After they became an inseparable part of the service provided by public-relations companies and advertising agencies, paid Internet talkbackers are being mobilized in the service in the service of the State. The Foreign Ministry is in the process of setting up a team of students and demobilized soldiers who will work around the clock writing pro-Israeli responses on Internet websites all over the world, and on services like Facebook, Twitter and Youtube. The Foreign Ministry’s department for the explanation of Israeli policy* is running the project, and it will be an integral part of it. The project is described in the government budget for 2009 as the “Internet fighting team” – a name that was given to it in order to distinguish it from the existing policy-explanation team, among other reasons, so that it can receive a separate budget. Even though the budget’s size has not yet been disclosed to the public, sources in the Foreign Ministry have told Calcalist that in will be about NIS 600 thousand in its first year, and it will be increased in the future. From the primary budget, about NIS 200 thousand will be invested in round-the-clock activity at the micro-blogging website Twitter, which was recently featured in the headlines for the services it provided to demonstrators during the recent disturbances in Iran.
“To all intents and purposes the Internet is a theatre in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and we must be active in that theatre, otherwise we will lose,” Elan Shturman, deputy director of the policy-explanation department in the Foreign Ministry, and who is directly responsible for setting up the project, says in an interview with Calcalist. “Our policy-explanation achievements on the Internet today are impressive in comparison to the resources that have been invested so far, but the other side is also investing resources on the Internet. There is an endless array of pro-Palestinian websites, with huge budgets, rich with information and video clips that everyone can download and post on their websites. They are flooding the Internet with content from the Hamas news agency. It is a well-oiled machine. Our objective is to penetrate into the world in which these discussions are taking place, where reports and videos are published – the blogs, the social networks, the news websites of all sizes. We will introduce a pro-Israeli voice into those places. What is now going on in Iran is the proof of the need for such an operational branch,” adds Shturman. “It’s not like a group of friends is going to bring down the government with Twitter messages, but it does help to expand the struggle to vast dimensions.”
“To all intents and purposes the Internet is a theatre in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and we must be active in that theatre, otherwise we will lose,” Elan Shturman, deputy director of the policy-explanation department in the Foreign Ministry, and who is directly responsible for setting up the project, says in an interview with Calcalist. “Our policy-explanation achievements on the Internet today are impressive in comparison to the resources that have been invested so far, but the other side is also investing resources on the Internet. There is an endless array of pro-Palestinian websites, with huge budgets, rich with information and video clips that everyone can download and post on their websites. They are flooding the Internet with content from the Hamas news agency. It is a well-oiled machine. Our objective is to penetrate into the world in which these discussions are taking place, where reports and videos are published – the blogs, the social networks, the news websites of all sizes. We will introduce a pro-Israeli voice into those places. What is now going on in Iran is the proof of the need for such an operational branch,” adds Shturman. “It’s not like a group of friends is going to bring down the government with Twitter messages, but it does help to expand the struggle to vast dimensions.”
The missions: “monitoring” and “fostering discussions”
The Foreign Ministry intends to recruit youths who speak at least one foreign language and who are studying communications, political science or law, or alternatively those whose military background is in units that deal with information analysis. “It is a youthful language”, explains Shturman. “Older people do not know how to write blogs, how to act there, what the accepted norms are. The basic conditions are a high capacity for expression in English – we also have French- and Swedish-speakers – and familiarity with the online milieu. We are looking for people who are already writing blogs and circulating in Facebook”.
Members of the new unit will work at the Ministry (“They will punch a card,” says Shturman) and enjoy the full technical support of Tahila, the government’s ISP, which is responsible for computer infrastructure and Internet services for government departments. “Their missions will be defined along the lines of the government policies that they will be required to defend on the Internet. It could be the situation in Gaza, the situation in the north or whatever is decided. We will determine which international audiences we want to reach through the Internet and the strategy we will use to reach them, and the workers will implement that on in the field. Of course they will not distribute official communiquיs; they will draft the conversations themselves. We will also activate an Internet-monitoring team – people who will follow blogs, the BBC website, the Arabic websites.”
