The apprenticeship of Aviv Kochavi in appointing an IDF spokesperson

A corporate executive’s aborted nomination as the IDF’s spokesman underscores the travails of Israel’s media relations

By AMOTZ ASA-EL
Nixed as IDF Spokesperson: Gil Messing (photo credit: Courtesy)
Nixed as IDF Spokesperson: Gil Messing
(photo credit: Courtesy)
It was an appointment as unorthodox as its mastermind.
With IDF Spokesman Brig.-Gen. Ronen Manelis’s term about to expire, Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Aviv Kochavi searched, and thought he found, his successor in the private sector.
The appointment fell through quickly, exposing Kochavi’s political innocence, but also highlighted the position’s political prickliness, military sensitivity and public weight.
The choice – hi-tech powerhouse Check Point’s corporate communications chief – could hardly be odder.
The first oddity was his youth. At 36, Gil Messing is half-a-generation younger than the generals with whom he would have sat in General Staff meetings, and whose trust, respect and daily cooperation the IDF Spokesperson must win.
The second oddity was Messing’s humble military rank – lieutenant – harking back to his days as a junior officer in the IDF Spokesman unit.
Thirdly, and fatefully, the nomination’s announcement was followed the next morning by revelations that Messing had been involved, as an innocent citizen, in a police investigation against politicians associated with former, and prospective, defense minister Avigdor Liberman.
Messing was reportedly asked by Israel Police in 2015 to tape a friend – media adviser Ronen Moshe, who was ultimately convicted of involvement in a kickback network dominated by activists from Liberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu party.
For the Israel Police, it was a questionable method about which the public had never previously heard. For the blameless citizen Messing, however, it was like a call-up for reserve duty in the military, a summons to civil duty which he patriotically fulfilled.
The impression initially stirred in the blogosphere – that Messing had somehow been involved in some wrongdoing – was quickly dispelled. Impressions of Gen. Kochavi’s misjudgment were not.
Kochavi was expected to learn by himself, and not through the media, of his nominee’s past, and even in the absence of hard facts to smell a political rat, even before one considers reports which claimed that Messing at one point also recorded Liberman himself.
Chances of such a history getting past the politicians’ scrutiny are, of course, nil, no matter who they are and regardless of how, if at all, they are related to what the police and their informant were up to specifically.
Moreover, while this part of Messing’s past was secret, there was a non-classified political line in his résumé: media adviser to former foreign minister and Zionist Union leader Tzipi Livni.
Such direct service to a politician – and not just any politician but a prime ministerial candidate – is very problematic for any general, let alone one speaking for the army that is supposed to be above anything even remotely identifiable as political.
These, then, were part of the nominee’s past that Kochavi failed to take into account when he convinced Messing to accept the candidacy he soon was compelled to withdraw.
Kochavi’s other considerations, however, cannot be dismissed, and, in fact, must be kept in mind when he selects the man who will actually be the IDF’s next chief of communications.
THE IDF has had 27 spokespersons since 1948. Most, one way or another, were related to the Intelligence Corps, to which the spokesperson also belonged administratively in the IDF’s first quarter of a century. That itself reflected an utter misunderstanding of the media and its place in the battlefield.
It was part of an attitude that historians recall from the American Civil War, when General William Sherman perceived the press, and treated it, as part of the enemy he faced.
Organizationally, the IDF began retreating from this attitude after the Yom Kippur War, when it decoupled its media operation from the Intelligence Corps and redesigned the IDF Spokesman as an independent unit.
Mentally, however, the suspiciousness survived, and the unit suffered from a lack of professionals who would understand deeply the media’s democratic merits, professional needs, and technical constraints.
The idea that this particular position demanded a professional from outside the military was first introduced in the 1980s, when defense minister Moshe Arens appointed journalist Nachman Shai as IDF Spokesperson.
Having previously served as Israel TV’s defense correspondent, Shai later became the press secretary at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, when Arens was the ambassador.
The journalist’s procession from there to the IDF, with the rank of brigadier-general, may have been a matter of personal trust no less than an administrative vision, much like Messing’s past as a lieutenant in Kochavi’s brigade.
Even so, Shai’s stint was a great success.
Though his uniformed experience was minimal – a reporter at a military magazine – Shai knew the generals from his years as a military correspondent, and he also knew how to deal with them. Moreover, during his years in the embassy he also learned the other side of the industry, the one that feeds the media through press communiqués, interviews, and leaks.
These assets proved priceless when, as IDF spokesperson in the days when Saddam Hussein fired missiles at Tel Aviv, Shai was tasked with telling the population in nightly TV appearances what was going on and what they were supposed to do.
The poise, reliability, and confidence with which he did all these helped the government pursue its policy at the time, which was to keep the population quiet and disciplined while the ground war between Saddam and the American-led coalition raged elsewhere.
