WarSclerotic

JERUSALEM—With elections three months away, Israelis were looking forward to a campaign driven by domestic issues. There was a craving for an ordinary national debate on issues like cost of living and wage gaps and the relationship between the ultra-Orthodox minority and the mainstream. The rise of the social protest movement, the transformation of the Labor Party’s focus from peace to social change, the growing disaffection among working class Israelis, many of them conservative Likud voters, with the government’s economic policies—it seemed like Israel would finally enjoy a political season like that of any normal country.

But the latest eruption in Gaza has returned Israel to its exceptional reality. Israel’s next national election, like the others in recent memory, will be defined by the big existential questions, by questions of war and peace and territory.

The current round of fighting will likely be resolved, sooner or later, with another fitful ceasefire. Israel hardly wants to be dragged into a protracted ground war in Gaza, with its inevitable horrors and international pressures. Other than restoring deterrence against the rocket launchers, though, Israel has no clear strategic goal. Toppling the Hamas regime is tempting but futile; it would likely be replaced by another variation of radical rule. And so Israel’s mission will be to restore relative quiet along the border—until the next time.

But regardless of what happens in Gaza, the illusion of a domestically driven election is over. Perhaps it was naïve to expect that an Israeli election could downplay foreign policy. The Syrian border, which briefly erupted last week for the first time since the 1973 Yom Kippur War, is as unstable as it’s been in recent memory. Hezbollah is waiting for the next round in Lebanon. The Egytian-Israeli border has become a terrorist front. And sanctions aren’t slowing Iran’s nuclear program. Not since May 1967, when Arab armies moved toward Israel’s borders, has Israel faced such danger. Some in the Israeli stategic community believe that the more apt analogy is with May 1948, when Israel declared its independence and was immediately invaded by seven Arab armies.

But if the latest fighting has confronted Israelis with the limits of wishful thinking, it has only encouraged the illusions of Israel’s critics. They impatiently acknowledge Israel’s right to defend itself against missile attacks on its civilian population, but then insist that the conflict could have been avoided if the government of Benyamin Netanyahu had simply been willing to negotiate peace with Palestinians.

Most Israelis would surely agree that a peace agreement with the Palestinians is far preferable to yet another round of fighting. But few Israelis, whatever their politics, blame Netanyahu for the absence of peace. There is a consensus that peace with the Palestinian national movement—or rather that half of the Palesitnian national movement represented by Mahmoud Abbas, rather than the jihadist Hamas—isn’t possible at this time. Indeed, that is precisely why the left-liberal opposition Labor Party had intended to shift its focus from the non-existent peace process to social issues. (The polls suggested this was a promising pivot: Before the latest fighting, Labor was expected to grow from an embarrassing 8 seats to 20 or more in the 120 seat Knesset.) Whether Labor will be able to focus on domestic issues depends entirely on what now happens in Gaza.

Most Israelis understand, no less than their critics, that the ongoing occupation is a long-term existential threat to the Jewish state. But they also understand that a Palestinian state, created by a national movement that denies Israel’s legitimacy, could become an immediate existential threat, turning Tel Aviv into the next Sderot, the Israeli town bordering Gaza which has endured thousands of rocket attacks over the last decade, making normal life impossible.

The result is a stalemate—not in the political arena, but within the Israeli psyche. For most Israelis, the debate between left and right over the territories has been resolved. The left won the debate over occupation, the right won over peace. Every poll in recent years confirms that, if peace were possible, most Israelis would agree to far-reaching territorial concessions. But those same polls reveal that most Israelis believe that no amount of territorial concessions will win Israel real peace and legitimacy among its neighbors. And so, at least for now, most Israelis want to be doves but feel they are compelled compelled to act as hawks.

Netanyahu’s greatest failure as prime minister was in not extending his ten-month freeze on building in the settlements (just as Obama’s greatest failure in his relationship with Israel was in not embracing Netanyahu’s freeze and demanding that Abbas return to the negotiating table). At a time when Israel is trying to focus world attention on the Iranian bomb and the growing danger on its borders, settlement building is especially self-destructive.

But even if Israel ceases building in the West Bank, that won’t end the need to periodically attack rocket launchers in Gaza. And if, in the lulls between outbursts of violence on the borders, Israelis can manage to debate their domestic problems and attain a measure of normalcy, then that too will be a victory in the country’s ongoing war of survival.

You are witnessing the first social media war. Over the past couple days, the Israel Defense Forces has tweeted, YouTubed, and blogged its case for its bombardment of the Gaza Strip in a battle against Hamas, which has launched hundreds of rockets at Israeli civilians. In flat language, @IDFSpokesperson, which has more than doubled its followers since Operation Pillar of Cloud began, has churned out a steady stream of tweets about the numbers of rockets fired from Gaza and where they have landed. But in videos and clip art, it is also willingly—brashly, even, and with a swagger that strikes some as unseemly—drawing attention to its own assault.

