Fighting in Public
Terry H. Schwadron
Dec. 12, 2023
It’s become a pattern: If there is a problem winning in court, in Congress, or on the battlefield, take your case to the public to get a wider verdict that seems to support the righteousness of the case, even if not a more demonstrable result.
It’s why Donald Trump feels he only needs to spit out his national victimhood on the courthouse steps rather than show up to testify in his own legal defense in the New York fraud case he effectively already has lost. It’s why the Hunter Biden case must be presented over and over to a cable television audience as if any of the underlying information or law has changed why the pressured politics of prosecution certainly has.
The need for good public relations to win a war has brought Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to Washington to press personally for critical military aid that both party majorities have promised but that remains stuck in partisan discord in Congress.
The pattern explains why college presidents testifying before Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-NY, came across so poorly, because while their remarks may have been legally responsive to free-speech concerns on campus, they failed miserably at showing there is any moral core to enforcement of campus rules about shutting down calls for eliminating whole peoples.
We see the same need to win popular acceptance affecting businesses caught up in scandal, whether real or imagined, against individuals and celebrities suddenly in the spotlight over some dreadful remark or allegation, against whole entities like the FBI or the Justice Department over perceptions of unfairness even when pursued by those seeking a specific outcome.
The Palestinian View
Of course, the currently most prominent public relations battle involves Hamas and Israel, who each are seeking to bend global support not only towards the immediacy of war, but towards whatever eventual solutions will be sought.
With its wide network of Muslim supporters, Hamas has taken on what should be an impossible job of winning public support after its terrible terrorist attacks into Israel on Oct. 7, killing 1400 civilians and soldiers, beheading babies, raping, and capturing hundreds of seniors and children as hostages. They make it worse by hiding among civilians, using hostages and hospitals as shields, shunting fuel and medicine meant for civilians to military means, and generally showing themselves to be impossibly untrustworthy and unresponsive negotiators.
Yet the world somehow is overly sympathetic to the more general Palestinian cause, and lots of protests — informed or not — are spreading globally, with anti-Semitic attacks rising precipitously. In that regard, the public relations effort has focused on trying to blunt the horrors on initial attacks with the continuing pictures of the devastating effects of the Israeli bombing and artillery response in Gaza and general appeal to giving Palestinians a home.
Still, It does raise the point of continuing global anti-Semitism as a reason for the breadth of acceptance..
It is a numbingly strange depiction of humanitarian destruction brought about by planned terror. In pursuit of calls for ceasefire, we should remember that hunger and homelessness follows decisions by Hamas, the Gazan government, to spend its billions in donations on missiles rather than food, and to find favor in continuing refugee camp conditions that could have been addressed. We should keep in mind that neighboring Arab countries refuse to denounce Hamas, which promises to do it all again and again, and show no interest in stepping in to take in 2.2 million displaced Gazans and prefer to point to Israel as an aggressor instead.
The Israeli View
Israelis started their public relations campaign by distributing widely the horrors of Oct. 7, pictures that had to be edited to make them even shareable. From sending the Israeli Defense Forces, they had images to share of tunnels beneath schools and hospitals, weapons stashes, and their own efforts at distributing leaflets before attacks in some kind of attempt to lessen the inevitable civilian injuries and deaths that would result from bombs and invasion. Like Ukraine, they had the public relations advantage of victimhood — this time from terrorism.
Two months later, that image of terror victim has been slipping amid a series of news disclosures about what Israel’s radical-religious coalition government did before, during and after Oct. 7. Israel is suffering a public relations hit over how it is prosecuting the war rather than how the war began.
The clear perception globally is that Israel’s neighborhood-clearing hunt Hamas leaders has led to a humanitarian crisis of gigantic proportion affecting Gazan civilians who have no safe place to go, and the death toll from starvation or lack of medical care is rivaling bombing victims. The United Nations has again proved generally useless, especially since Israel controls water and power.
There have been a series of disclosures about Israel’s delayed response on Oct. 7, on the country’s insistence on punitive war against Hamas topping hostage negotiations as the top priority, and, over time, how Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is seen as having worked with Qatari officials to allow millions of dollars a month to go to Hamas to prop up that government in hopes — obviously incorrect in hindsight — of keeping the peace. The New York Times reports that Netanyahu’s critics disparage a strategy of “buying quiet.”
The Washington Post is among those reporting use of banned phosphorus weapons against Lebanon, as the war shows signs of expanding beyond Gaza. There are widespread media reports about how in the midst of the Hamas war, Israeli officials continue to press for expansion of settlements in the West Bank, encouraging exactly the kind of violence and land-grabbing that has made the place a pressure cooker waiting to explode.
There are more such reports, but the cumulative effect is to tarnish the very image that Israel wants to project to a world seemingly open to holding the Jewish state to a war standard that no other country is forced to meet.
For the United States
In the U.S. and in Europe, we’re seeing all this public relations push and pull result in attacks on individual Jews and Muslims — and arguments about how to talk about it all in a way that does not leave individuals threatened.
Worsening the problem has been the inability of journalists, NGOs and others to confirm the information that does get used. Access is limited, and partisan review of information demanded as a price to embed in an attempt to control what gets out.
It has led to confused, if temporary political alliances and lots of mix-up that holds all Jews or all Muslims responsible for whatever happens thousands of miles away.
Add in untampered language and sloganeering that often is code for genocide of one side or the other, and we have all the makings of continuing violence at home as well as a widening war in the Middle East with all its international ripples.
Conducting war through public relations in this manner is not going to lead to solutions.
We’re seeing opinions and loyalties run well ahead of information.
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