The precedent set by Shai’s appointment soon produced another such appointment – Shimon Peres picking Oded Ben-Ami, previously Israel Radio’s Washington correspondent and subsequently a TV anchorman, now with Channel 12.
Ben-Ami’s stint, which began shortly after Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination and ended shortly before the outbreak of the Second Intifada, involved no challenge like Shai’s during the First Gulf War. As historical ironies go, by the time the Second Intifada arrived bringing new media challenges for the IDF, the spokesman’s position had reverted to an intelligence veteran, Ron Kitri.
The Palestinian seizure of the media agenda in those days – for instance in September 2000, with the videotaped killing by a hail of bullets of a Gazan boy, Muhammad al-Dura, next to his father; or in spring 2002, with the spreading of fake news about a massacre in Jenin – once again underscored the IDF media relations’ need for journalistic experts not just as advisers, but as leaders.
Most fatefully, Kitri advised the General Staff to close off Jenin to the media during Operation Defensive Shield. It is now widely agreed that if the area had been open for the media, the libels the IDF faced in 2002 would have been impossible to spread.
It was this kind of rigid military thinking that Messing’s appointment was meant to prevent.
MESSING is only 36, but, unlike any IDF general, is a veteran resident of the no man’s land that sprawls between the media industry and the corporate world.
The media relations of a hi-tech empire like Check Point are complex and global. A Nasdaq-traded, $1.7 billion programmer of firewalls and other security software, the Ramat Gan-based multinational of some 5,000 employees is the brainchild of founder Gil Shwed, a poster-boy of Israel’s hi-tech revolution.
The thought that the IDF’s next media relations man is hidden not in the military barracks that produced most of his predecessors, and also not in the newsrooms where Shai and Ben-Ami were reared, but within the glitzy skyscrapers where corporate executives graze and Israeli inventions bud, was itself an innovation.
In these turrets, media relations and crisis management are part of a senior manager’s daily diet, just like thinking unimaginatively in those quarters is almost an obscenity. That Messing was not the right man to retrieve from that cityscape does not mean it was not the place in which to search.
A major asset Messing would likely have brought is the corporate sector’s worldliness.
The IDF Spokesperson unit, which deploys an estimated 400 conscripts and officers, is split into Hebrew and foreign operations. The unit’s reflex is to focus on its Hebrew operation. That’s what its employees and customers – the generals – regularly consume. The country’s more urgent need, however, is the foreign press.
One moment in which this attitude proved crucial came in the summer of 2006, during the Second Lebanon War. The war’s coverage seemed fine from the IDF’s viewpoint until its 18th day, when news broke that an Israeli bombardment killed dozens of Lebanese, including children, in the village of Kafr Kana.
Until that moment, IDF Spokesperson Miri Regev – now the culture minister on behalf of Likud – could be seen almost daily on TV, behind the shoulder of Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Dan Halutz. When Kafr Kana happened, she vanished from the screen just when she was needed most.
It turned out that her English wasn’t good enough. Even more crucially, she lacked access to real-time, fresh information with which to offset enemy reports from the field and potentially shape the media’s agenda.
Regev was a product of the IDF Spokesperson unit where she had spent almost all her 24 years of service. It gave her thorough acquaintance with the unit and its operational methods, but it did not give her ways to obtain secret information that the media craved and the generals were reluctant to divulge.
The problem was not new.
Regev’s predecessor, career diplomat Ruth Yaron who had been “lent” to the IDF by the Foreign Ministry, was told by air force generals that targeted killings which had reportedly killed dozens of Gazan civilians could not have been that lethal, because those attacks used Hellfire, a missile that could not cause that much damage. It turned out they used a different missile.
Anyone in the media relations business knows that the first thing one must not do is lie to the press. Yaron knew this, but the generals on whom she depended did not care about what they understood to be her problem, not theirs.
The syndrome resurfaced during the Marmara Affair.
A video recording taped from the helicopter above the vessel showed convincingly that its passengers included men armed with clubs who stormed IDF soldiers upon their arrival on deck, thus creating an effective image of Turkish aggression. Yet by the time the Navy and the IDF Spokesperson released the tape, the media coverage had long established the Marmara as the innocent victim of aggression.
The new IDF Spokesperson, then, will need to be fearless and authoritative in the face of generals; savvy in the face of evolving technology; eloquent in the face of the foreign press; very quick in retrieving information from the field and delivering it to the world; and extremely inventive in shaping the media’s coverage of Israel’s military affairs.
As things turned out, he or she will not be Gill Messing. That does not mean the next IDF Spokesperson should not be some other creature of the hi-tech ecosystem, someone for whom the media is no mystery, nuisance, or foe.


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Miri Regev