According to Shturman the project will begin with a limited budget, but he has plans to expand the team and its missions: “the new centre will also be able to support Israel as an economic and commercial entity,” he says. “Alternative energy, for example, now interests the American public and Congress much more than the conflict in the Middle East. If through my team I can post in blogs dealing with alternative energy and push the names of Israeli companies there, I will strengthen Israel’s image as a developed state that contributes to the quality of the environment and to humanity, and along with that I may also manage to help an Israeli company get millions of dollars worth of contracts. The economic potential here is great, but for that we will require a large number of people. What is unique about the Internet is the fragmentation into different communities, every community deals with what interests it. To each of those communities you have to introduce material that is relevant to it.”
The inspiration: covert advertising on the Internet
The Foreign Ministry admits that the inspiration comes from none other than the much-reviled field of compensated commercial talkback: employees of companies and public-relations firms who post words of praise on the Internet for those who sent them there – the company that is their employer or their client. The professional responders normally identify themselves as chance readers of the article they are responding to or as “satisfied customers” of the company they are praising.
Will the responders who are hired for this also present themselves as “ordinary net-surfers”?
“Of course,” says Shturman. “Our people will not say: ‘Hello, I am from the policy-explanation department of the Israeli Foreign Ministry and I want to tell you the following.’ Nor will they necessarily identify themselves as Israelis. They will speak as net-surfers and as citizens, and will write responses that will look personal but will be based on a prepared list of messages that the Foreign Ministry developed.”
Test-firing in the Gaza War
According to Shturman, although it is only now that the project is receiving a budget and a special department in the Foreign Ministry, in practice the Ministry has been using its own responders since the last war in Gaza, when the Ministry recruited volunteer talkbackers. “During Operation Cast Lead we appealed to Jewish communities abroad and with their help we recruited a few thousand volunteers, who were joined by Israeli volunteers. We gave them background material and policy-explanation material, and we sent them to represent the Israeli point of view on news websites and in polls on the Internet,” says Shturman. “Our target audience then was the European Left, which was not friendly towards the policy of the government. For that reason we began to get involved in discussions on blogs in England, Spain and Germany, a very hostile environment.”
And how much change have you effected so far?
“It is hard to prove success in this kind of activity, but it is clear that we succeeded in bypassing the European television networks, which are very critical of Israel, and we have created direct dialogues with the public.”
What things have you done there exactly?
“For example, we sent someone to write in the website of a left-wing group in Spain. He wrote ‘it is not exactly as you say.’ Someone at the website replied to him, and we replied again, we gave arguments, pictures. Dialogue like that opens people’s eyes.”
Elon Gilad, a worker at the Foreign Ministry who coordinated the activities of the volunteer talkbackers during the war in Gaza and will coordinate the activities of the professional talkbackers in the new project, says that volunteering for talkback in defence of Israel started spontaneously: “Many times people contacted us and asked how they could help to explain Israeli policy. They mainly do it at times like the Gaza operation. People just asked for information, and afterwards we saw that the information was distributed all over the Internet. The Ministry of Absorption also started a project at that time, and they transferred to us hundreds of volunteers who speak foreign languages and who will help to spread the information. That project too mainly spreads information on the Internet.”
“You can’t win”
While most of the net-surfers were recruited through websites like giyus.org, which was officially activated by a Jewish lobby, in some cases is it was the Foreign Ministry that took the initiative to contact the surfers and asked them to post talkbacks sympathetic to the State and the government [of Israel] on the Internet and to help recruit volunteers. That’s how Michal Carmi, an active blogger and associate general manager at the high-tech placement company Tripletec, was recruited to the online policy-explanation team.
“During Operation Cast Lead the Foreign Ministry wrote to me and other bloggers and asked us to make our opinions known on the international stage as well,” Carmi tells Calcalist. “They sent us pages with ‘taking points’ and a great many video clips. I focussed my energies on Facebook, and here and there I wrote responses on blogs where words like ‘Holocaust’ and ‘murder’ were used in connection with Israel’s Gaza action. I had some very hard conversations there. Several times the Foreign Ministry also recommended that we access specific blogs and get involved in the discussions that were taking place there.”
And does it work? Does it have any effect?
