all the heroes who fell [in battle]. I try to speak on their behalf, and say in all the interviews that we are fighting a just war, a war for our security. Not a war of revenge. And then I get asked – but a minister in your government is talking about an atomic bomb. There is no good way to answer that.”
Lerner also mentions a document circulated by lawmaker Gila Gamliel, who at the beginning of the war headed the Intelligence Ministry, with a plan for the transfer of hundreds of thousands of Gazans. “This is a document signed by a government ministry, and it’s admittedly a joke of a ministry, but in the world ‘Intelligence Ministry’ sounds like something important,” he says. “It gets published, and I start to get questions about it – is this the goal of the war? Is it the official policy of the government? Is it reflected in the army’s orders?”
In a functioning country, he adds, “there are only two options when such a document is published: either it’s brought to the government, or it’s shelved and the minister who signed off on this embarrassment resigns. In Netanyahu’s government, nothing was done. It just caused us international damage, and we moved on. No one was reprimanded or punished. And I was left there like the Dutch boy with his finger in the dike.”
These statements, he says, directly aided Hamas, as well as influential international organizations who opposed the war from its first day and tried to portray it as a futile revenge war by Israel. “There is a huge gap between what the army does on the ground and how it is translated internationally – in media reports, in diplomatic discourse, in legal discussions,” says Lerner.
“We are fighting in a very tough, almost impossible arena. There is an entire network of ‘journalists’ in Gaza who simply spread Hamas messages worldwide. There are international organizations that publish partial, unreliable data, and these data reach the UN, the headlines, and eventually the Hague. But those are the conditions we must fight in. What I cannot fathom is how ministers in the government, instead of keeping their mouths shut, keep giving gifts to those working against us.”
He speaks with disdain about another phenomenon that occurred throughout the months of the war. “Israeli politicians who go for interviews on international channels, ostensibly to help with public diplomacy efforts, but in reality, their entire goal is to later paste in Hebrew subtitles and publish the interview for their audience here in Israel. They ‘trick’ their voters into thinking they are fighting for Israel in the [international TV] studios, but their messages are tailored only to the Israeli ‘base,’ and they in fact cause damage just to get likes.”
Lerner speaks highly of those who were his commanders throughout most of his reserve service, namely IDF Spokesperson Brigadier General Daniel Hagari, and Lt. Col. Richard Hecht, who was responsible for the international department in the Spokesperson’s Unit. He recounts how, within 72 hours of Hamas’ surprise attack, the Spokesperson’s Unit organized tours for hundreds of journalists from around the world in the affected communities near the border, and brought them together with victims of the massacre. “People kept asking, show us evidence for everything you’re telling us. So Richard took them to the border region and said – here’s the evidence, you’re walking within it. I think it worked, and it had a great impact on the coverage in the early stages of the war.”
On the other hand, he has no similar praise for the conduct of the government. Even though it had as many as four ministries ostensibly responsible for Israel’s international relations and mediating its messages to the world – the Foreign Ministry, the Strategic Affairs Ministry, the Diaspora Ministry, and at the beginning of the war also the Public Diplomacy Ministry – Lerner says that, “in the end, with so many titles and positions, everyone sees the results, and they aren’t good.”
Lerner concludes with a quote by Netanyahu himself, from a 2016 discussion at the Knesset’s State Audit Committee on public diplomacy during the 2014 Gaza War. “He said what is, in my opinion, an important sentence: the test in the field of hasbara [public diplomacy] is a very simple one – did the world tie your hands when you wanted to defend yourself. In the test that he himself set, Netanyahu failed miserably. The U.S. is canceling arms shipments, as does Britain; France forbids us from participating in a large arms exhibition; we delayed the [IDF’s] entry into Rafah for months. This matter requires a state commission of inquiry, just like the failures of October 7.”
This article is reproduced in its entirety