@mtracey Maybe I’m being overly optimistic, but I think hasbara is having its worst month in awhile – in a good while.
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) July 20, 2014
Benjamin Wallace-Wells identifies why Israel is losing the PR battle in the American media:
“I’ve seen some truly shocking scenes this morning,” tweeted the Guardian’s man in Gaza, Peter Beaumont, on Saturday. “A man putting the remains of his two year old son into a garbage bag.” 3,000 people retweeted that. Earlier this month, the IDF’s twitter feed had been full of images of besieged Israelis. But by this weekend Israel was so clearly losing the public relations war that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu complained to reporters, tersely, that Hamas uses “telegenically dead Palestinians for their cause.”
If Netanyahu is so bothered by how dead Palestinians look on television then he should stop killing so many of them. But his complaint is in itself a concession.
The story of the conflict between Israel and Palestine looks a little bit different this time around. Social media have helped allow us to see more deeply inside war zones–in this case, inside Gaza, and allowed viewers much fuller access to the terror that grips a population under military attack. America’s changing demographics (the country’s Muslim population has skyrocketed in the past decade and is now as much as 50 percent larger than the US Jewish population) have meant both a more receptive audience for sympathetic stories about Palestinians and more Americans like Abu Khdeir, with connections back to Palestine. The sheer imbalance in the human toll, in the numbers of dead, has been impossible to elide or ignore.
That’s despite the best efforts of media outfits like CNN, which reassigned the reporter who had dared to comment on how the Israeli spectators watching the war from the hilltops outside Sderot had threatened her and her crew:
CNN has removed correspondent Diana Magnay from covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict after she tweeted that Israelis who were cheering the bombing of Gaza, and who had allegedly threatened her, were “scum.”
“After being threatened and harassed before and during a liveshot, Diana reacted angrily on Twitter,” a CNN spokeswoman said in a statement to The Huffington Post. “She deeply regrets the language used, which was aimed directly at those who had been targeting our crew,” the spokeswoman continued. “She certainly meant no offense to anyone beyond that group, and she and CNN apologize for any offense that may have been taken.” The spokeswoman said Magnay has been assigned to Moscow.
(Photo: A relative mourns over the dead body of a child killed due to Israeli attacks at Al-Shifa Hospital’s morgue in Gaza City, on July 20, 2014. At least 40 Palestinians were killed and 400 others injured in Israeli shelling of residential areas, including al-Shujaya, in eastern Gaza City. By Mustafa Hassona/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images.)
The Dish 