“I am not sure that that strategy was correct. The Ministry did excellent work, they sent us a flood of accurate information, but it focussed on Israeli suffering and the threat of the missiles. But the view of the Europeans is one-dimensional. Israeli suffering does not seem relevant to them compared to Palestinian suffering.”
“You can never win in this struggle. All you can do is be there and express your position,” is how Gilad sums up the effectiveness so far, as well as his expectations of the operation when it begins to receive a government budget.
* “department for the explanation of Israeli policy” is a translation of only two words in the original Hebrew text: “mahleqet ha-hasbara” – literally, “the department of explanation”. Israeli readers require no elaboration. Henceforth in this article, “hasbara” will be translated as “policy-explanation”. It may also be translated as “public diplomacy” or “propaganda” – trans.
Translated for Occupation Magazine by George Malent
The Foreign Ministry intends to recruit youths who speak at least one foreign language and who are studying communications, political science or law, or alternatively those whose military background is in units that deal with information analysis. “It is a youthful language”, explains Shturman. “Older people do not know how to write blogs, how to act there, what the accepted norms are. The basic conditions are a high capacity for expression in English – we also have French- and Swedish-speakers – and familiarity with the online milieu. We are looking for people who are already writing blogs and circulating in Facebook”.
Members of the new unit will work at the Ministry (“They will punch a card,” says Shturman) and enjoy the full technical support of Tahila, the government’s ISP, which is responsible for computer infrastructure and Internet services for government departments. “Their missions will be defined along the lines of the government policies that they will be required to defend on the Internet. It could be the situation in Gaza, the situation in the north or whatever is decided. We will determine which international audiences we want to reach through the Internet and the strategy we will use to reach them, and the workers will implement that on in the field. Of course they will not distribute official communiquיs; they will draft the conversations themselves. We will also activate an Internet-monitoring team – people who will follow blogs, the BBC website, the Arabic websites.”
According to Shturman the project will begin with a limited budget, but he has plans to expand the team and its missions: “the new centre will also be able to support Israel as an economic and commercial entity,” he says. “Alternative energy, for example, now interests the American public and Congress much more than the conflict in the Middle East. If through my team I can post in blogs dealing with alternative energy and push the names of Israeli companies there, I will strengthen Israel’s image as a developed state that contributes to the quality of the environment and to humanity, and along with that I may also manage to help an Israeli company get millions of dollars worth of contracts. The economic potential here is great, but for that we will require a large number of people. What is unique about the Internet is the fragmentation into different communities, every community deals with what interests it. To each of those communities you have to introduce material that is relevant to it.”
The inspiration: covert advertising on the Internet
The Foreign Ministry admits that the inspiration comes from none other than the much-reviled field of compensated commercial talkback: employees of companies and public-relations firms who post words of praise on the Internet for those who sent them there – the company that is their employer or their client. The professional responders normally identify themselves as chance readers of the article they are responding to or as “satisfied customers” of the company they are praising.
Will the responders who are hired for this also present themselves as “ordinary net-surfers”?
“Of course,” says Shturman. “Our people will not say: ‘Hello, I am from the policy-explanation department of the Israeli Foreign Ministry and I want to tell you the following.’ Nor will they necessarily identify themselves as Israelis. They will speak as net-surfers and as citizens, and will write responses that will look personal but will be based on a prepared list of messages that the Foreign Ministry developed.”
Test-firing in the Gaza War
According to Shturman, although it is only now that the project is receiving a budget and a special department in the Foreign Ministry, in practice the Ministry has been using its own responders since the last war in Gaza, when the Ministry recruited volunteer talkbackers. “During Operation Cast Lead we appealed to Jewish communities abroad and with their help we recruited a few thousand volunteers, who were joined by Israeli volunteers. We gave them background material and policy-explanation material, and we sent them to represent the Israeli point of view on news websites and in polls on the Internet,” says Shturman. “Our target audience then was the European Left, which was not friendly towards the policy of the government. For that reason we began to get involved in discussions on blogs in England, Spain and Germany, a very hostile environment.”
And how much change have you effected so far?
“It is hard to prove success in this kind of activity, but it is clear that we succeeded in bypassing the European television networks, which are very critical of Israel, and we have created direct dialogues with the public.”
What things have you done there exactly?
