Are Palestinians Poised for New Propaganda Campaign?

Jerusalem, 29 June, 2023 (TPS) -- As the security situation in Jenin and northern Samaria heats up, so is the likelihood of a Palestinian propaganda campaign to garner world sympathy ahead of a possible Israeli counter-terror operation.

As terror escalated — including an unusually large bomb buried beneath a road that injured seven soldiers and the launch of the first rocket from Jenin, the Israel Defense Forces called in a helicopter strike and a targeted assassination of three terrorists in tactics not seen in Judea and Samaria in 20 years.

With the Palestinian Authority having little influence in northern Samaria, many Israelis and Palestinians anticipate a major IDF operation in the near future.

But  a Palestinian propaganda campaign using staged video footage could put Israel on the defensive in the arena of international opinion, experts told the Tazpit Press Service.

“It would certainly make sense to do it. Given the stuff I’ve seen coming out recently, like the scenes of them in a hospital ducking fire that never comes,” said Professor Richard Landes, author of “Can The Whole World” Be Wrong?: Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism, and Global Jihad,” which was published in November 2022.

Landes explained that Palestinians frequently play for the cameras, “people ducking and other people standing and looking around.”

“But that’s B-roll” or supplementary footage, he said. “A-roll would be something like al-Dura.” Landes was referring to footage purporting to show 12-year-old Muhammad al-Dura caught in the crossfire of an Israeli-Palestinian shootout at Gaza’s Netzarim Junction in September 2000.

“If they can possibly stage footage of some kid getting killed, that’s gold. That’s diamond. That’s just what they want. And the fact that today, there are people who are convinced they are right that the Israelis kill kids intentionally is a product of the al-Dura affair. The Palestinians have been saying for years that Israelis target kids.”

Ben-Dror Yemini, a journalist, lawyer, author of the 2017 book, “Industry of Lies: Media, Academia, and the Israeli-Arab Conflict,” agreed that the Palestinians would likely stage an incident for propaganda value.

“They’ve done it many times. They’ve done it before, they do it now and they’ll do it in the future,” he told TPS. “You can count on it. When they manipulate and they fake, they just cheat and get public opinion globally. That’s what they want to do. They do it by lies. And most times, they’ve succeeded.”

He said that Palestinian children often play for the cameras “and they just pretend to be killed, covered with white sheets.” But raw footage shows the children getting up afterwards “and the show is finished.”

He said technology has made the propaganda dynamic worse, since questionable videos can be so easily shared.

But Yemini stressed that “It’s not only social media, it’s a campaign that includes the newspapers, academia and social media all together. They sell the same campaign in order to demonize the State of Israel.”

Fact-Checking

Yemini also called on journalists to do a better job of fact-checking.

“What you need to do is check the facts,” he said. “You cannot talk about Gaza as the biggest prison in the world when actually it has nothing to do with Israel. It has to do with Hamas, which is refusing to accept the preconditions of the Quartet, of the international community.” The Mideast Quartet — made up of the United Nations, European Union, US, and Russia — demanded that Hamas recognize Israel, renounce terror and comply with previous Israeli-Palestinian agreements in 2006.

Elaborating on the need for verification, Landes cited the death of Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian-American journalist who was killed while covering an Israeli raid in the Jenin refugee camp in 2002. Moreover, the Israeli Police were unfairly blamed when an Arab mob hijacked her funeral.

“Unlike the al-Dura case, she actually gets killed. But immediately, the Palestinians claimed that she was killed, she was targeted by Israeli snipers and killed on purpose,” Landes said.

“And that was picked up by the media without hesitation even though every witness that said that had deeply suspicious origins.” One key witness, Palestinian journalist Ali Smoddi, had been previously caught on film by Israel-French filmmaker Pierre Rehov coaching a woman on how to lie about being forced to give birth in a car at an Israeli checkpoint, Landes pointed out.

“And this is the guy that the Western media accepts as a legitimate witness and therefore buys the argument that the Israelis killed Abu Akleh on purpose,” said Landes. “Since al-Dura, the Western media has been enormously receptive to Palestinian claims and enormously resistant to Israeli denials.”

Landes stressed that in the last 20 years, the Dura video has had what he called “two mythical impacts.”

“In the Muslim world, it’s a call to jihad. Bin Laden used it in his recruiting video shortly after the event,” Landes noted.

“And in the Western world, it’s an opening to Holocaust inversion. In other words, the Israelis are the Nazis and the Palestinians are the innocent civilians,” he stressed. “And if anything the impact of this was primarily on the Left in the West.”