from NY to Israel Sultan Reveals
The Stories Behind the News

Why Israel is Losing the Military and Media Wars

Posted: 22 Sep 2009 07:22 PM PDT

Every now and then bewildered Israeli politicians and outreach
professionals call conferences to wonder why the Hasbara is failing and
why Israel can't get its story across. They are given the usual advice of
hiring more PR firms, finding innovative ways to get the message through,
using the internet in smarter ways and of course that all time favorite,
rebranding Israel. Naturally they follow this advice, only to call another
conference a year later wondering why nothing has changed.

The answer is simple enough. Defensive PR, like defensive
warfare, never works. And Israeli PR and Israeli warfare has been on the
defensive for decades now. If you break down Israel's message to a single
sentence, it's "We didn't do any of the things we're accused of." That is
the kind of message you expect to hear from criminal defendants, and it's
a message that impresses no one. The only thing it does is produce a
debate about the validity of the accusations themselves, which is to PR
what Stalingrad was to the Russian front.

The recent Aftonbladet
case represents a classic scenario that demonstrates why Israel's
defensive PR is doomed to fail over and over again. The Swedish tabloid
Aftonbladet published an article claiming that Israeli soldiers were
killing Palestinian Arabs in order to harvest their organs. The Israeli
government pointed out that the article presented no evidence whatsoever,
that no such thing had ever happened and demanded a retraction from the
newspaper and condemnation of it by the Swedish government. The only thing
Israel accomplished was to popularize the false allegation thus creating a
debate over whether or not Israeli soldiers kill Palestinian Arabs to
harvest their organs. Pleased by his newfound fame, the author of the
article has only escalated his allegations and gone on to do a tour of the
Arab world. Leftist propagandists can only watch the fallout and chuckle,
because once again Israel has been suckered into playing the mug's game of
defensive PR.

Defensive warfare of any kind is reactive. For the
last few decades Israel has run itself ragged because it has been
reactive. And by reactive I mean that Israel keeps responding to attacks
against it, rather than taking the offensive. In the Six Day War, Israel
responded to Nasser's planned assault, by preempting him and taking the
offensive. The result was Israel's finest hour. In the Yom Kippur War,
Israel waited and watched, and was nearly destroyed.

Few nations
can afford to be purely reactive and play defense alone, Israel least of
all because it is outnumbered by larger and more numerous enemies who can
wear it down through sheer brute force. And that is exactly what has been
happening on both the media and the military front. The terrorist
campaign, planned, financed and executed first by the USSR, and then by
the Arab and Muslim world, has worn out Israel both militarily and
politically.

Israel's greatest asset was its innovation, its
mobility and brilliance. Qualities that are best employed on the
offensive. Instead Israel has been restricted to the defensive, constantly
retreating, giving up both physical and ideological territory to its
enemies, while wondering how much to give up in order to stem the
bleeding. Which is the one reaction certain to put it even further on the
defensive.

Israel wants a solution to the conflict. So do its
enemies in both Islam and on the left and far right. A final solution.
Each attempt by Israel to offer a solution has only brought Israel closer
to that final solution. The more Israel has tried to show its goodwill,
the more it has gotten stuck on the defensive. The goal of successive
Israeli governments is no longer to be a great nation or a strong nation,
but to be a nation that everyone likes.

The fallacy there is that
"everyone" consists of a billion Muslims and a sizable number of leftists
who view Israel's very existence as an insult to their deeply held
beliefs. And then there are the Western business interests who think Ahmed
would be much friendlier to them if Israel weren't in the way. And Russia
which cultivates wars in the Middle East the way gardeners cultivate
flowers. Finally there's the rest of the world which isn't too keen on
embracing losers who keep apologizing for their existence and cutting
their own country to pieces in order to win the favor of the terrorists
trying to wipe them off the face of the earth.

To boil down the problem simply enough, the more Israel goes on
the defensive, the weaker it becomes, not just militarily, but politically
as well. Reactive conflicts are hugely draining. They require endlessly
watching for an attack and then trying to counter it. The advantage in
such a scenario is always to the attacker who has more lead time to plan
an attack, and room to retreat if the attack fails.

Strike and
vanish into the desert, and then strike again, was the classic raiding
strategy of the Arab bandit, including a charming head chopping fellow
named Mohammed. The British General Orde Wingate, who helped pioneer much
of the doctrine of the future IDF, responded to such attacks in the
mandate era, by taking the battle to the enemy with small, fast moving and
mobile units. To go on the offensive.

The following section from the official Wingate site says it best;

While impressed with the devotion & willingness to
sacrifice in the Haganah, Wingate was exasperated by the defensive
nature of the Jewish forces. He realized that they could not halt the
violence with their defensive tactics of fortified settlements. The
policy of restraint meant the Haganah was ceding the initiative and
mobility to the Arab guerillas.

