5 reasons why Israel hides information from its media | policy

Israel did not practice a media blackout during its wars to the extent that it did after the outbreak of the “Al-Aqsa Flood,” to deduct another aspect of its deficient democratic credentials, which it had always boasted of before, and presented as a basic pillar for improving its image and marketing in the Western world in particular. To compensate for the discrimination it has long practiced against Arabs who hold its nationality, as well as some African Jews, and the racial segregation it imposes in dealing with the residents of the West Bank and Gaza Strip territories, who are under occupation, and the deviation from the truth when it paints a false image of Arabs in its media.

In this war, Israel was keen to silence the voices that revealed the truth about the “genocide” in Gaza, so it killed 175 Palestinian journalists, arrested 32 others, closed the offices of a number of Arab media outlets, and prevented their crews from working in Gaza, including the Lebanese “Al-Mayadeen” channel and the “Al-Mayadeen” channel. Al Jazeera then closed the latter's office in Ramallah, and imposed restrictions on those it left working as field war correspondents. It did the same thing even with local Israelis themselves, whether they appear on its satellite channels or write articles, columns, reports and analyzes in newspapers.

Then the hand of military censorship was extended even to the citizens themselves, who were uploading clips to the Internet on their smartphones, sometimes accompanied by a comment or audio commentary on any losses occurring inside Israel as a result of the rockets of the Palestinian resistance and Hezbollah.

The shift in Israeli media policy

Years ago, the Israeli media was a source of news even for Arab citizens themselves, when it revealed understandings or agreements with Arab regimes, or secret visits made by some officials from these countries to Tel Aviv.

This was aided by the presence of a strong Israeli opposition whose interest was to degrade the image of those sitting in government, as well as the multiplicity of political trends, as the media is distributed among political parties from the far right to the far left, and the level of interest in regional and international news increases, and the existence of a system of laws that protects freedom. Opinion and expression.

As the regime under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, allied with the extreme right, moved toward a kind of “totalitarianism” that descended into “tyranny” at times, the hand of power began to tighten the noose around the neck of the media, and some different voices were forcibly excluded, and others were drawn into the circle. Mobilization and mobilization that calls for unity in the face of an “existential threat” to the entire “State of Israel.” Over time, it began to conceal, conceal, or circumvent part of the truth, through lying, evasion, and deception.

Tightening censorship during the current war

There is no comparison between the Israeli media’s handling of the current war if we compare it to what it was like at the time of the war on Gaza in 2021 or on Hezbollah in 2006. During these two wars, the Hebrew media, or the one issued in English from the heart of Tel Aviv, was a source of important news and information filtered from From time to time, it outlines the features of the situation, exposes the government's negligence, and extends to show the problems affecting the operations carried out by the army.

In the current war, whether against Gaza or Lebanon, the grip of governmental and military control over the media has been tightened, to achieve several goals, which are:

1. Hiding military losses: Israel seeks to hide the losses that befall its army, whether during its ground attack on Gaza, then its positioning in areas inside the Strip, or as a result of the rockets fired into Israel from the Gaza and Lebanon fronts. The goal is to reduce internal criticism, whether towards the army or the government that is managing the war, especially as it continues military operations despite internal and external voices warning against this and calling for not expanding the scope of the battle.
2. Maintaining the image of an “invincible army”: Israel is trying to keep the image of its army under the banner that it has long raised as “the invincible army,” in the eyes of its investors and Western bets on it, as the Israeli army is the fulcrum of a country that is considered the military and security spearhead of the Western project in the Middle East.
3. Reducing panic on the home front: The media blackout seeks to reduce the level of panic in Israeli society, which is suffering from the exodus of settlers from places within range of missiles coming from Gaza or southern Lebanon, which places increasing pressure on the government in Tel Aviv.
4. Concealing crimes committed against civilians: Israel aims to hide or minimize the crimes committed by its army in Gaza and Lebanon, whether by killing civilians or destroying infrastructure, in order to reduce the degree of international criticism, even from its supporters, in light of the damage to its image before world public opinion.
5. Depriving the resistance of information: The media blackout prevents the resistance from obtaining information related to the weakness or confusion of the Israeli army, which may raise the morale of its fighters and enhance the confidence of social circles in them.

Israel and the media war

Countries in a state of war do not let their media operate completely freely, in order to preserve the secrecy of military operations, ensure the effectiveness of deception, and hide the types of weapons used in combat, and above all the plans and goals. In its previous wars, Israel was no exception to this rule, as it practiced “determining the truth,” but it had never before tightened control with such strictness.

It opened a space for expression to achieve some goals, such as imposing the equation of deterrence on opponents, practicing psychological warfare against them, and involving the interior in following up on the battle, especially since the Israeli army relies heavily on its reserve force, and mobilizes the entire state’s resources around military personnel in wars.

But this time, a severe media blackout was imposed for two main reasons:

• Length of war: Israel is not accustomed to fighting long wars, as it usually tends towards lightning wars. But this time, it found itself in a long war of attrition in Gaza, and the same may happen again in Lebanon. These ongoing losses make the truth unnerving for both the army and Israeli society, and before them the Netanyahu government.
• The resistance’s ability to harm Israel: This war was characterized by the ability of the resistance in Gaza and Lebanon to transfer the battle to inside Israel itself, through missiles and marches, which broke the rule of “war outside the borders” or “safe borders” under which Tel Aviv had lived for decades.

But this opacity, and in the sense of the violation, shows the difficulty of the war that Israel is currently waging, an issue that is not a secret to the resistance, nor to the military and political analysts, and perhaps the curtain will be lifted one day on what was hidden, when the war ends and the reckoning begins.