In Gaza conflict, both sides ratchet up war of propaganda

By JODI RUDOREN / New York Times News Service

Send this clipping to somebody

Transcribed from the clipping

Jerusalem — The Gaza-based interior ministry advises its supporters in a YouTube video that whenever talking about the dead, “always add ‘an innocent citizen.’” In Israel, the message is quite different: Those same victims are described as “human shields” sacrificed by the “heartless” Hamas “terrorists” that rule Gaza.

Recently, thousands of Israeli mobile phone users received a text message that bragged: “We forced you to hide in shelters like mice,” while Israelis trade cartoons and satirical videos — one intersperses an Arab political speech with a slobbering goat, another replaces the heads of Palestinian fighters with Angry Birds characters.

And Hamas and the Israel Defense Forces are circulating remarkably similar video clips of exploding buildings with thundering soundtracks that evoke Hollywood thrillers. “Time for revenge has arrived,” warns one Hamas video, in Hebrew.

An Israeli one, making fun of Palestinian accents, says, “Balestine, listen, this is a message to Gaza, we are killing Gaza,” adding, “The IDF is strong! Gaza is weak!” The ground war between Israel and Hamas intensified again Sunday with many more civilians and soldiers dying. But that is only one battlefield.

Another, the clash of narratives, the struggle for domestic and international opinion, is seen by both sides to have long-term stakes as high and perhaps even more lasting than combat on the ground. Propaganda wars have unfolded alongside the battlefield for generations.

But analysts said the latest flare-up between Israel and the Gaza Strip has brought a new level of dehumanizing, hateful language and a muddying of official talking points with incendiary threats, as social media broadcast an explosion of voices, an onslaught of unreliable information, and creative mash-ups of pop-culture icons with war imagery.

Etgar Keret, an Israeli novelist, said he has been troubled by some of the terms favored by journalists, politicians and even friends in Tel Aviv. There is no Hebrew word for “assassination,” Keret said, so killings of Hamas operatives are described with a phrase meaning “focused obstruction.”

Instead of “civilians,” he said, slain children and women are sometimes called “uninvolved.” There is a long history here of such euphemisms. The journalist Amos Elon called it “word laundry,” and David Grossman explored the phenomenon in “The Yellow Wind,” his 1987 study of Palestinian life under Israeli occupation.

“A society in crisis forges for itself a new vocabulary,” he wrote, using “words that no longer describe reality, but attempt, instead, to conceal it.”

How this transcription was made

Date confirmed on the page (folio). Adjudicated confirmed against the printed page: Folio line at the top left of the page, above the rule and the headline, reads "Monday, July 21, 2014" in bold sans — sharp and unambiguous. 21 July 2014 was a Monday. The folio gives the date only; i.

Context added by this archive

The most self-aware clipping in the batch: an American paper printing a story about how both sides launder the words for Palestinian dead, and in doing so using the word 'occupation' in its own voice, in a descriptive clause about a 1987 book.

Note the paper's own nouns in the lead are all in quotation marks and attributed - 'human shields', 'heartless', 'terrorists' - which is the opposite of how the Omaha and Chicago pages handle the same vocabulary. Rudoren also reports the casualty line flatly ('many more civilians and soldiers dying') without numbers.

Cite this clipping

"In Gaza conflict, both sides ratchet up war of propaganda," The Day, 21 July 2014. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2014-057. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2014-057