The British were trying to
balance an active defense with mobile sweeps & strikes, with holding
important static positions in order to maintain effective government
control. Mobile columns & patrols were sent out to deny the rebels
any sanctuary and to hunt them down. They became consistent and routine
in their movements and their actions. With the enemy often
indistinguishable from their civilian base and troops often quartered
near Arab civilian areas, "it was very difficult to keep operations
conducted in a largely hostile civilian milieu secret, and so the
element of surprise was lost; at the same time, reliable information
about the enemy was hard to come by."

Commented one Jewish
official on a big sweep by British forces, "They marched over hills and
valleys, and in the end emerged with some rusty Turkish pistols and a
few empty rounds of ammunition...The Arab gangsters just hid their arms
and mingled with the population of the villages. Not only did the huge
British army find absolutely nothing, it discredited and ridiculed
itself in the eyes of the whole population." In 1938 General Archibald
Wavell, the temporary acting commander of British military forces in
Palestine, was forced to admit these and other actions such as aerial
bombing had only "a temporary effect."

Wingate envisioned
carefully selected, small and mobile units of volunteers to fight
aggressively and unconventionally...

"There is only one way to
deal with the situation, to persuade the gangs that, in their predatory
raids, there is every chance of their running into a government gang
which is determined to destroy them, not by exchange of shots at a
distance, but by bodily assault with bayonet and bomb." This new unit
was to carry the war to the enemy, taking away his initiative and
keeping him off-balance. And so it was, "to produce in their minds the
belief government forces will move at night and can and will surprise
them either in villages or across country." The force would be a mixed
British-Jewish one operating under his command, moving primarily at
night in areas of guerilla activity with the allies of the night:
deception, surprise, shock.

Since then Israel has forgotten Wingate's lessons that
helped make the IDF into the fearsome force that it was. Instead Israel
has reverted to the fortified settlements and cities, the home guards
maintaining watch... as well as the British assault teams thundering
across the desert in a spectacular show of force that accomplishes
absolutely nothing. And this applies not only to Israel, but to the United
States post-2004 as well.

You cannot win
through defensive tactics. You can only bleed. And Israel is bleeding
badly. The nation that once executed Entebbe, rescuing hostages on another
continent, can no longer even rescue one of its soldiers held captive
within its own borders. The country that was once hailed as a symbol of
rebirth has been internationally demonized. And the worst part of it all
is that Israel sat back and let it happen.

Israel is too small to
be able to keep on bleeding indefinitely. Its soldiers and citizens have
tired of always being on watch, and always waiting for an attack. Its
citizens and its defenders around the world are tired of being expected to
answer increasingly outlandish charges. This cannot go on forever. Israeli
leaders understood this, but they drew the wrong lesson, determining to go
even further on the defensive by cutting deals with the enemy. They were
wrong. Disastrously wrong.

To survive against larger enemies, a
small country must be quick, it must be feared, it must use surprise and
cultivate an aura of inhuman abilities. Israel used to be all of these
things. Now it is none of these things. But if it is to survive, it must
become those things again.

Israel does not have a terrorism
problem, it has a defensiveness problem. Israel has the capability to
destroy every terrorist group within its borders in a matter of a month.
Israel does not have a PR problem. Its PR problem is created by an ongoing
conflict with terrorist groups, who have extensive sympathizers abroad.
Destroy the terrorist groups, regain control over the disputed areas, and
the PR problem shrinks to a fraction of its former size. More importantly
it ceases to have any useful meaning.

The media war against
Israel, the lawfare and the other various non-military tactics require an
investment of resources. For those resources to be worth investing, there
must be a visible payoff. The more Israel stays on the defensive, and its
enemies make territorial and political gains, the more those tactics seem
to be paying off. Reverse that scenario, and the resources will be
reinvested somewhere else because they are not achieving tangible results.

It has been demonstrated that the demonization of Israel is not
significantly altered by the nature of Israeli tactics against terrorism.
Whether Israeli tanks smash through Arafat's compound, or Israel builds a
non-violent defensive border wall-- the demonization of Israel remains
constant. That is because the demonization is not a moral response to
specific policies, but an ongoing state of hostility directed against
Israel in support of Muslim and Marxist terrorists. The only way to stop
the demonization is to remove the incentive for it, by removing the
terrorists.

The Oslo Accords did not lesson the global demonization of
Israel. Instead after a brief honeymoon, it significantly worsened it.
That is because it was closer to achieving its purpose. The more Israel
has compromised, the worse its international status has become. That is
because by compromising, Israel demonstrated its weakness to both its
enemies and allies, emboldening its enemies and making its allies
reevaluate its ability to survive. The more Israel has gone on the
defensive, the worse the terrorism and the demonization has become. That
is only natural. If you retreat, the enemy's fire will only increase in
severity.

To many Jews and Israelis, and sympathizers with Israel
as a nation battling Marxist and Islamist terror, the problem seems
impossible. The political and military situation is a Gordian Knot of
tangled complexities. Which is why it takes an Alexander or a Wingate to
cut the knot. Israel's media and military problems are born of a defensive
strategy that have allowed the country to be tied into a Gordian Knot. To
survive Israel must go on the offensive to cut the knot and save itself,
or be choked to death by the knot its enemies have tied around it.