A group of the Israeli occupation army in the Gaza Strip (Israeli press)
There were no Palestinian Fedayeen in Sinai when the Israeli delegate to the United Nations said, 1956;
His country was forced to occupy it to keep the guerrillas away from the borders and to stop the massacres being committed against the people of Israel.
Israel was working for an opportunity to attack the Sinai Peninsula, and the French-British aggression against Egypt provided it with an opportunity to achieve this.
America stood against the aggression, implemented punitive economic measures against Britain, and rebuked Israel.
Eisenhower was preparing for a new election round, and Russian tanks were storming Hungarian territory.
The American President justified his country's position by saying:
Resorting to force to resolve political disputes will harm global security.
In order to condemn the Soviet encroachment on Eastern Europe, and to rally the world against that invasion, it was necessary to condemn a similar invasion carried out by Eisenhower's allies.
Israel began to explain its part of the war: it does not invade, but rather defends the right of the people of Israel to exist.
Israel learned from that war that it must dress like a victim before opening fire, so that it does not have to go through hard propaganda work in defense of its actions.
In the weeks before the June 1967 setback, Nasser decided to close the Strait of Tiran with limited forces and no air cover.
The Israeli media started crying and lamenting about the people of Israel who are being suffocated and starved.
When the Americans requested a report detailing the extent of the damage that would be caused to Israel as a result of closing the Strait of Tiran, Tel Aviv’s leaders refused to respond, because with the exception of oil coming from Iran, commercial exchanges with the world were passing through other ports.
Israel worked to control narratives before and after crises.
By October 12, 2023, she had filled YouTube and the X platform with poignant announcements about the tragedy that befell her children.
The destruction that Israeli forces inflicted on Arab countries, days later, carried its moral legitimacy.
There is no army in the world that stands idly by while enemies suffocate its people and deprive them of fuel and food.
Hasbara is a popular Hebrew word that in classical Hebrew means clarification.
Over time, it has come to refer to Israel's public diplomacy, which is a type of sustainable propaganda that controls the narrative emerging from the Middle East, and manages it in a way that achieves two things at the same time: leaving a good image of Israel, and a bleak one of the people of Palestine.
Within the Hasbara regime, Israel is keen to present itself as a victim under threat, and this happens because it is the only democracy in the region, and because of the religion of its people.
The Palestinian, according to the Hasbra, is a corrupt regime in Ramallah, terrorist groups in Gaza, and scattered human groups that indoctrinate their children to hate Jews.
Israel recognizes the importance of world public opinion, and makes a great effort to maintain its external image.
Although it did not succeed in becoming a country for all the Jews of the world, it has turned into the Kaaba of the Jewish religion, and its image must be kept bright and inspiring in the eyes of the world.
The poll conducted by the Pew Center, which specializes in measuring opinion, in 2019 revealed that 45% of American Jews have visited Israel at least once in their lives, and that 82% of them see caring for Israel and its affairs as an issue that lies at the core of their Jewish identity.
Care activities include maintaining Israel's image, and training in Hasbara methods and techniques.
In 2002, under the influence of the Second Intifada, the International Federation of Jewish Students published “Hasbara: How to Defend Israel on Campus?”
The book is 131 pages long, the first half of which explains a number of issues related to communication with the world, such as writing, public speaking, and correspondence.
While the last part of it was unique in teaching the Jewish student the dilemma and its solution, such as: the refugee issue, terrorism, the Camp David negotiations, settlement, and others.
Regarding settlement, the Jewish student must repeat these words: There are no new settlement projects, there is a natural expansion of Jewish families whose number of members has doubled.
Faced with the “claim” that Israel’s presence destabilizes the security of the Middle East, the Jewish student, anywhere in the world, must address the issue with these words: The Middle East suffers from profound turmoil due to religious division among its peoples, and as a natural result of the colonial legacy.
In addition to a number of complex crises, such as: the Iraq-Iran war, the Iranian Islamic Revolution, the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, the Islamic-secular conflict in Egypt, and the enormous oil wealth whose proceeds go to the ruling elites and not their people.
Israel worked to control narratives before and after crises.
By October 12, 2023, she had filled YouTube and the X platform with poignant announcements about the tragedy that befell her children.
Some of these ads end with the phrase: "We know that children cannot read what is written here, but parents can. Pray for the families who lost their children in Israel."
In one of them, a blurry image of the bloodied body of a child appears, with an appeal to parents - Western ones in particular - to embrace their children.
Israel has used childhood to create victimhood since its early founding years.
During World War II, after 1942, Anne Frank, then 13 years old, began writing her diary in a basement in Amsterdam.
At the same time, another Jew from Norway, named Ruth Mayer, was doing the same thing, and she fled to Frankfurt.
