Starvation in Gaza: a psychological victory for the Palestinian Arabs

Editorial note: On Wednesday, 6 August, I joined Marco Alexander, Niram Ferretti and Vitor Vicente on the Vitor Vicente podcast to discuss the claims of starvation in Gaza. Below is an edited (and expanded) transcript of an excerpt from that discussion.

Anjuli Pandavar: We tend to fall into a trap. An enemy making an announcement that is obviously false, we respond to as if that enemy has made a false statement, i.e., lied. We take the bait and try to blitz the media with contrary facts, trying to prove that this is not so, etc., and go down that rabbit hole. I think that's wrong.

When there is a claim of starvation in Gaza, it is not a factual claim. It does not call for a response as if this is something that is factually incorrect. The correctness or not, the lies or truth of the matter, is of no importance. The point of making these statements is to upset our applecart and get us drawn, side-tracked, into a media scrum, where we will not succeed, because nobody is interested in the facts of the matter, except us, and that's where we go wrong.

What we see when we see this claim of starvation in Gaza, the photo of the starving child, or before that, the claim of genocide, so many civilians being killed, etc., these kinds of claims, we fall for them every time and then go crazy trying to prove otherwise. To borrow Richard Dawkins's words, you cannot reason people out of something they were never reasoned into.

Such claims are psychological warfare attacks, designed, firstly, to rile up the international community, people who might otherwise be our supporters, but see this and pull back, and, secondly, to put us under greater stress worrying about the world knowing something about us that is not true. This is the whole point of making those kinds of claims. If we respond to such claims as if they were meant to be true, then we've lost.

The point is to take a psychological warfare approach to this. For example, we knew already when the whole talk of feeding the Gazans took off on 8 October (initiated by Anthony Blinken), eventually it was going to come to the point when they claim that we are starving the Gazans no matter how much food we send in. We already know this; it's an old story. Yet we fall for it every single time!

We have been in negotiations with Hamas in Qatar for I don't know how long, and it is in Qatar where the top leaders of Hamas, those who are still alive, inexplicably, live very lavishly: five-star hotels, very big meals, and so forth. The easiest thing to do, as soon as they launched this particular attack that we are starving the Gazans, was to be in Qatar, camera on some fat Hamas guy, and say something like, do you have any comment to make on the starvation in Gaza?

Now that leader whom we ask that question of knows very well that we know that there's no starvation in Gaza, and he knows that we know that he knows that there is no starvation in Gaza. Now he is a fat slob, living it up, eating very big meals and we are asking him to comment on starvation in Gaza. What's he going to do? The camera is on him, live-streaming. That's psychological warfare. That's how we fight this, ideally turning their psychological attacks against them.

And the same applies to every other psychological warfare attack launched against us: we need to already have anticipated, in terms of psychological warfare, how this is going to unfold. What, possibly, is their psychological strategy? What possible claims are they going to make in the media and how are we going to respond to these in counter-attack mode, and put them in trouble.

He cannot deny that there's starvation in Gaza, because they're already running with that one. Here's this fat Hamas leader, sitting there, what is he going to say? And if he doesn't come to the point that he is overfed and living it up, we can raise it: How about sending something to them to help them in their starvation? We can play that one; we can push it, and it's all on camera. That's how we should approach these things; a long history of abuse and being lied about is not to be forgotten, but if it becomes an impediment to effective psychological counter-attack, then there is a problem here.

Marco Alexander: Israel and the Jewish community, and decent people in general, are on the back foot and this has always been a basic flaw of the way Israel has operated. It's always finding itself on the back foot and pushed into a corner. Israel has limited, throughout the course of the years, its capacity for manoeuvre.

Niram Ferretti: We need to make a statement which I don't think is very pleasant for us to hear: Hamas has won the information war. We are learning that there is starvation in Gaza. Before that we've been learning that genocide has been going on. We've been learning that kids are killed, delightfully, by IDF soldiers in Gaza. In other words, we are hearing about a big crime novel against Israel.

This is nothing new, of course. Every time there has been a war, between Hamas and Israel, we had the same accusations against Israel. The difference here is that this time it's much bigger than before, because the war has been going on for so long. Hamas has been playing its cards very skilfully.

The most striking and frightful thing is the fact that the West [falls for it]. What is the opinion of Americans concerning Israel causing genocide in Gaza? 4 in 10 Americans think that there is starvation and genocide in Gaza. I don't know what the numbers are in Europe, but I think they are even worse than those in the United States. This is scary because it means that the West does not have the resources to oppose this kind of propaganda, this kind of lies. It was much better equipped to fight against lies during the Second World War than it is equipped right now, when it has an overwhelming capacity for getting information and different sources than it did in the past. But this has been turning things against Israel, especially, because propaganda is much more easily disseminated than before.

What I see is this incapacity, this feebleness of the West, to contrast with success this narrative that Hamas has been able to impose. Since the war started, Hamas has been taken at face value. This is absolutely preposterous. Never once have they been put into doubt.

