Scene: Bibi’s office. In attendance are Prime Minister Netanyahu and everyone who would be played by a main character in an Israeli version of West Wing (to be called The Aquarium): media advisers, speechwriters, PR gurus, pollsters, etc.
Bibi: We’re three weeks into this new uprising and the world media narrative is all about how Palestinian violence is terrible but understandable given the Occupation™. We need to show that the occupation is the result of violence, not the other way around. How do we do it?
Speechwriter: We tell the truth. The truth is on our side. Their leaders lie about Jewish connection to holy sites. They lie about Ashkenazic Jews coming here as colonialist occupiers. They lie about and deny the Holocaust. About poisoning the wells. About defiling the Temple Mount with our filthy feet. They say Jesus was a Palestinian. Let them bury themselves with lies. We need to stay on message with the truth. Haters will hate.
Bibi: Who do you think you’re talking to? When I was Ambassador to the UN, I used to give these history lessons all the time. I was Mr. Context. Mr. Nuance. But it doesn’t work. Not anymore. Their lies are now presented as a side of the story, one that we have to refute.
Media Adviser: Correct. The news cycle is fast and fickle. Media outlets need click-bait. Truth, especially complicated truth, doesn’t attract eyeballs. Forget about history lessons.
Speechwriter: So we lose the media and keep the truth. Let’s stay on the high ground.
Pollster: What high ground? The media is a real battlefield today. World leaders are constrained by public opinion. If you can win public opinion, it gives your allies much more freedom and shackles your opponents. Look at Obama. There was only a certain amount of leeway he had to act against us, because American public opinion is on our side. In contrast, Sisi can’t say what he really thinks of us because public opinion is so poisoned against us.
Bibi: Agreed. But what are our options? There are a dozen groups who exist to call out the lies and inaccuracies of the media against Israel. CAMERA, HonestReporting, CIFWatch, etc. How many editions of Myths and Facts have been published? But they’re playing defense. Our enemies still control the discourse. We need to stop getting bogged down in arguments within their frame of reference. How can we play offense?
PR Guru: Talk about the Mufti.
Media Adviser: Who?
Bibi: Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. He was behind the Arab uprisings in 1920-21, he was behind the massacres in 1929, and he was behind the Arab Revolt in the 1930s, which closed the door to immigration to Mandatory Palestine just before World War II. He was behind the Farhud in Baghdad in 1941. Then he fled to Germany, where he was a guest of Hitler for the rest of the war.
PR Guru: A very bad dude, and a Palestinian founding father. If we can draw attention to him, it totally undermines the narrative that violence is the result of the occupation. He was hobnobbing with Hitler before there was a State of Israel.
Pollster: Still, too much information for the average consumer of the news. Dates, numbers, all just bugs crawling across a screen.
Media Adviser: Any pictures?
PR Guru: Yeah. There’s one of him with Hitler. There’s one of him with other high-ranking Nazis. No shortage.
Bibi: That’s the angle. We need to get that picture out there. A leading Palestinian cozying up to Hitler before there was a State of Israel.
Media Adviser: Not so simple. What are we supposed to do, send a photo of the Mufti and Hitler to all the newspapers? He’s old news. He needs to be in today’s news.
Speechwriter: What if we drop his name in a speech in English? It’ll make the newspapers.
Media Adviser: Maybe the Israeli and Jewish media. Everyone else will just ignore it or bury it. There’s no meat. Nothing to really capture the world’s attention.
PR Guru: We need to overstate the case. We need to tell a lie that will provoke reaction, that will get everyone to “set the record straight” about the Mufti.
Pollster: But it needs to be sticky. We need people to remember in a month that the Mufti is a really bad dude, but there’s disagreement about just how bad. That’s got to be the residue that’s left over in people’s minds.
Media Adviser: Especially if that picture gets out. People will remember that he had something to do with Hitler, even if they don’t remember what.
PR Guru: Great. We’re in agreement. What’s the lie that we tell?
Bibi: We tell them that the Mufti convinced Hitler to kill the Jews.
Speechwriter: With all due respect, Mr. Prime Minister, that’s insane. You will be a laughingstock. Everyone will say you’re a liar or an idiot.
