July 21, 2014
Israeli soldiers weep at the grave of Israeli Sgt. Adar Barsano during his funeral on Sunday, July 20, in Nahariya, Israel.
HIDE CAPTION
Israel's ground offensive in Gaza
Editor's note: Michael
B. Oren, a CNN Middle East analyst, is the Abba Eban chair in
international diplomacy at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya,
Israel, and an ambassador-in-residence at the Atlantic Council. He was
formerly Israel's ambassador to the United States. The opinions
expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
(CNN) -- The displacement, injury, and death of
civilians in war is always tragic, and the current fighting between
Israel and Hamas in Gaza is no exception. But unlike the vast majority
of conflicts in history, Operation Protective Edge, as Israel calls it,
is one in which images of civilian suffering play a central—and
potentially decisive—role in the outcome.
And the reason is simple:
More than a military strategy, Hamas has a media strategy.
Calculatingly, Hamas employs primitive military tactics to mount a
sophisticated media campaign that can threaten Israel's basic security.
And in conducting that offensive, Hamas can count on one of the world's
most powerful weapons: the international media.
Hamas fires hundreds of
rockets at Israeli cities and towns and tries to attack Israeli farms
via the sea and through tunnels. Thanks to Israeli technology and
vigilance, few of these actions have inflicted extensive damage. Still,
they disrupt Israeli life, impair the economy, and leave cumulative
psychological scars.
Michael Oren
As a sovereign nation,
Israel must respond robustly to such attacks. And as a state committed
to Jewish and democratic values, Israel provides water, humanitarian
aid, and electricity to the residents of Gaza even as their government
murders Israelis.
Throughout, Israel
strives tirelessly to minimize Palestinian civilian casualties. Yet in
spite of the hundreds of thousands of leaflets Israel dropped, the
countless text messages and personal phone calls it made warning
Palestinian civilians to leave targeted areas, tragedies still occur.
Israel deeply regrets these losses and continuously hones its operations
to make them more surgical still.
In a war with Hamas,
though, Israel's strength and morality can become vulnerability and
guilt. By investing nothing in air raid sirens and bomb shelters, by
hiding deep beneath neighborhoods and shooting near hospitals and
mosques, Hamas ensures that Israel will invariably wound and kill
civilians.
Hamas gunmen carry out
attacks disguised as women and old men, fight from UN and Red Cross
vehicles, store rockets in schools, and physically prevent Palestinian
civilians from fleeing combat zones. This context, though, is rarely
mentioned by the media when covering the civilian cost of the fighting.
Unlike Israel, which
respects the privacy and dignity of its fallen, Hamas has no difficulty
in displaying these casualties to foreign cameras. And the media
broadcasts them, obsessively.
The sources of that
obsession are many. They include genuine empathy for the Palestinians,
objection to Israeli policies, and even animus toward the Jewish state.
Still, many journalists would be appalled by the suggestion that they
are aiding a terrorist group indistinguishable from ISIS and al-Qaeda.
Most, rather, are just doing their job by providing their audiences with
the most up-to-date pictures and stories.
But whether visceral or
professional, the correspondents' motives are, in fact, irrelevant to
Hamas. It merely has to know that dozens of Palestinian victims of
Israeli fire capture more headlines and airtime than tens of thousands
of Syrian victims of Syrians or Iraqi victims of Iraqis.
Hamas knows that the
construction of a world-leading civil defense system in Israel, and the
utter absence of one in Gaza, will ensure a growing gap between Israeli
and Palestinian casualties. And that disparity, Hamas knows, will become
the focus of media attention and accusations that Israel uses force
disproportionally.
Above all, Hamas knows
that shocking images—some of them taken from the carnage in Syria and
Iraq and even from Hollywood horror movies—inflame public opinion. Under
mounting pressure, governments will endorse UN condemnations of Israel
for war crimes. Hamas missiles cannot destroy Israel, but international
sanctions can tie its hands from deflecting them.
Unwittingly or not, the
international media is complicit in Hamas's plan. While some may think
they help the Palestinians by highlighting their plight, in reality, the
journalists only worsen it. They effectively absolve Hamas of
culpability for using Gaza's population as a human shield, of stealing
its aid money to buy munitions and dig fortified tunnels with the sole
purpose of killing Israelis, and of contributing nothing to Gaza's
welfare.
Israel, by contrast, is
expected to apologize for protecting its citizens and for not suffering
as many civilian losses as the Palestinians. Rather than depicting a
complex reality in which both Israelis and Palestinians are victims of
Hamas, the media prefers facile narratives of West versus East,
colonialists versus natives, Goliath versus David.
Yet the most helpful
role that the media plays for Hamas—and the worst disservice for
Palestinians—is in demoralizing Israelis. They are willing to pay a high
operational price, even to endanger their own soldiers, to avoid
hurting Palestinian civilians.
Yet, in spite of these
unprecedented efforts, the Jewish State is often depicted by the media
as indiscriminate and callous. By calling them killers even when they
take risks to save lives, the media discourages Israelis from showing
restraint in the face of ceaseless Hamas attacks. And Hamas, which wants
to drag Israel into a ground war in which even more civilians are
killed, welcomes the media's role in convincing Israelis that image-wise
they have nothing to lose by escalating.
Former President Bill
Clinton recently told Indian television that Hamas "has a strategy
designed to force Israel to kill their own [Palestinian] civilians so
that the rest of the world will condemn them." A crucial means through
which Hamas accomplishes this is the international media.
Just as Israel must
relentlessly scrutinize its military actions in Gaza and their
consequences, so, too, must journalists take a hard look at the way they
cover this conflict. They must not allow themselves to act as
accessories to Hamas's murderous strategy that delegitimizes Israel and
prolongs the Palestinians' suffering.
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