THERE HE WAS, most of his features hidden by a red keffiyeh. Sharing the screen with him were the flag and insignia of the Hamas military command. Did he realise that nine out of ten Westerners confronted with this imagery would immediately recall the “communiques” of the Islamic State? Clearly, this Hamas commander didn’t care. His business was war, not public relations. And therein lies the defining weakness of the Palestinian cause.
It was the Prussian military scholar, Clausewitz, who famously defined war as “the continuation of politics by other means”. Translated into modern terms, that puts public relations at the heart of military strategy. States fight not only to win, but to persuade the rest of the world that they were right to fight, and that they deserve to win.
The Palestinians have been singularly unsuccessful in achieving either of these goals. Outside the Islamic world, they are neither trusted nor liked. Certainly, people all over the world feel desperately sorry for the mothers and the children killed by Israeli bombs and shellfire, but most of them refuse to blame the Israelis for defending themselves; the person they blame is the Hamas commander in the red keffiyeh for giving them no other choice.
Imagine if the Palestinians had studied the tactics of Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King instead of the incendiary anti-colonial tracts of Franz Fanon and his ilk. Imagine if, from the very beginning, the Palestinian leaders had understood that their key audience wasn’t to be found in the Arab “Street”, but in the living-rooms of middle-class America. Imagine if, in the late-1960s, Christians of good-will around the globe heard not the chant of “Allahu Akbar!”, but the poignant lyrics of “We Shall Overcome”. Does anyone think that all of Israel’s jet fighters and tanks could have defeated that sort of Palestinian Liberation Organisation?
The brute fact of the matter is that the PLO didn’t believe it needed to court the good will of the West. Between 1948 and 1967 it was content to repose all its hopes and aspirations in Egyptian and Syrian armour – along with their Warsaw Pact armourers. Palestine would be theirs, “from the river to the sea”, for the very simple reason that the armies of their Arab sponsors had generously promised to drive the Jews into that sea. That this bore a much closer resemblance to the strategy of the jackal than the lion did not give them pause – until the Six-Day War of 1967. Turned out the Jews weren’t about to be driven anywhere.
Not only did Israel win the war on the ground, but it also conquered the hearts and minds of the whole West. Those old enough to remember will never forget the world-renowned pianist and conductor, Daniel Barenboim, flying to Israel, accompanied by his equally talented cellist fiancé, Jacqueline du Pre, to give concerts in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa and Beersheba. As the bullets flew and the bombs fell, the couple played Beethoven and Schubert to khaki-clad citizen-soldiers fresh from the front. When it comes to effective PR, it’s very hard to top that.
Did the PLO learn anything from the 1967 disaster of Arab arms? Not a thing. Egypt and Syria doubled down on the original strategy and sent their superpower sponsor ever-longer shopping lists for the latest Soviet weaponry. Moscow took a deep breath and complied: sending thousands of “advisers” to instruct the recipients in how to use their new state-of-the-art battle tanks, artillery, STA missiles and MiG jets. “Soon”, whispered the PLO. “Soon we shall go home!”
It was close-run thing – too close for Israel’s comfort – but, once again, Arab arms failed. And, once again, the West thrilled to the astonishing images of Israeli armoured columns crossing the Suez Canal and kicking-up dust on the road to Damascus. Twice defeated, the Arab lions sued for peace, leaving the PLO with no better friends than Muhammar Ghaddafi and no better strategy but ever-more-savage terrorist atrocities.
And, every time the world was forced to look at the ripped apart Israeli buses and the ripped apart Israeli lives, it not only recoiled in horror, but it also asked itself, very quietly, the question that the PLO (and its proliferating collection of religiously-driven rivals) could never answer.
“What would have happened if those Syrian armoured columns had broken through the northern Israeli defence line? What if those Egyptian tanks had made it across the Sinai Desert and into southern Judea? What would the world have witnessed then? For the second time in less than 40 years, would it have watched the mass extermination of Jewish men, women and children? And where would the Palestinians have been found as this ghastly pogrom unfolded? Protecting Jewish lives with their own? Or, stripping the dead?”
That is the size of the mountain the Palestinian cause has to climb – the measure of the public relations challenge it must somehow overcome. It is not liked. It is not trusted. Moreover, it is not helped by the comparatively small numbers of Westerners who espouse the cause of Palestine.
Those who snarl about “Zionist oppression” and “Israeli Apartheid” find it impossible to believe that Westerners will remain unmoved. How could anyone look at the disproportionate numbers of Palestinians killed in conflicts with the Israeli state and not be horrified? Pointing to the snaking concrete wall enclosing the Palestinian communities of the West Bank, they demand the same condemnation that greeted the infamous Berlin Wall. When Israeli bulldozers flatten a Palestinian farmer’s home, they expect the world to be outraged – and are outraged when it isn’t.
What they forget is the degree to which the history of the State of Israel – and the historical crimes that preceded its creation – have inoculated the West against Palestinian propaganda. If the Israelis have become the implacable and unforgiving enemies of the Palestinians, most Westerners would simply say that the Palestinians have given them good cause.
Even those who have, in the past, marched in the streets for a just Middle East settlement, report deep misgivings. When students from that part of the world, marching beneath a sea of Palestinian flags, began chanting “Up! Up! Palestine! Down! Down! Israel!”, those marching with them recall the cold shiver that ran down their spines. There was something about the icy glitter in the protesters’ eyes as they chanted “Down! Down! Israel!” that made these formerly sympathetic folk swear they would never again participate in such demonstrations.
Even when they try to engage the emotions of the West, the efforts of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas never quite come off. One such effort, “filmed in occupied Palestine” (a.k.a. the Hamas controlled territory of Gaza) is entitled Palestine Freedom Song. The singers are two young Palestinian sisters, brim-full of courage and determination. But the motherland they sing of extends “from the river to the sea” – i.e. it includes the whole of what is now the State of Israel. We Shall Overcome it ain’t. No two-state solution for these freedom-fighters:
We own this home
We own this land
From the river to the sea
Our motherland
We’ll set it free
We’ve got our stones
And the olive tree
Must it be this way? For the moment, the tragic answer is, Yes. So long as behind every young and idealistic Palestinian singer, stands the man in the red keffiyeh – hungry for martyrs.