Mayer's writing is more comprehensive and eloquent than Frank's, but she was only 22 when she lost her life in a Nazi camp, so her memoirs remained neglected until 2008, barely gaining traction.
Al-Hasbara searches for rich, unconventional images to enhance its discourse, which Anna Frank provides more than Ruth Meyer.
Through the story of Anne Frank, Israel was able to torment the European conscience for more than half a century.
The colonial phenomenon, in its various forms, degrades the humanity of indigenous people, such as claiming that they carry criminal genes in their DNA, as Nigerian writer Biko Agozino has noted.
The demonization of indigenous people has facilitated the process of erasing them. When the problem is in the genes, every means of reform becomes in vain.
In the first days of the war on Gaza, Netanyahu described the children of Palestine as children of darkness, as opposed to children of light in Israel.
Israel goes to every war after building a victim narrative and disseminating it widely.
The victim is not expected to be harmed, and thus Israel dares to talk about the most moral army in the world, and the only democracy in the region.
Due to the abundance of information, the world has become more capable of seeing, and the average individual has become able to connect times together and have a comprehensive look at what is happening in them.
It is interesting to note that the Hasbara discourse still works in the same way: the Israeli victim surrounded by the savage.
Israel left behind a number of complications that cannot be hidden by hasbara alone, such as refugees, occupation, siege, apartheid, and violations of international law.
With every military operation launched by Israel inside the Palestinian territories, all these issues are reproduced, causing the Hasbara to lose its ability to influence.
Wars do not take place in a vacuum, but rather within a complex historical context.
The results of the poll conducted by the "Globe Scan" organization, based in Canada, in 2013, which included 25 countries in the world, said: Only 21% have a positive image of Israel.
This result came a year after the 2012 Gaza War. In July 2014, Israel resumed its war on Gaza, reinforced by the loud Hasbara noise of a moral army defending the Jews’ right to live.
Shortly after the end of the war, Chatham House conducted a survey in Britain, the results of which were published in 2015, noting that North Korea was the only country that surpassed Israel in terms of notoriety.
In this war, the Hasbara system was able to put its lies in the words of the American President himself, and to push the leaders of democratic countries to repeat the most vile types of lies. Despite all of this, Israel went for the first time to the International Court of Justice surrounded by a highly plausible accusation of committing the crime of human genocide.
Israel does not have a foreign policy, but rather a domestic policy, as Kissinger noted.
Foreign policy is replaced by hasbara.
The book Hasbara, referred to above, says: The Jewish student must transfer the discussion about peace as a principle to peace as a process, and avoid delving into consequences.
Hesbra requires a small image on which to build a large entity, and if it does not find it, it invents it.
When Edward Said stood near the Israeli-Lebanese border, in July 2000, and threw a stone at the checkpoint, the Hasbara machine went into action, and the professor of English literature almost lost his position at Columbia University.
The stone that Said threw, in a race with his daughter, became further evidence of the barbarism of the Palestinian, even if he was a professor of English literature.
Under the whips of Hasbara, Saeed blamed his Arab friends. He said:
He wished he could compliment them in a different way than that, as Shakib Kazem narrates in Al-Quds Al-Arabi.
The Hasbara machine can create alternative realities, and the first victims of that machine are the Israeli people themselves.
In their book “The Nakba in Hebrew,” recently published by the Palestinian Center for Israeli Studies, spouses Eitan and Eleonore Bronstein talk about the Hasbara within the school education system, where the Palestinian Arab appears to be a barbarian who works tirelessly to eradicate Israel.
The students learn that there is no space to meet the Palestinian, either Israel from the sea to the river or Palestine.
The army - the authors say - works in the service of this narrative, and from time to time its generals storm schools and speak to students directly.
In the current war, the Hasbara machine is working brilliantly internally after losing its external influence, and the people of Israel still, by a significant majority, support more war on Gaza, and feel fear.
It is not the war that is the cause of sustained Israeli fear, but rather the Hasbara machine that puts the Israeli on a hot plate, taking him back to his history, where he slept for a long time on his packed suitcases, always ready to leave.
A study conducted by the Knesset Center for Research and Information, 2019, said: Nearly half of Israelis in the north and south do not feel safe, and that a third of them are thinking about moving to safer areas.
In “The Nakba in Hebrew,” Eleonore Bronstein recalls the moment when she, a Frenchwoman, discovered her Jewishness.
As a child, she was playing with her cousin, and she found herself saying: “If the Nazis come back, you will be at the top of their list, because you are Jewish,” to which she replied: “You are also Jewish, and they will take you as well.”
You suddenly become afraid, that's what it means to be Jewish.
The heartbreak that never stops saying;
An existential danger surrounds Israel. It is unable to deceive the world all the time, but it succeeds internally, creating fearful citizens and packed bags.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.