Pollster: They’ll spin it against you. They’ll say that you absolved Hitler from the crime of murdering six million Jews. That you trivialize or deny the Holocaust.
Media Adviser: The memes will be flying around the internet.
Bibi: What’s a meme?
Media Adviser: Something like this.
Bibi: That’s pretty funny.
Media Adviser: Hilarious. But you will be the butt of thousands of these jokes.
Bibi: As you said, though, the news cycle is quick. I can take a round of jokes at my expense. I can clarify that Hitler is to blame for the actual killing. But what are the strategic implications? What will we lose, what will we gain?
Pollster: You won’t lose much in the polls. Haters will hate, and I don’t think you’ll lose much support. They’ll say it was a stupid gaffe and move on.
Media Adviser: It will change the discourse on the violence. People will remember, if nothing else, that Palestinian violence and opposition to the Jewish state predates any occupation. It will put the Palestinian leadership on the defensive for the first time I can remember.
Bibi: And what about my credibility? This is a major strategic shift we’re talking about. It means no one will ever trust us again.
Pollster: There’s a risk. No question. On the other hand, you’d be amazed at the degree to which supporters overlook the flaws of their favored candidates and magnify the flaws in the ones they don’t like. It’s crazy. You’d think they’d realize by now that the vast majority of politicians are borderline sociopathic. But no.
PR Guru: Look, everything you say is filtered through the media anyway, and they’re understandably not credible. People pick their news sources based on what they want to hear. If someone looks to the media, any media, for truth, they get what they deserve. And that’s the overwhelming majority of people. All we’re doing is getting the media to tell the lie that we want them to tell instead of the one that they would tell otherwise.
Media Adviser: Look, if we tell the truth, they respond with lies. If we lie, they’ll respond with truth or lies. We can still respond to their lies with truth, but honestly, nobody knows the difference anymore, anyway. And there’s also the truthiness factor.
Bibi: The what?
Media Advisor: Truthiness. The quality of feeling true even if it isn’t. The word comes from Colbert, the American comedian, but it’s basically driving American politics right now. Take Trump. His overall message resonates with people, and they don’t care about details, accuracy, reasonability, etc.
Speechwriter: That blathering idiot?
Media Adviser: That blathering idiot is a juggernaut who might be the next POTUS. If you read the Dilbert Blog, you’d also know that he’s a genius.
Bibi: I don’t want to be compared to Trump.
PR Guru: You won’t be. He’s an extreme case. But there’s value in taking notes from a master. He absolutely dominates coverage of the 2016 elections.
Bibi: Okay. And what about our relationship with the PA? Long-term damage?
Speechwriter: Actually, it can advance your overall vision. You’ve said time and again that peace can only come with mutual recognition of each other’s claim to the land, and that any two state solution has to acknowledge that Israel is the state that embodies the self-determination of the Jewish people, just as the Palestinian state will be the nation-state of the Palestinian people. A major obstacle to that is this notion that we’re foreign occupiers with no connection to the land. Attention to the Mufti will help marginalize that narrative, which, after all, was propagated by a Nazi.
Bibi: Interesting. I like it. When’s my next scheduled major English speech?
Media Adviser: World Zionist Congress on Tuesday, October 22.
Bibi: Draft the speech. Plant the bombshell in it. Then, gentlemen, we will sit back and watch as the whole world acquaints itself with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.
I would like to think this was true and that the Jewish brain still thinks
People will now see that the pals were nazis, that its not just an epithet. When seeing that their behavior and jew killing goals have never varied they might then even realize that ANY serious peace negotiations with nazis is ludicrous.
even better than “people” realizing all this is that perhaps the Israeli jews might even realize this, and realize that it is absurd to keep dangerous anti semites in their home; that it is absurd to make aliya from anti semitism to suffer anti semitism and muslim abuse in a jewish state; that it is absurd to prioritize democracy for anti semites over the safety of jews and a jewish right of freedom from anti semitism. The day that Israeli Jews realize this, my dream will have been realized because the only problem is jewish realization followed by the inevitable conclusions.
I think Netanyahu played the world for fools.
And every one is still talking about the Mufti The Nazi.
There’s your Internet meme.