A Shift in Consciousness
That shift in consciousness that Rabbi Lerner believes must take place for peace and security to truly be established in the war-torn region may already be underway.
Josh Ruebner said:
“I really sense a big shift underway in public opinion. Despite the enormous resources at the disposal of Israel and organization that support Israel in the United States and its ability to get its message out, there was opposition at the grassroots level to an extent never seen before during Israel’s three-week war on the Gaza Strip. We recorded more than 300 protests, which took place nationwide from large cities all the way down to small towns across the country iron more than 40 states and the type of widespread condemnation of Israeli actions was unprecedented.
You’re starting to see in mainstream media unprecedented hard-hitting pieces that are very critical of Israel and its actions. That’s going to burst a whole lot of doors open in terms of having a discussion and moving policy on this issue.”
Ruebner referred specifically to the 60 Minutes, which aired recently and focused on growing West Bank settlements.
Munayyer talked about a “revolution in information” underway in America and how Israel struggled and continues to struggle to combat the spread of information on Gaza:
“Increasingly, however, people in this country are seeking out alternative news sources for information on what is going on in the Middle East and elsewhere. I think that sort of revolution in information is leading many people to realize that there is a different story about what’s going on that doesn’t make its way to the American television screens or the mainstream media. That is something that the PR people in the state of Israel are having a lot of trouble dealing with because they don’t know how to really combat it. It’s come to the point where the state of Israel has actually announced that they are hiring an army of bloggers to send a different story out on the Internet so as to interrupt a public relations battle that opened a more free discussion.”
As Samir Khader, senior producer for al Jazeera says in Control Room (2004), a documentary on Arab journalists , “You cannot wage a war without rumors, without media, without propaganda. A military leader when he plans for war, if he doesn't put media propaganda on top of his agenda, he's a bad military.”
Munayyer described how Israel planned the recent campaign out so that perception of the conflict could be controlled by Israel:
The campaign that Israel undertook in Gaza was one that was timed in such a way that specifically kept the American perception in mind. The violation of the ceasefire which Israel made on November 4th came on the day of U.S. elections and happened at such a time so that the American public would have no recollection of the event because it was not reported in the media because it was buried in a tsunami of election coverage for days and days and days. Ultimately when the attacks began, it seemed like they were attacks that could be justified as reaction to rocket fire, which was actually provoked by the Israelis on the 4th. Because nobody had any recollection of that, the sort of narrative of responding to existential threat was one that Israelis were able to carry out very well in the American press. In other places in the world, however, that was a different story. Other places they did hear reporting on what happened on Nov 4th realized it was not something started by Hamas but was a continuing of events that included occupation, siege, and blockade.
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