As a ceasefire is announced and both sides claim victory in Israel and Gaza, the Israeli military’s online propaganda offensive continues.
By Jennifer O’Mahony, TELEGRAPH uk
On November 14, the drone assassination of Hamas military chief Ahmed Al-Jaabari appeared on the Israel Defence Force’s YouTube page in a grainy ten-second clip.
The black-and-white footage showed Jaabari’s car explode in a flash of white surrounded by a superimposed yellow target.
An image with the words “eliminated” in bold letters overlayed onto Jaabari’s face emerged within minutes of the attack in a tweet from the IDF’s official account.
In the days that followed, “points” and “badges” appeared on the military’s blog, rewarding online interaction and promotion by users and assigning them a cyber military rank based on the frequency of their visits.
The interactive game, known as IDF Ranks, asks users: “Want to help fight the misinformation about Israel and the IDF online? Well, now you can. Here at the IDF Blog you can join IDF Ranks – the ultimate virtual army.”
The idea of war as a game is not new, but Israel’s approach during the eight-day conflict was among the most sophisticated of any modern military, attempting to calm fears about attacks on Gaza at the same time as ramping up emotion over Israeli deaths, all while bypassing traditional Western media.
Thomas Rid, Reader in War Studies at King’s College London, has studied this dualism in Israel’s approach, which is best summarised as a combination of aggressive territorial defence and slick professional reassurance.
He said: “The IDF generally tries to make two points in the videos it publishes: ‘We can and will hit our enemies’ – meaning they want to frighten and deter other Hamas fighters; and ‘we are precise when we hit our enemies’ – meaning they avoid civilian casualities whenever possible. The videos are chosen to reinforce both points.”
The IDF is less hierarchical than typical military organisations, and the young people performing compulsory national service are offered a lot of responsibility. The IDF’s YouTube account, for example, was set up by Aliza Landes, then a lieutenant in her early 20s, during Operation Cast Lead against Gaza in 2009.
The organisation’s Twitter account is the brainchild of Sacha Dratwa, a 26-year-old Belgian immigrant. It counts more than 200,000 followers, compared to the 40,000 following Hamas’s military on the social network.
Dratwa and his team post live updates of every aspect of the conflict, posting news of attacks, deaths and statistics of the number of rockets fired into Israel from Gaza. A typical tweet reads: “Why is the number of Israeli casualties so low? Answers on our blog.”
Dr Rid believes that “Rockets and bullets matter more than tweets and badges,” and asserts that “War is when you get a leg blown off, not when you read a tweet on your iPhone.”
But for Chris Coles, the Oxford-based co-ordinator of Drone Wars UK, a campaign against unmanned drones in combat, the physicality of war is precisely what is lost in the “gamification” of war for those living outside the conflict.
“It is the idea of the ‘PlayStation mentality’, whereby the physical and psychological distance between the operator and the target lowers the threshold for launching weapons,” he said. “Rather than seeing flesh and blood, it is only pixels on a screen that are being destroyed.”
The Ministry of Defence confirmed in October that pilots based at RAF Waddington in Lincolnshire would begin to fly five unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, capable of carrying bombs and Hellfire missiles over Afghanistan for the same “precision strikes” Israel has employed in Gaza.
For Israelis, social media and online interaction are a chance to speak directly to a global audience that routinely idolises and demonises them.
And with its sympathetic blog posts on Israeli military life and tweets about targeting Gazan supply tunnels, the IDF shows no signs of ending its propaganda offensive, even as a fragile truce takes hold.
All I can say is, “Almighty G-d, I ask you to keep your hand on Israel, and no more war.” It is hurtful to read about the things that are happening, and I know that Israel has to defend their land, because if they don’t, I believe they would be eliminated. I absolutely despise war, but I also know that Israel has to protect their country.
Now lets see if the brits can achieve the same low collateral damage as israel achieved. Even the americans have not achieved israels abilities.
Dittos!!
So good this evil Arab Muslim dog–is dead!