Earlier this week we picked up Frank Luntz’s polling data that Zionism has become a negative word for American elites. Well the process is further advanced in Britain. The JC.com, a British Jewish publication, reports the following statements from an appearance by Matthew Gould, Britain’s ambassador to Israel:
[N]o ambassador could have softened the impact of pictures of dead Palestinian children in Gaza which appeared daily on the news during the summer, irrespective of the rights and wrongs of the conflict, [Gould] argued.
“There is no amount of hasbarah or public diplomacy that is going to convince the vast majority of the British public that settlement announcements are a good thing,” [Gould] declared.
“There is no amount of hasbarah… which is going to convince the British public that Israel is the underdog in this conflict.”
Mr Gould expressed fears that Israel was “slowly losing, bit by bit, the elite centre ground of British public opinion”.
The recent parliamentary vote in support of British recognition of a Palestinian state, while it had made no difference to British government policy, reflected “a level of impatience and frustration with what’s happening, with Israeli settlement building and continuing waves of conflict”.
Speaking of English influence leaders who are growing queasy about where Israel is going, Roger Cohen has a column in the International New York Times, “Two Ideas of Israel-Palestine,” that presents the conflicting narratives one gets from an Israeli and a Palestinian about the rising tensions in the land. Cohen presents these two narratives neutrally, as equal and incompatible, but the Palestinian bats last and sounds far more reasonable. I believe anyone who reads these lines from each narrative will have to agree with the Palestinian:
[Israeli:] The Land of Israel was given to the Jews, it’s in the Bible. The West Bank does not exist, nor does the so-called occupation. It’s Judea and Samaria, Jewish land. Get used to it…
[Palestinian:] The Jews say the land is theirs because the Bible says so — and that’s not making this a religious war! If we try moderation, we’re unilateralists; if we resist, we’re terrorists; if we mourn, we are death merchants; if we breathe, we are intruders. They don’t want two states, they want a “peace process” to camouflage colonial rule. Gaza is the way it is because that is the way Israel wants it in order to say, you see, peace with these people is impossible. They have all America, money, nuclear bombs, highways, drones, an army and technology. We have nothing. We are poor. We only have our narrative. But we will fight until we have a state that restores our pride.
Again I insist that a nationalist ideology that has a religious basis is anathema to reconstituted American values; and that the girl gangs in the streets of Jerusalem attacking Palestinians are the fruit of such an ideology. It doesn’t take an elitist to hear this talk and recoil.
P.S. Ami Kaufman finds the Cohen piece too smooth: “I’ve got news for you, Roger Cohen, this… is a rich, armed-to-the-teeth colonial regime that has been stepping on the neck of an oppressed people for 47 years. That’s the narrative. That’s the story.”
Thanks, again, to Ofer Neiman.
Great article Phil, and it is encouraging to know that things are indeed turning, especially in places where it counts. No unbiased person one could have watched those horrible scenes of the Gaza massacre, destruction of homes, schools, even Mosques, and seen the bloody scenes from UN shelters, and NOT come to that conclusion. I still cannot understand how the pro Israel/zionists crowd, could have watched the same scenes and NOT felt some compassion, remorse, and realized it was wrong in many ways. I cannot understand how the US congress and brainwashed leaders can keep supporting the side that inflicts pain and suffering, and use their offices to stop the occupation.
I was moved by the Palestinian side of the narrative:
“[Palestinian:] The Jews say the land is theirs because the Bible says so — and that’s not making this a religious war! If we try moderation, we’re unilateralists; if we resist, we’re terrorists; if we mourn, we are death merchants; if we breathe, we are intruders. They don’t want two states, they want a “peace process” to camouflage colonial rule. Gaza is the way it is because that is the way Israel wants it in order to say, you see, peace with these people is impossible. They have all America, money, nuclear bombs, highways, drones, an army and technology. We have nothing. We are poor. We only have our narrative. But we will fight until we have a state that restores our pride.
SO very well said.
I have to disagree, I find Cohen’s entire framing revolting. Yes, he gives some eloquence to the Palestinian side on what boils down to tactics (resistance and peace process) but completely elides any argument for equal rights and an end to ethnocracy. At the end he has the Palestinians where he wants them: wanting a state of their own (so they can get out of the way of Cohen’s Jewish democracy).
Then, though the Jewish side sounds unreasonable to us, the comments show it’s the opposite for many of his readers. And even if he sets up the Israeli side with some flawed religious arguments, his real point is liberal Zionist dialogue fantasy: this is the Jewish narrative which Palestinians must come to accept in return for Jews accepting theirs. Even-handedness, except in the end Palestinians get driven into their beseiged bantustans and Zionists keep their supremacist system.
Any time someone sets up two straw arguments like this there’s a good chance of sleight-of-hand.
This is great news to wake up to, but the very next thing I thought was does this mean that Britain’s military establishment will sever its trade deals with Israel? Or will their business establishment? Or will they now put pressure on their American counterparts to wake up, act decent, and stop underwriting the next Israeli onslaught?
It’s all well and good to get see Israel for what it is, but what exactly is the next step? Is Mr. Gould’s change of heart merely a gentle personal warning to Israel to “tone it down” or does it portend a real policy shift away from business as usual?
You know which one I’m hoping for.
Jon Snow of Channel 4 who went to Gaza and broadcast from there during the height of the slaughter, represented a lot of the shift in British thinking over Israel as the carnage turned Brits, who are basically decent , objective people who don’t like bullshit, firmly against hasbara.
And all Israel had was crap from morons like Bennett who thought he could translate his Hebraic hatred, which makes perfect sense to anyone Jewish who went through the Israeli “education” system, into English
If you compare Snow with Bennett it’s no wonder Israel lost the UK elite. Snow wiped the floor with Yigal Palmor, one of the chief wizards of hasbara.
It’s very hard to sell rabies as logic.
http://www.channel4.com/news/israel-threatens-to-escalate-gaza-offensive-hamas-video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4z4TvDbffI0&feature=youtu.be
Regev got slapped around by Emily Maitlis on BBC2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRfNRQblXbs
versus
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMG7Fze6sgQ
and the Palestinians had the videos this time
http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/war-crime-video-shows-sniper-killing-wounded-gaza-civilian
While Israeli Jews are educated to see Gazans as vermin and they support IDF policy in reiterating that point they can only sell their peace loving and rational façade to the West if they have decent hasbara. And they don’t.
Because it’s incoherent now. Especially in an age where images take precedent over Luntzisms.
Something that nobody in leadership in Israel understands is that it is no longer the 1970s. Those people who wore those wide ties are no longer calling the shots thinking about poor little Israel, that plucky fighter.
It was pretty clear that Israel was running a punitive campaign designed to terrorise the people of Gaza back to the siege and that Israel didn’t care how many people it killed.
And that’s IDF logic. Because we are JEWS and nobody tells us what to do. Which is fine if you run an autarchic economy with no trade with the outside world. But the world is a little bit more nuanced.
And it is made even more interesting by the fact that Israel has this desperate neediness alongside the limitless cruelty. Please love us. And it is very hard to love a sociopath. Or maybe Israel just has a collective form of paranoid schizophrenia.
Israel punished Gaza like a group of prison thugs punish a prisoner who refuses to bend to their rules. And this makes sense in Hebrew. Because it’s what Shulman calls the parallel world in which Israelis think , the Homeric world of white Israel surrounded by dark forces of Amalek.
But nobody in the real world buys that .
And that is why hasbara is in crisis.