In the 1950s and 1960s, the expression "Know thy enemy" was a common one in Israel. This expression relied on the common-sense belief that the line between Israel and those who plot against us must be sharpened. Things have deteriorated on this front ever since. In recent years, we have been flooded with news articles whose subtext is: Show sympathy for the enemy: The typical Gazan has both a name and a face, a wife and children to finance. They are suffering, and more importantly, they are people too. Obviously. And if we are all people, then any violation of our harmony is due only to "radicals on both sides."
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This last expression, which became fashionable in the 2000s, is further proof of this deterioration. It embeds the idea that radicals are like fire and water, and never mind that old Zionist questions of who is and isn't in the right and who has rights to this land? This logic, which absolves media consumers of historical knowledge, now has the support of a new term, "violence," which came into being to liberate us from the "archaic" term known as riots. In fact, reporters who use the term "violence" treat it as a pathological phenomenon and a social deviation. As a result, we should deal with the violence through accepted methods from the fields of social work and criminology: dialogue, letting off steam, and economic welfare, through the neutralization of the cultural, historical, religious, and nationalist con on both sides.
Another new phenomenon that has appeared since the 2000s is the tendency of information middlemen to make the distinction between "radicals" and "moderates." Journalists who adhere to this distinction do not do so purely out of a desire to clarify things for their consumers. They hope to embed the collective consciousness with the understanding Palestinians are not made of one mold; there are moderates – Fatah – and radicals – Hamas - among them. Israel should therefore rush to make a deal, meaning reach a territorial agreement – with Fatah lest Hamas take control.
Another clear expression of the systematic attempt to anesthetize national resilience can be found in the disappearance of the concept of "military victory" from the media landscape. These information mediators live in a world where the ethos of victory is a vestige of the past, one they have replaced with the pathetic term "image of victory" or ceasefire. Absent a decisive victory or ceasefire, the country must act toward "disengagement," a term invented by late Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's image consultants in the hope of promoting the expulsion of Jews. The idea behind this term was for Israelis to see the voluntary eviction of Jews from territory conquered by the Israel Defense Forces as a wise decision. The other aspiration of these consciousness engineers: to separate territory from the Jewish national consciousness.
The media dedicated the merry term "disengagement" to the expulsion of Jews from their homes, while using the term "expulsion" to describe the return of refugees and infiltrators to their homelands. What happens when the "disengagement" fails to achieve its stated goal? That is where the Iron Dome steps in. Many journalists fawn over this technology, but Iron Dome is nothing more than a tactical solution to the gravest of strategic failures that they, the journalists, and in particular senior media figures, led us toward and dragged us all into. Just like the wise men of Chelm, they dug us all a deep pit, encouraged the disengagement from the sidelines, and when the number of the dead began to mount, set up a hospital in the form of Iron Dome.
True, the media does not operate within a vacuum; The government, academia, and the cultural arena have abilities. Nevertheless, it is the media that shapes, rewrites, erases, neuters, and confers concepts and significance. What, then, is its contribution?
Media researchers tend to judge the media in accordance with the ability of certain media channels to explain reality on two levels and explain both how and why something happens. Though the former is relatively to answer, the answer to the latter is complex and far more abstract. A media that succeeds in getting the public to understand not just how it happened but why would be considered a quality media outlet. Translated for the Israeli reality, this means that we all know how we arrived at an escalation in the Gaza Strip. We have less of an understanding as to why it happened.
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