“For example, we sent someone to write in the website of a left-wing group in Spain. He wrote ‘it is not exactly as you say.’ Someone at the website replied to him, and we replied again, we gave arguments, pictures. Dialogue like that opens people’s eyes.”
Elon Gilad, a worker at the Foreign Ministry who coordinated the activities of the volunteer talkbackers during the war in Gaza and will coordinate the activities of the professional talkbackers in the new project, says that volunteering for talkback in defence of Israel started spontaneously: “Many times people contacted us and asked how they could help to explain Israeli policy. They mainly do it at times like the Gaza operation. People just asked for information, and afterwards we saw that the information was distributed all over the Internet. The Ministry of Absorption also started a project at that time, and they transferred to us hundreds of volunteers who speak foreign languages and who will help to spread the information. That project too mainly spreads information on the Internet.”
“You can’t win”
While most of the net-surfers were recruited through websites like giyus.org, which was officially activated by a Jewish lobby, in some cases is it was the Foreign Ministry that took the initiative to contact the surfers and asked them to post talkbacks sympathetic to the State and the government [of Israel] on the Internet and to help recruit volunteers. That’s how Michal Carmi, an active blogger and associate general manager at the high-tech placement company Tripletec, was recruited to the online policy-explanation team.
“During Operation Cast Lead the Foreign Ministry wrote to me and other bloggers and asked us to make our opinions known on the international stage as well,” Carmi tells Calcalist. “They sent us pages with ‘taking points’ and a great many video clips. I focussed my energies on Facebook, and here and there I wrote responses on blogs where words like ‘Holocaust’ and ‘murder’ were used in connection with Israel’s Gaza action. I had some very hard conversations there. Several times the Foreign Ministry also recommended that we access specific blogs and get involved in the discussions that were taking place there.”
And does it work? Does it have any effect?
“I am not sure that that strategy was correct. The Ministry did excellent work, they sent us a flood of accurate information, but it focussed on Israeli suffering and the threat of the missiles. But the view of the Europeans is one-dimensional. Israeli suffering does not seem relevant to them compared to Palestinian suffering.”
“You can never win in this struggle. All you can do is be there and express your position,” is how Gilad sums up the effectiveness so far, as well as his expectations of the operation when it begins to receive a government budget.
* “department for the explanation of Israeli policy” is a translation of only two words in the original Hebrew text: “mahleqet ha-hasbara” – literally, “the department of explanation”. Israeli readers require no elaboration. Henceforth in this article, “hasbara” will be translated as “policy-explanation”. It may also be translated as “public diplomacy” or “propaganda” – trans.
Translated for Occupation Magazine by George Malent
Homepage:
Comments
Hide the following comment
FLASHBACK: Israel's blonde bombshells and real bombs in Gaza
15.07.2009 12:02
Israel's blonde bombshells and real bombs in Gaza
by Yosefa Loshitzky, The Electronic Intifada, 5 January 2009
"I reiterate that we will treat the population [of Gaza] with silk gloves" -- Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert
I am not sure that most people understand the meaning of the name "Operation Cast Lead" chosen by Israel for its murderous and criminal attack on Gaza. The name is borrowed from a Hebrew nursery rhyme which was (and may still be) very popular among Israeli children in the 1950s. In this song, a father promises to his child a special Hannukah gift: "a cast lead sevivon." Sevivon, in Hebrew (A dreidel in Yiddish) is a four-sided spinning top, played with during the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah. Somebody, in the Israeli army, who apparently feels nostalgic about his childhood, decided that if Israeli kids would enjoy a sevivon cast from lead there is no reason why Palestinian children would not appreciate it too. After all Operation Cast Lead is not the first (and unfortunately, will not be the last) of Israel's cruel war games.
The cynicism embedded in the name, selected for what Ari Shavit, one of Israel's most celebrated commentators, called "an intelligent, impressive operation," is symptomatic to the cold, meticulous and calculated cruelty with which this attack was "designed," "executed" and "marketed" to the world. As the perpetrators themselves proudly boast, Operation Cast Lead is not only a great military victory but also a success story of Israeli hasbara (meaning in Hebrew, explanation, but practically referring to misinformation, spin and lies).
