On the images – Anshel Pfeffer in Haaretz:

‘About 18 months ago, after returning from a reporting trip to Ukraine, an Israeli general asked me what I thought the main lessons were from that war. I answered that I’m sure he didn’t need any lectures from me on the proper usage of tanks in combined arms warfare, but that if there was anything Israel should learn from it, it’s the power of videos made on the battlefield to influence the international narrative of a war.
“For the first weeks of the war in Ukraine,” I told him, “very few journalists, if any, had access to the battlefield in Ukraine and most of the reporting was being done from the cities. We knew of course that both sides were taking heavy casualties, but very few visuals came out. What did emerge were well-produced videos of Ukrainian missile teams ambushing and destroying Russian tanks. It doesn’t matter that this was only a small part of what was happening: it was the image of those early stages of the war.”’

(…)

‘Last week, I watched a compilation of these videos, the worst of the worst of footage from Hamas body cameras, kibbutz security cameras, and social media posts of both the victims and perpetrators, prepared by the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit. A slightly updated version with added horrors was screened to larger groups of journalists this week. You can read the details of what was on the screen elsewhere. At this point, I’m more interested in what the IDF was hoping to achieve.’

(…)

‘So why screen the footage of mutilated and burned bodies of women and children? Because, as the officers of the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit – and a few lonely media experts on the Netanyahu government’s hollowed-out civilian side – began to realize at the end of the first week of this awful war, Israel’s case was not actually so easy to make.
It should be painfully obvious, but it wasn’t. Wide swaths of Western public opinion – particularly on the left, especially among the well-educated younger generation and the news organizations serving them – were far from convinced that the Israelis were the victims. The scenes had failed to convince them otherwise. They remained conditioned to see Israelis, even dead children, as the oppressors.’ (…)

‘Look closer at all his years in politics and that’s basically what he has had to sell. Hasbara. A deep belief that Israel doesn’t have to improve itself; it is perfect as it is. All it needs is to explain itself better.
He sold that to Israelis, to many Diaspora Jews and to a whole cohort of wanna-Bibis, who believe it is their duty to wage hasbara war on Israel’s behalf rather than fight to make Israel a better place. And guess what? The world didn’t buy it, and then parts of the world got so tired of it that when Israel had an unassailable moral case, they still refused to believe their own eyes.
The conceptual failure of hasbara doesn’t excuse those who refuse to see Hamas for what it is – a mortal threat to Israelis and Palestinians – or their moral blindness and in some cases latent Jew-hatred. It doesn’t mean that Israel, like any other country at war, doesn’t need to be presenting its case with facts and confidence.’

Read the article here.

One could argue that the US lost the war in Vietnam because of the images and that the fathers and mothers of the American middle class just didn’t want their sons to die in Vietnam for nothing. Images undermined the narrative of the generals and the politicians.

Those with their eyes and ears open could have known that the intellectuals in the West were convinced that the Palestinians were the true victims in this conflict. The Lebanon war of 1982 was the turning point.

Ideology and moral blindness are brothers, this can be said about both sides.

And yes, the conflict is about land, but the conflict is also about the question, who is the true victim? Especially the latter is a rather form of competition.

The concept of Hasbara turned out to be another failure, because underneath it was too much rot. Israeli politicians underestimated geopolitical strategies (in which the Palestinians are merely a pawn in the eyes of for example the Iranian regime, but an important pawn) and the same politicians thought that the real suffering of too many Palestinians was going to be be merely background noise.

Moral blindness is just a given. Don’t complain about it too much. Wherever people have strong convictions moral blindness will sprout up.