From Twitter to Trench: The Israeli Army’s Propaganda War in Gaza

From Twitter to Trench: The Israeli Army’s Propaganda War in Gaza

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On May 14, the official Twitter account of the Israeli military released a “popular question and answer” video, inviting viewers to “imagine” themselves as the Israeli armed forces and decided to react to the rockets in the Gaza Strip.The answer options are: Nothing[.] Allow terrorists to destroy Israeli cities” or” B. Target terrorists who fire rockets. “

According to the military, “there is only one correct answer”: Option B. In fact, the more accurate answer should be: bomb Gaza at the blacksmith shop and kill the entire Palestinian family in response to rockets that are not even capable of destroying Israeli cities, and these rockets only fired at Israel, because Israel has been in the past 73 years The Palestinians were massacred or otherwise tortured. “

In the Israeli attack that began on May 10, nearly 250 Palestinians have been killed so far, including 66 children. As always, the Israeli military Twitter account has become a valuable weapon for conducting parallel propaganda wars to strengthen personal attacks.

The account currently has 1.5 million followers. The account is mainly dedicated to transforming the roles of victims and victims, portraying Israel as an Israeli-in theory, this is a difficult task because “victims” usually do not Will violently establish its own country on other people’s land to carry out ethnic cleansing and massacre of legal residents.

The destruction in Israel and the Gaza Strip is fully proportional, which means that the Israeli military is usually reduced to tweeting on air raid sirens and attaching a useful color map: “In the past 30 minutes, every red in Israel The dot sirens are all sounding: Israel is under attack.”

If these red dots are not fascinating enough, a tweet on May 11 encouraged Twitter users to listen to the audio clip of “SIRENS IN TEL AVIV” and “imagine hearing this sound and having a few seconds of life.” “On May 12, another tweet announced: “It is 3 am and Tel Aviv is launching more rockets. The family was awakened and rushed to the bomb shelter.”

It doesn’t matter, there is a lack of air-raid sirens or air-raid shelters in Gaza. Imagine, for example, that six-year-old Suzy Eshkuntana was evacuated from the rubble of her home in Gaza City seven hours after the Israeli airstrike killed her mother and four siblings. . Or imagine, it’s Eman Basher, a teacher from the United Nations Relief and Engineering Agency, who tweeted on May 13: “Tonight, I will let the children sleep in our bedroom. In this way, when we die , We will die together, and no one will mourn for each other’s loss.”

The entire purpose of the Israeli army is to “imagine,” but it is limited to the perspective of Israel’s invention. Another sensational video tweet titled “Imagine this is your reality” aims to show that “Israel is all in fire” through clips of rockets, flames and people running. The video tape prompts the audience to “imagine whether it is Washington”; “imagine it like Paris?”; “imagine it if it is London”.

At the same time, this army continues to exert cinematic enlightenment on the Gaza Strip. It does require a lot of imagination to imagine Israel as a victim.

Sometimes the military urges the Twitter community to imagine events through so-called Palestinian views. Its video tweet on May 18 “explains that Hamas uses human shields” began: “Imagine your house is surrounded by terrorism”-for Israel, looking at flat high-rise buildings, this is probably not necessary The imagination of the residents of Gaza and the buildings around them.

According to Israel’s extremely cumbersome narrative, Palestinian “terrorists” were buried in civilian areas, and therefore should be condemned when Israel wiped out civilians. To be sure, the military will regularly provide rigorous evidence to support this claim, which is expected by any entity with such technical prowess.

For example, the now deleted videotape “Explain that Hamas uses human shields” contains footage of Hamas rockets that Israel claims are embedded in civilian areas of Gaza. However, as Reuters reporter Raphael Satter pointed out, these shots are actually Israel’s “2018 Israel Training Exercise”! (Sart continued to point out that the Israeli military “difficult to distinguish Hamas rockets from Israeli rockets. This fact does not inspire confidence in the quality of its intelligence.”)

In May 2010, the state of Israel was frustrated by a similar digital attack when the army killed eight Turkish activists and one Turkish-American on Mavi Marmara (the flagship of the fleet trying to provide aid to Gaza). According to Israel’s official statement, the Israeli commandos who shot people of descent from helicopters were the real victims of this incident. The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs set out to upload photos of the “weapons” allegedly found on the ship, including marbles, keffiyehs, kitchen knives and slingshots. .

This photo of the slingshot was originally taken in February 2006, that is to say, more than four years before the air assault team was transported to the sea area of ??the besieged coastal enclave by transporting baby incubators and medicines to brutally attack the air and sea assault team. . True, when your entire narrative about the victim is a lie, what is the need for meticulous detail?

Finally, if you are an Israeli army and you have established an Internet connection, then you have little to argue with. If the military is responsible for publishing other current affairs news, we might hear deer attacking shotguns, snorkelers attacking sharks with legs, chainsaws hurting chainsaw chainsaws, rats being eaten by cheese, and so on.

As for the role of journalists in disseminating Israeli propaganda (Western corporate media has long been guilty of this), it is widely believed that the Israeli military induced foreign media to report on the ground invasion of Gaza on May 13. Push Hamas fighters into tunnels for large-scale attacks.

Of course, there are other options for dealing with the media, such as canceling its Gaza office (think Washington, Paris or London) as it did on May 15.

The Israeli army explained the attack on this 11-story building on Twitter. The attack destroyed the offices of Al Jazeera and the Associated Press, as well as many residential buildings. It is “an important base of operations for Hamas’ military intelligence”.

More interesting is the famous satire “The Onion” (The Onion), which calls on Israel to “burn the onion’s own international office to rubble as soon as possible,” so as not to have “any Hamas workers hiding there.” The article urged Israel to “not issue any prior warnings to tenants located in these buildings” and concluded that “if carpets bombing the entire city block where our offices are located will eventually end this cycle of violence, it will be inconvenient. Regards please forgive.”

Now, as the Israeli army continues to wage real and digital warfare, destroying the truth in the process, it is time to reduce its narrative to rubble.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.





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