Last Straw

Nat­ur­ally, Zion­ism sees new media as “a new war zone”:

The body, known as the National Inform­a­tion Dir­ect­or­ate, was set up eight months ago fol­low­ing recom­mend­a­tions from an Israeli inquiry into the 2006 Lebanon war. Its role is to deal with has­bara — mean­ing, in Hebrew, “explan­a­tion”, and refer­ring vari­ously to inform­a­tion, spin, and propaganda.

One of the chal­lenges of Israel’s media offens­ive has been to counter the dis­turb­ing images of Gaza in the con­flict. “In the war of the pic­tures we lose, so you need to cor­rect, explain or bal­ance it in other ways,” said Aviv Shir-On, for­eign min­istry deputy director-general for pub­lic affairs. “Sup­port doesn’t mean the world is stand­ing behind us, but it does mean people under­stand what we are doing and why.

The has­bara dir­ect­ive also liaises over core mes­sages with bod­ies such as friend­ship leagues, Jew­ish com­munit­ies, blog­gers and back­ers using online net­works. Last week the dir­ect­or­ate star­ted a You­Tube chan­nel show­ing Israeli bomb­ings in the Gaza strip. “New media is a new war zone within the media — we are plan­ning to be rel­ev­ant there,” said Leibovich.