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Ron Schleifer is a senior lecturer at Israel’s Ariel University and head of the Ariel Center for Defense and Communication, where he specializes in psychological and information warfare. He spoke to an April 3rd Middle East Forum Webinar (video) in an interview with Ashley Perry, adviser to the Middle East Forum Israel office and former senior Israeli government adviser, about the Palestinian Arab strategy used since the late 1960s in its war against Israel. The following is a summary of Schleifer’s comments:
Schleifer has spent forty years researching the “phenomenon” of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and its effective use of psychological warfare (“psywar,” or the use of propaganda against an enemy, supported by such military, economic, or political measures as may be required). A central question in this regard is why Israel, with all its technological advances, “is doing so poorly when it comes to propaganda.”
There is considerable evidence that the Soviet Union played a significant role in setting up the PLO. Indeed “the PLO is practically an invention of the Soviets. Not just the support, which is well documented ... but the actual setting up of the organization in itself was an initiative of the Soviets.” The communists, both Russian/Soviet and others, had a long track record of using psywar and were particularly adept in this field. Three communists played a role in these efforts: Lenin, leader of the Bolshevik revolution, was “the pope of agitation, of propaganda, the chief rabbi of moving a people towards a revolution.” Willi Münzenberg, a German Communist, established the concept of “front organizations, where people are very active for a purpose they believe in and have no idea they’re serving something entirely different.” The third person in this group is General Vo Nguyen Giap, commander of the North Vietnamese Army, who led his small nation for two decades to victory over the U.S.
Inspired by Giap, whose doctrine held that the “real fight is not in the jungles of Vietnam, but in the streets of Washington,” Yasser Arafat, PLO chairman, learned the “art” of how to defeat a greater military power. He changed his “mode of strategy” from terrorism to embracing the “whole charade” of human rights, advocating for the establishment of “two states,” or a “secular democratic government.” Over the decades, and with Soviet assistance, the PLO cultivated support in the U.N. and from European nations in a mapping campaign to “penetrate the interest map of the West.” The PLO researched its allies and its opponents, whom to bribe or whom to threaten, and those amenable to persuasion. By utilizing psychological warfare principles over the past half century, the Palestinian strategy has succeeded in that there is a well-funded “de facto state” today that has more embassies around the world than does Israel.
Another example of the Palestinian strategy of taking a page out of Israel’s playbook was in the Palestinians’ imitation of a publicity coup by Haganah, the principal Zionist military organization during the lead-up to the establishment of the state of Israel. Haganah sent the ship Exodus to challenge the British naval blockade and embarrass the British for refusing to permit Jewish immigration to Mandatory Palestine in 1945. The international media supported the Jewish position in Palestine at the time, and the Palestinians tried to repeat Israel’s public relations campaign with the 2011 Mavi Marmara incident, albeit unsuccessfully.
The essential principles of psychological warfare the Palestinians use against Israel, and Israel can use in turn, are:
1.Understanding the enemy culture – By sociologically marginalizing the Sephardic and Eastern Jews who came to Israel in the late 1940s and shaming them for their non-Western background, Israel squandered a major strategic resource which could have been better used to try and understand Arab culture. The PLO, on the other hand, founded an institute for Israel studies to understand Israeli culture.
2. Drive a wedge in parts of the enemy society to create a schism – “In every society there are differences, there are arguments, there are between the veterans and the newcomers. There’s [a difference] between the people who came from the West and people who came from the East. It’s always the religious and the not religious.” So, the task of the psychological operator is to “to drive a wedge and plant and create the schism between the parts of enemy society.”
3. Lower the enemy’s morale – The idea here “is to persuade the enemy that [he is] not right and ... that the future is not bright for him, and he is eventually going to lose.” There is a need to persuade the enemy that what he thought is an “asset” is in fact a “liability.” This liability can manifest itself through the exacting of cost in various forms: diplomatic, financial, psychological, ethical.
4. Segmentation – Define the target audience and direct the message to each separate audience, while managing conflicting messages.
5. Guilt – This is used by Palestinians who arrange visits to refugee camps for political leaders and societal influencers (academics, artists, religious figures) as a means of manipulating public reaction. By leaving the squalid state of refugee camps unaddressed and subverting any attempt by Israel to improve conditions, the PLO succeeds in exploiting the misery of the refugees, thereby creating the preferred image of victimhood and instilling guilt in its target audience.
The takeaway lesson for Israeli victory is to copy the Palestinian six-decade psywar strategy that was originally copied from Israel.
To cultivate the idea of Israeli victory among the enemy and follow the Soviet model, a goal worth pursuing is “annexation” of “Judea and Samaria” to Israel proper. By instilling the idea in a “slow process,” similar to the Palestinian strategy of “a two- stage solution,” the idea will transition from the “far periphery” and gradually move to the center. Additionally, the psywar principle of driving a wedge between the competing factions in Palestinian society can be adopted by promoting who the winners and losers will be. Israel should also encourage emigration, financially and physically, which is already underway.
Schleifer is convinced that “coexistence” with the Palestinian Arabs will come about if the settlers are open to “cultural understanding” and learn to speak Arabic to overcome the language barrier and facilitate interactions with their Arab neighbors. The geographic proximity of Jews in the West Bank to Palestinians is such that the idea of living in peace with each other will become a daily practical necessity for both sides. The takeaway lesson for Israeli victory is to copy the Palestinian six-decade psywar strategy that was originally copied from Israel. Israel needs to project the sense that the future “belongs to Israel and to no one else.”