This great victory, as some (but not enough) noticed, prominent among them, Richard Falk, United Nations Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, is targeted against the "wretched of the world." They are first, second and third generation refugees (originating from the area currently being rocketed from Gaza), the poorest people in the world, crammed in one of the most densely-populated areas on the planet, already starved and weakened by months of Israeli blockade. The sanitized language of the western media calls it "a disproportionate reaction." But the ground zero that it creates for the Palestinians, who, over the last decades, have achieved the dubious honor of becoming the world's quintessential victims, should be a "shock and awe" for any person who has not, as yet, lost his or her basic humanity and sense of justice.
Israel's oiled propaganda-machine was further lubricated by its self-acknowledged decision to select women as their masbirim (misinformation spokespersons) so as "to project a feminine and softer image." To add some cool glamour to Israel's hot lies, Tzipi Livni, the state's foreign minister and a natural blonde, announced, in response to calls for truce: "There is no humanitarian crisis in the [Gaza] Strip, and therefore there is no need for a humanitarian truce." The blonde offensive, led by the rising star of Israeli politics, was fortified by a team of peroxide blonde Israeli women, whose sex, lies and video games decorated TV screens worldwide. They explained to the sympathetic world the hardships endured by the nuclear-armed Israelis threatened by the crude rockets. After all, one Israeli was killed in the last six months, while three other Israelis (one of them a Palestinian citizen of Israel) were killed by rockets since Gaza has been turned into a slaughter-house by the silk gloves of the Israeli army.
Quick to join this sugar-coated team of blonde bombshells were Israel's most celebrated and translated writers abroad, Amos Oz and David Grossman. The two project to the international community (i.e., the so-called liberal west) what it regards as Israeli political conscience and moral voice. Both are given a special stage by prestigious western media platforms to express their opinions regarding major political events involving Israel. They are Israel's hamasbirim haleumim (the national spokespersons) a euphemism for national (or international) deceivers, who whitewash Israel's dirty laundry in the global launderette.
Grossman (slightly more to the "left" than Oz) has obtained an extra moral authority after his own tank commander son was killed in Israel's murderous attack on Lebanon in 2006. In a militaristic society, centered on the cult of the fallen soldier, a bereaved father (av shakul in Hebrew) enjoys a special status. One could have expected Grossman to "cash" in this newly gained status and come out with a more courageous stance, one that would criticize Israel's immoral massacre, rather than re-play the eternal Jewish victim, pleading "to halt" Israeli fire while promising Hamas that: "Even if you continue to fire on Israel, we will not respond by resuming combat. We will grit our teeth, just as we did throughout the period before our attack."
Israelis, in Grossman's self-adulatory discourse, are rahmanim bnei rahmanim (merciful sons of merciful fathers), dignified and righteous victims. Perhaps this is what Olmert meant when he talked about the silky touch of the Israeli gloves caressing "ordinary," non-militant Palestinians in Gaza.
One could think about a braver bereaved parent, Smadar Elhanan-Peled for example. A mother who, after losing her daughter in a suicide bomb attack in Jerusalem, publicly and openly put the blame for her daughter's death on the Israeli government and its cruel policies towards the Palestinians. Her teenage daughter, unlike Grossman's son, was not a tank commander, not even a soldier but just an ordinary girl.
The well-orchestrated propaganda machinery was also equipped with Israel's most successful "secret weapons" of mass deception: playing the role of the victim again. It is not an accident, therefore, that, as the Israeli spin doctors themselves explained in an interview to The Jewish Chronicle, that: "The international media were directed to a press center set up by the foreign ministry in Sderot itself so that foreign reporters would spend as much time as possible in the main civilian area affected by Hamas rockets." The scenes of crying, panic-stricken Israelis added some excessive emotionalism which counter-balanced, but nicely complemented, the team of the icy blonde offenders.
The designation of the Gaza Strip and south Israel as a "closed military zone," and the ban on media coverage of the Gaza carnage contributes to the sanitized view of the Gaza story as manufactured by Israel. The real horror and gore is reserved for the Al Jazeera's spectators, particularly the Arab ones. Ghetto-under-siege Gaza remains almost silent and partly invisible to the rest of us. We hardly hear or see in mainstream media, testimonies from the ground.
