From Benjamin Netanyahu’s book “Bibi: My Story”.
“My conversations with Father [Benzion Netanyahu] were eye-opening. He put forward a stark proposition: in today’s world, you can’t defend a military victory without a political victory; you can’t defend a political victory without a victory in public opinion; and you can’t win public opinion without an appeal to justice. (My underlining).
"If your adversaries succeed in portraying your cause as unjust, they will gradually erode your position. It didn’t matter if your cause was a genuinely moral one if you didn’t present it as such. Some of the greatest aggressors in history portrayed themselves as just and their victims as unjust.
"This happened to Israel time and again. Israel kept winning on military battlefields and losing on political ones. Israel’s clearly just war of self-defense in 1967 was portrayed by Arab propaganda as an aggressive war of conquest. They conveniently hid the fact that they laid a siege of death on the tiny Jewish state, choked its trade route to Asia and formed a tristate military pact that openly called for Israel’s annihilation.
“Arab propaganda systematically covered up the true root cause of the Israeli-Arab conflict—the persistent Arab refusal to recognize a Jewish state, whatever its borders.”
-- p. 103 of 724 in Kindle version, Chapter 13.
Some thoughts on the nice formulation above by Benzion Netanyahu, Bibi's dad, back in the 1970s.
1. Israel lost the public opinion war in those days of the 1970s and it’s still losing that battle today in the war in Gaza.
2. Hamas has been much more effective in winning over hearts and minds in the west. Especially, but not only, amongst the youth.
3. This is all the more incredible given the brutality of the October 7th attacks on Israel.
4. Hamas has done so on the asymmetric warfare tactic of the “Dead Babies strategy". They make the most out of all civilian deaths on their side. Especially dead babies and children. Of which there are many because of deliberate “Human Shield” tactics. And which they then give to western media, which replays them on the nightly news every day in every way and with no question. (“a photograph is not an argument”. Except, well... it kind of is).
5. The western media is also complicit, in accepting every word and every picture from Hamas, as if true. And if it turns out not to be true, there’s never a retraction.
6. Given all this, I wonder if the above advice by Bibi’s father to his son -- from Benzion to Benjamin -- is relevant any more.
7. I suspect that Bibi is still working on that advice. He does seem to care about the public opinion to the extent of putting off war aims that he should have carried out. For example, he held off attacking Rafah during Ramadan because of “public opinion”. Many are saying that that lost the momentum of the war, and perhaps even lost the war itself, given that the Biden Administration is now pushing a “Comprehensive Ceasefire deal” that amounts to Israel surrender.
8. Therefore, there is now a case that Israel should simply ignore “public opinion”. The opinion of the world, the opinions of the United Nations, of the ICC, of the ICJ, of the protesters on elite campuses around the world. There is nothing that Israel could do, no care and concern for Gazan civilians enough for them to think that Israel has done enough. No matter what Israel does it’s never enough. Ergo don’t worry about trying to do enough. Just worry about the war aims.
9. The “appeal to justice”, that Bibi’s Father mentions above, hasn’t worked. Israel has done that, all its supporters have done that. And yet, the justice of Israel’s actions is dismissed, ignored, mocked. This, despite that it can be clearly stated, is convincing and is soundly based. It's as nothing to the haters of Israel.
10. Any time that Israel does try to put its position, its justified position, to give facts and history, it is dismissed as “Zionist propaganda”. All that’s believed comes from Hamas. A clearly bad actor, a serial liar, a terrorist organisation, committed to genocide of Jews. And yet they’re the ones believed. “You can’t rationalise someone out of a view that they’ve reached irrationally”.
That’s my own feelings about it. It’s just me being an "extreme, a horrid right-wing radical” (as I’ve been called by some OR’s). Well, yeah, I guess. I do plead guilty to wanting Israel to win this war. I can’t see any good coming out of capitulation. The capitulation that the Biden Administration wants and many in the west want.
Winning means winning. It means demolishing Hamas. The only thing that’s standing in the way of Israel winning is that Israel, and perhaps Bibi too, are perhaps overly concerned about the “public opinion” that Bibi’s father drilled into him fifty years ago.
Winning does not mean some BS "ceasefire agreement" foisted on Israel by a man -- Joseph Biden -- of whom Barack Obama famously said: “never underestimate Joe’s capacity to fuck things up."
