Gissin: 'Take The Israel Media War To The Enemy'



By Herb Keinon and Joel Leyden
The Jerusalem Post, Israel News Agency

Jerusalem -----November 13 ..... The Palestinians have succeeded in turning battlegrounds into crime scenes and forcing Israel into the defendant's dock, Ra'anan Gissin said Sunday, adding that Israel desperately needs to be proactive and turn the tables.

Gissin, a longtime Ariel Sharon adviser who served as an Israel foreign media spokesman during Sharon's tenure as Israel prime minister and serves as a reserve colonel in the Israel Defense Forces spokesperson's office, said a good example of how to do this was a move being spearheaded by former ambassador to the UN Dore Gold.

Gissin said Gold and other former diplomats were building a case to take to the International Court of Justice in The Hague and demand it initiate legal proceedings against Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for conspiring to commit crimes against humanity.

Gissin, spoke at the fifth annual David Bar-Illan Conference on the Media and the Middle East, held at the College of Judea and Samaria in Ariel, said this type of action would bring the Iran president's genocidal threats against Israel to the attention of the media, which so often acts as judge and jury.

Instead of constantly being on the defensive and apologizing, Gissin said, "Israel needs to take the PR war into their territory. If the media is the one who adjudicates, we need to put the other side on trial in the media - use the media as theater to carry the war into enemy territory."

Israel needed to look at the media battlefield as almost as important as the military one, and to act accordingly, he said.

For instance, he said, Israel should have known that by shelling Beit Hanun in Gaza last week the Israel Defense Forces was walking into a PR ambush, with those from Palestine eager to have pictures of dead civilians beamed around the world.

Israel lost the media war this past summer in Lebanon because it sent spokesmen with sound bites to combat the photographs of destruction and despair that dominated television and newspapers said Foreign Ministry Director of Public Affairs Amir Gissin. He was one of a host of speakers at the fifth annual David Bar-Illan Conference on the Media and the Middle East held Monday at the College of Judea and Samaria in Ariel, who analyzed the reasons why Israel found itself so ill-equipped to dominate the media blitz during the war.

"It was like sending the cavalry out to fight the machine guns in World War I," said Ra'anan Gissin.
"A spokesman can not compete with the pictures," said Gissin. He recalled the idea that a photograph is worth a thousand words. When quick victory was not achieved and Israel found itself fighting a war, it failed to adopt a "winning spirit." He added: "What started with a spin, ended without a win." What was needed was some of the spirit exhibited in the famous photograph of a wounded soldier who held up his two fingers to make the letter "V" for victory.

Gissin said it was clear after the Kassam rocket barrage on Ashkelon, Israel last week that the Palestinians were trying to lure Israel into making a Kafr Kana type of mistake that would fundamentally alter the world's view of what was taking place in Gaza.

Gissin was referring to the errant Israel missile attack in the Lebanese village of Kafr Kana during the fighting in the summer that killed 28 people and led to a temporary halt in air strikes, and also to IDF artillery shells that mistakenly killed more than 100 civilians in the same village in 1996 and effectively put an end to Israel's Operation Grapes of Wrath.

The IDF must do everything necessary to keep from entering into a "crime scene" scenario when it was clear this was what the enemy was trying to achieve, Gissin said.

"There is a pattern here. Israel needs to identify it, and act accordingly." Gissin said that just as Israel often "intercepts" suicide bombers with targeted killings before they carry out their attacks, it also needed to "intercept" damaging pictures that could quash a military operation. One way to do this would be to avoid military actions that would push the television lens in the direction of images harmful to Israel's interests, he said.

Sharon understood this, Gissin said, and that for this reason he waited to react for a few days to the terror attack on the Dolphinarium club in Tel Aviv in the summer of 2001 so that the world's camera lens would focus on the 21 Israel victims of the Palestinian horror rather than on the IDF's retaliatory actions.

"This is a global theater in which you can win the hearts and minds of people," Gissin said. But he warned that it can only happen if Israel looks at the media as the second front in any war. "You have to deal with the media with the same seriousness that you deal with other theaters of war," said Gissin.

Israel needed to take the media offensive and provide the world with real-time images of what the IDF was up against, he said. It would do Israel good to track with a camera an Islamic suicide bomber or those firing rockets at civilians to show the international community just how the terrorists operate, in the hope that this would provide the world a forceful explanation of why Israel reacts as it does.

Gissin spoke about Israel wanting peace but added the rest of the world often unfairly questions its legitimacy. He said he must spend most of his time justifying Israel’s existence to its detractors.

Gissin, who was born in 1949, is a fifth generation Israeli. He earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology and political science from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and a doctorate in political science and public administration from Syracuse University in New York. He is one of Israel’s leading spokesmen for the international community on issues of security and stabilization in the Middle East.

Gissin was recently appointed as a co-moderator of IsraelPr, an Internet based public relations and public affairs global think tank which provides 24/7 real time consultancy to the Israel Prime Minister's Office, the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Israel Defense Forces and dozens of Jewish and Israel non-profit organizations.

"In future wars, we must call them wars, and not place a spin on this action and label it a military operation," said Gissin. "That is called the sin of spin. We needed to have had all of our combat and media resources out there, we needed to declare it a war."

Gissin, who was told by the moderators of the media and PR conference that he was now greatly missed being outside of public office, concluded: "One must first shoot the enemy with film and then only after the pictures are out on the networks and on the Internet, then shoot the enemy with bullets."

 

 

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