Israel’s culture of hasbara has made Israelis blind to the occupation

Israeli soldiers stopping Jewish settlers from entering the Palestinian town of Turmus Ayya in the West Bank in 2023

Noa Limone writes in Haaretz on 22 May 2024:

A video circulated on TikTok last week (which has for the time being been taken down) showing a group of middle school students in the central Israeli city of Ganei Tikva protesting against an Arabic teacher who had participated in a perfectly legal Nakba Day protest and loudly singing, “Your village should burn.”

The same week, trucks carrying humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip were set aflame, and no one has been arrested in connection. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir angrily complained to the police commissioner after special units had been assigned to protect the trucks.

The week ended with violent clashes at protests which were calling for the release of the hostages. Right-wing activists, who held up signs saying “leftist traitors,” cursed and beat Reuma Kedem, who lost six family members on October 7 and assaulted her husband Gadi when he tried to help her. None of the right-wing activists were arrested. Kedem, however, was questioned under caution.

A straight line can be drawn between these events and Israel’s obsession with hasbara (advocacy), a phenomenon that has no other equivalent in the world – both in relation to the resources dedicated to it, including a wide range of government and non-government organizations dealing with it and the way in which nearly every Israeli feels committed to it: Every citizen who travels abroad knows that he becomes an “ambassador” while visiting a foreign country.

Hand in hand with the faulty advocacy syndrome is a related syndrome of constant disappointment in its ineffectiveness. The lament about the failure of outreach attributes any criticism of Israel, if not to antisemitism, then to a failure of making ourselves understood, that is, “we did not explain” well. God forbid, it should be because of government policy.

But outreach has another side to it, which the Israeli public tends to ignore, and that is the one directed inward, to the citizens of the country. Its purpose is to market a single narrative for the State of Israel, Zionism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and to dismiss any other narrative as illegitimate, false, antisemitic or undermining Israel’s right to exist. Even at the height of the protest against the judicial overhaul, attempts to introduce the issue of the occupation into it were mostly rejected. This is the limit of our ability to resist.

The reality of the lives of the Palestinians in the territories is unfamiliar to most Jewish Israelis. They do not see it in the mainstream media, have never learned about Israel’s wars from a different perspective, and have not acquired the tools to examine with a critical eye the question of whether they were wars of choice or not. And they did not hear the story told by a Palestinian, due to the implicit assumption that such a thing would be a danger in itself.

However, the real danger lies precisely in the fact that we only know one story, hence the Jewish citizens of Israel are a captive audience of the outreach efforts. As a foreign policy, advocacy fails because it has limits. A country is ultimately judged by its actions. Therefore, those who did not grow up in Israel are able to recognize the propaganda manipulations that most Israelis are blind to.

This blindness, and its tragic results, is exemplified by the children calling for the dismissal of a teacher who participated in a legal demonstration and encouraged violence against Palestinians. It also manifested itself in the actual violence and vandalism against Palestinians, aid trucks and bereaved families.

No less, it appears in the criminal indifference with which all these are accepted by Israeli society, thereby making the national outreach project even more barren. And here lies the Israeli tragedy in its entirety.

This article is reproduced in its entirety