But we are bombarded by statements and "explanations" given by Israeli officials and "international experts" who discuss the "situation" calmly and "logically." After all, unlike the hysterical, always shouting and crying Gazans, they have not been bombarded by for nine days straight. They are interviewed in their comfortable (probably leather-clad) offices. They look and sound like respectable westerners, just like "us," and their foreign minister is very calm and cool as her blonde hair obliges.
A pioneering study by the Glasgow University Media Group on media coverage of conflicts, taught us that if you look respectable and calm you must be right. The Palestinians, by contrast, usually interviewed when they are in a state of shock, look disheveled, disoriented, slightly hysterical. And they are always surrounded by chaos and disorder. The buildings around are destroyed, debris is scattered everywhere, and the noise is unbearable (not to mention that they speak this incomprehensible language). Is something wrong with them? Also, even when they are not "extremists" they are always on the defense, almost apologetic, trying to convince us that they are not terrorists, not even militants, just ordinary people who want to survive, if not to enjoy this life. This makes them look even more suspicious.
After all, if they are not terrorists, what are they doing in Gaza? Gaza, we should remember, was declared as "hostile entity" by Israel in September of 2007. And since only the powerful have the power to define, even if their definitions amount to tautologies or oxymorons, they are still the accepted ones. According to this perverse logic, produced in Fortress Israel and marketed to the whole world, any Gazan deserves to die. Furthermore, despite the fact that Israel claims to attack only Hamas and not the Palestinians (conveniently oblivious to the fact that, as David Boardman reminds us, the majority of Palestinians voted democratically for Hamas), it still clings to its old law of blood, according to which, as John Berger observes: "One Israeli life is worth a hundred Palestinian lives." So if in the course of the last six months, one Israeli died as a result of a Hamas rocket attack, it is perfectly logical that in a week 500 Palestinians will lose their lives and thousands more will be injured. This is what the Israelis view as a policy of deterrence.
We should not forget, however, that behind this cruel apparatus of sex, lies and video war games, a more "primitive," "organic," and tribal cruelty, usually well hidden from the scrutiny of the outside world, is operating. Most people in the west do not realize the indifference, and more disturbingly, the joy with which Israelis receive news about the suffering of Arabs and particularly Palestinians. It is more common in the west to see Arab and Muslim crowds "dancing on the roofs" when missiles or rockets hit Israel (as was the case during the 1991 Gulf War) but it is less common to see or hear Israelis cheered at the plight of suffering Palestinians and Arabs. More than once, I have encountered a jovial taxi driver applauding the good news that he has just heard. "Let them all die in agony" was a standard reaction that I have become accustomed to hear on a day-to-day basis while I was still living in Israel.
It was also not uncommon in my Jerusalem neighborhood -- even prior to the onset of the second Palestinian intifada -- to see Israeli Border Police brutally harass poor old Palestinians who came to collect some "valuables" from the garbage bins of the affluent Jews. Time and again it happened in front of a popular Jerusalem cafe, where people were sipping their lattes, completely oblivious to the unfolding drama. Nobody, among these beautiful people, seemed to be bothered by these scenes, or to suffer from some disturbing reflections on the transfer of guilt.
Israel's cruelty -- manifested through its use (or rather abuse) of language, and creative "strategy" of "re-branding" its continuous assaults on the Palestinians as a war of defense, using their tautological logic to justify the extermination of an "entity" which they designate as "hostile" -- should be interpreted in the spirit of Giorgio Agamben. The influential Italian philosopher argued in relation to the Nazi death camps that the "correct question to pose concerning the horrors committed in the camps is, therefore, not the hypocritical one of how crimes of such atrocity could be committed against human beings" but what were "the juridical procedures and deployments of power by which human beings could be so completely deprived of their rights and prerogatives that no act committed against them could appear any longer as a crime."
We may well ask the same question today when listening to Israel's blonde bombshells explain the bombs tearing apart the people of Gaza.
Yosefa Loshitzky is Professor of Film, Media and Cultural Studies at the University of East London. Her most recent books are Identity Politics on the Israeli Screen (2001) and (as editor) Spielberg's Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler's List (1997).
Yosefa Loshitzky
Homepage:
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2009/01/417412.html