“We’re looking at a terror organizaion called Hamas, that calls for the destruction of Israel, doesn’t acknowledge its right to exist, that professionalized the suicide bomber,” Avital Lebovich, the IDF lieutenant colonel and spokesperson responsible for the Twitter feed, told me yesterday. “Some people might think we’re looking at a political party, but that’s not the situation.” Her confidence mirrored that of the IDF’s social media accounts: that if everybody knows the facts, they will be convinced of the rightness of Israel’s cause.

Which is risky, because that isn’t necessarily the case—especially when there are powerful images that argue against Israel’s side, such as a photograph of a baby killed by an Israeli bomb. (Israel was targeting Hamas terrorists; compared to past operations in densely populated Gaza, tragedies such as this have been less frequent—thus far.) And while Israel can win militarily with brute force, applying the same strategy to social media risks turning international opinion against the country.

But there is an argument that it should be welcomed, if only on the grounds that it lets everyone see what Israel itself claims it is trying to do in a mission whose tactical aims are obvious (halt rocket-fire and drone production) but whose strategic aims are less so (there isn’t really a good alternative to Hamas rule over Gaza). This more immediate form of the same old sort of propaganda encourages observers to judge Israel on the wisdom, or lack thereof, of its actual actions. Who doesn’t want that?

In recent years, every battle the Israeli military has fought has been followed by an amorphous, harder-to-control war over how that battle is perceived. More than ten years ago, during the Second Intifada, an operation in the West Bank city of Jenin led to accusations of massacre, which were later—but only after the appellation “massacre” had set in—proven false. Operation Cast Lead, the 2008-9 Gaza incursion, lasted three weeks and accomplished most of Israel’s immediate objectives; the tussling over the United Nations investigation, which produced the Goldstone Report, lasted far longer, and eventually did great damage to Israel’s reputation in finding that both Hamas and Israel had likely violated laws of war. (Israel, which did not cooperate with the probe, heavily protested the report, and lead investigator Richard Goldstone repudiated it.) In 2010, when a flotilla of ships tried to sail to Gaza, the Israeli Navy maintained its blockade—but not before IDF soldiers boarded the Mavi Marmara and killed nine aboard, causing an international outcry. Despite evidence that a group with Al Qaeda ties had helped organize the flotilla and that, contrary to its rhetoric, not all aboard the Mavi Marmara had come in peace, the predominant narrative that emerged was of Israeli aggression against harmless innocents, and even Israeli supporters tend to acknowledge it was a P.R. debacle.

“We do understand the importance, that speed here is a key element,” Lebovich said after I referenced the flotilla. The IDF doesn’t want to get caught flat-footed as a narrative shapes, which is arguably what happened during the flotilla fiasco two years ago. “Good morning to our friends in #America,” the feed tweeted at 9 a.m. Eastern Standard Time yesterday (mid-afternoon in Israel). “While you were sleeping, 3 Israelis were killed when a rocket hit their house.”

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The most striking and unprecedented social media moment of the past couple of days has not been the proliferation of hashtags, official and unofficial, or even the revelation that the IDF is on Pinterest. It was a ten-second clip the IDF posted to its YouTube page of the targeted assassination of Ahmed Jabari, the top Hamas military commander. You watch in black-and-white as a car, highlighted by a yellow circle, suddenly blows up. To call it jarring is an understatement. “The logic was to allow direct access to video clips, usually taken from the air or from some intelligence cameras from the ground,” Lebovich explained. “They seem authentic and [viewers] understand this is not something we’re directing.”

Unmentioned in the video—which, in the most literal sense, was by definition “directed”—is that Jabari’s son was also in the car, and of course was killed. But even the most cloistered of observers are bound to learn that, even from sympathetic news accounts. They are also bound to learn that Jabari was responsible for hundreds of Israeli civilian deaths and was more or less in charge of the five-year-long captivity of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, which appalled even most Gazans. 

A Twitter feed or a YouTube page is not a silo. The IDF’s bulletpoints about how many rockets have been fired uneasily jostle for readers’ attention alongside news reports, anti-Israel sentiment, and, this morning at least, tweets about Twinkies. This means that propaganda generally stands to be only as effective as the actions it seeks to validate; and the more bombastic the propaganda, the more that is the case. “When you have the clip as proof,” Lebovich told me, referring to the assassination video, “it speaks better than anything else.” That’s true—but what exactly it says still depends on who’s listening.