The self-imposed assignment was to monitor the media’s place in the unfolding war, and the revelation was that the media had become war’s fourth arena, alongside the land, the air and the sea.
Ben-Eliyahu, who would later be the IAF’s commander, was impressed with the American army’s systematic work opposite the media, including steady supply of quality information and rapid response to unexpected events.
“The key to this arena’s management,” he wrote in fall 1991 in the IDF quarterly Ma’arakhot, “lies in ‘pushing’ information, rather than waiting for the press to request it.”
It was a groundbreaking article. Though written years before email, websites, smartphones and social networks, the article recognized the media’s wartime significance, and helped overhaul the IDF’s work opposite the media.
Even so, 30 years later Israel’s performance on this front leaves much to be desired, both militarily and politically, as May’s Operation Guardian of the Walls made plain.
THE IDF learned well in recent decades to create and supply media content. Reportedly deploying some 500 soldiers and up to another 1,000 reservists in wartime, the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit is a big information machine which includes special departments for print, broadcast, and online news organizations as well as social networks alongside press relations services in all major languages, including Chinese.
The unit’s soldiers are selected carefully and undergo training in a special media-affairs school which also trains officers from field units to deal with the press. Generously budgeted, the unit also knows how to create high-end digital content, from documentaries to breaking news video clips.
During May’s fighting the unit indeed delivered frequent and orderly press briefings peppered with videos that showed what the IDF was bombing, very shortly after its attacks were waged. And then came the blunders, twice.
First, in launching the operation’s biggest attack, a press officer allegedly misled the foreign press to report that a ground operation had begun; and then, two days later, the IAF struck an office tower whose tenants included the Associated Press news agency’s offices. The tower collapsed, and so did foreign journalists’ sympathy for the operation.
The ground attack that didn’t happen was in fact a complex operation involving 160 fighter jets and 450 bombs joined by artillery and tank fire that collectively minced an underground tunnel system used by Hamas terrorists.
As this commotion began an IDF’s spokesman, Lt.-Col. Jonathan Conricus, told reporters that IDF troops were operating in Gaza. The statement made leading news organizations, including The New York Times and Washington Post, report that a ground operation had commenced.
Foreign reporters were convinced they were deliberately duped, part of a deceit aimed at making Hamas fighters scramble into the tunnels where they would be trapped under the IAF’s barrage, as scores of them indeed were.
Faced with an outcry, Conricus said he innocently misphrased the press, a line that his boss, Brig.-Gen. Hidai Zilberman, repeated in a letter to Foreign Press Association Chairman Andrew Carey.
Alas, many among the foreign press are still convinced they were maneuvered by the IDF, and became unwitting participants in the violence. Whatever the exact facts in this Rashomon, it means that in this case the IDF violated the first of the Ben-Eliyahu doctrine’s two dictums: Win the media’s trust.
His second dictum – prepare your evidence in advance – was violated in the operation’s second blunder.
THE 11-STORY Al-Jalaa building’s tenants were gone by the time the IAF flattened it, thanks to its “knock on the roof” technique whereby an aircraft lands an non-explosive, yet loud, projectile atop a structure shortly before hitting it with a bomb, serving as warning.
That is how the IAF‘s 11-days of shelling and bombing produced no equivalent of the February 1991 Amiriya shelter bombing; an air attack that killed 408 civilians, and for a moment seemed ready to derail the American effort to liberate Kuwait.
Located in what then was an upscale neighborhood in western Baghdad, the bomb shelter where hundreds of civilians were trapped, had been identified by US intelligence as a camouflaged command center.
Later research doubted this call, but the media-relations fact is that when the bloodshed at the site dominated media coverage, the American military produced pre-bombing photos that stated its case. As Gen. Ben-Eliyahu observed at the time, the graphic display of military fixtures at the site convinced the press, and the operation proceeded as planned.
Thirty years on, the IDF has yet to implement this lesson. Yes, it learned to release video footage of bombs landing on rooftops, but their journalistic value is limited, for two reasons: first, such clips are blurry, sterile, and pretty much identical; and more importantly, such footage shows that a building was targeted, but it does not show why.
The IDF did not hand the media any visual proof of Hamas’s military presence in the Al-Jalaa building. Its subsequent promises to provide such photography “soon” did not materialize, as of this writing.
There is reason to suspect the IDF did not fully understand the sensitivities at play in bombing the offices of a news organization, especially one as prominent as the AP, which has been a central news provider for American media since before the Civil War.
What, then, causes this failure?
ONE FACTOR in the IDF’s media blunders is the background of its spokespersons, most of whom were reared either as intelligence officers or combat commanders.
Zilberman, for instance, is an artillery commander who later headed the General Staff’s Planning Division and will soon take over as the IDF’s military attaché in Washington. In other words, prior to his assignment as IDF spokesperson he had never worked either within or opposite the media. There have been some exceptions to this pattern along the years: journalists Nachman Shai and Oded Ben-Ami, and diplomat Ruth Yaron. All three were brought from outside the military and performed well, having understood the media, both local and foreign, better than any career soldier.
This precedent was set to be repeated two years ago, when Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Aviv Kohavi nominated hi-tech executive Gil Messing as IDF spokesman. The chief communications officer of software powerhouse Check Point was only 36 at the time, and his selection was unorthodox and intriguing. However, he ended up withdrawing his candidacy.
One has to wonder how such a civilian media expert would have performed during a test like Operation Guardian of the Walls. Whether or not he would have provided imagery of Hamas’s presence in the Al-Jalaa building is anyone’s guess, but in all likelihood he would have thought how to shape the media’s narrative in advance, and not in response to events.
Then again, the problem is far larger than the IDF Spokesperson’s assignment, because it is not only about the IDF and its operations, but about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as a whole. As such, the task transcends the generals’ task, climbing to politics and diplomacy.
When comedian and TV host John Oliver accused the IDF of committing war crimes, and when he insinuated that justice must be with the weaker party, he displayed an ignorance whose treatment is not the IDF’s task. It’s Israeli diplomacy’s task, and it begins not when a TV viewer like Oliver sees Gaza in flames, but during the years in which he learned nothing about the conflict he now hastened to judge.
The same goes for The New York Times’ front-page display of 67 children’s photos, all reportedly killed in the fighting in Gaza. Subsequent revelations that some of those kids were either not kids or not killed in Gaza were ineffective, because they were responsive. The task was to make a guy like Oliver know long before the war all about Hamas’s Islamist zeal, abusive rule and disregard for human life.
That job, the ongoing transmission of Israel’s case to the world’s opinion makers, is the civilian system’s duty. And that system’s performance has been far worse than the IDF’s performance of its own segment in the information war Israel faces.
Originally entrusted with the Foreign Ministry, Israel’s advocacy effort – hasbara in Hebrew – was splintered along the years, twice: first when the Olmert government decided in 2007 to shift overall responsibility for public advocacy to the Prime Minister’s Office, and then when the Netanyahu government decided in 2015 to shift some of the advocacy activity to the Ministry of Strategic Affairs.
Some believe that the thinking behind the shift was that the Foreign Ministry is unsuitable for what the information war demands, because diplomats are generally not built to fight, and also lack the charisma and inventiveness that it is all about.
Clearly, whoever is supposed to fight this war is currently on the defensive. As a new government prepares to settle in, this too might change, considering that the designated foreign minister, Yair Lapid, is a former columnist and newscaster.
Whether he can affect Israel’s chronic public-relations problem remains to be seen. He is, however, equipped to tackle this prickly issue; no one will have to explain to him what AP is, much less what bombing its offices might cause.