Vitor Vicente: More and more its about selling emotions and sentiments, and not much facts and logic. It's no wonder that they prefer the Hamas narrative. It's much more appealing to the heart. When they want to sell solidarity, when they want to sell images that are just about visual and don't have much about background or context. I think the Qataris are also to blame in that whole context.

MA: Israel has become a target and it is a symptom of all the ills that afflict Western society. Israel has been on the receiving end of wars of aggression since 1948—and to say "wars of aggression" is an understatement; they've been genocidal wars since the outset. We have to look at the role of Western countries and what has been happening within Western societies themselves. We see something that is collapsing. And now it is much worse: we see the Western mind being destroyed from the inside. We're not talking about genocide here; we're talking about 'neuronocide', people are incapable of forming a coherent picture of reality. It is all shifted into the emotive sphere.

AP: It is not about facts. And if it is not about facts, then it cannot be about truth or lies. The mistake we make is to assume that when a statement is made or a position is taken, it asserts, or purports to be, some kind of truth, which we then have to counter. It is not about truth. We know that starvation is not the case. So when they say there is starvation, it is not a factual claim. It's a psychological attack designed to elicit a certain psychological response, not a denial or confirmation of a fact.

When we respond with, these are lies, we can disprove this, we can prove that, we fall exactly into the trap that the original "false" statement, "there is starvation", is designed for us to fall into. The point is to say, ok, they've taken their shot, their psychological shot, at us. What is our shot back? Our best shot back might have nothing to do with the "false" statement. Our shot back has to devastate them, so their whole plan for how their psychological war is going to unfold gets thrown for a kilter and they are left not knowing what to do. Then we escalate, massively.

To treat this as a matter of truth or lies is exactly to fall victim to psychological warfare. It was distressing to see the Prime Minister talk himself hoarse and thump the table in frustration that Israel's record low civilian casualty figures made not the slightest dent in the "killing civilians" narrative, which means that the claims of excessive civilian deaths achieved their aim well. This is what is wrong. This is the mistake we make. It is not a matter of either proving or explaining.

It is a matter of how can we disrupt their disruption of us, and at the same time disrupt their populations, their supporters and their infrastructure with our psychological attacks. And we are miles away from even beginning to get this. We are still deluded enough to think that if we act as if our enemies are meeting us halfway, they'll get the message and meet us halfway.

We're pretty far back in this because we don't fight psychological wars, at best we conduct discrete (and discreet) psychological operations, a hit here and a hit there, although we do have our moments, such as highlighting the female pilots who bombed Iran. But that is the point: they are moments, opportunistic by-products, rather than part of a coherent, well-planned psychological warfare strategy. We know that our enemies' greatest weakness is their fear of humiliation, yet we will not go there. We would rather take 1200 slaughtered and raped, and have 250 taken captive. By contrast, this is all that the Palestinian Arabs, the Arabs as a whole, have been doing all along since before 1948. They've been fighting psychological war against us and we have left the battlefield wide open to them.

Two immediately useful actions would be: firstly, to make the head switch that it is not about truth or lies, but about what can we say or do that's going to unbalance our enemy and our enemy population so effectively that they cannot counter. Secondly, Western society is extremely sensitive to starvation. Instead of going to pieces in the face of such an accusation, we should train ourselves to fire a more devastating psychological shot right back at them.

MA: You have an organism that is not capable of fighting using the appropriate instruments.

AP: Or of even recognising when those instruments are being used against us. We conceptualise such attacks inappropriately and make ourselves victims time and time and time again. It's a massive infrastructure that we lack. The infrastructure of psychological warfare. We don't know how to do this. They are past masters at it. They run rings around us every single time.

MA: We need to retool on a general level.

AP: Exactly.

NF: Claims are made against Israel as if they were true, and the perception of the audience that is against Israel, that thinks that Israel is a rogue state, basis itself on the belief that what Hamas is saying corresponds to fact. If they didn't think that it corresponds to fact, they simply won't believe that this is happening and so the hate that arises against Israel will not arise at all, of course. So, what can we do in order to oppose false claims? It's very basically to say, this is not true and try to prove that it's not true. The fact is that we do not succeed in making this truth available and more powerful than lies, because this is too emotional. Warfare and psychological warfare and information that Hamas produces against Israel is entirely emotional. It's not rationally-constructed. It's emotionally-constructed. It's constructed in order to arrive to your guts. It's completely emotional.

MA: Israel has been outflanked, clearly, on the psychological, the media front and the academic front. The most effective attacks against Israel have not been direct attacks. They have been attacks on European civilisation. The mental regime in Western states has been changed. We have to ask ourselves the question: why are people prepared to believe absurd claims? I think this is a problem that we need to address.

AP: I think the question to ask is, why are absurd claims made in the first place.

MA: That is certainly true, but obviously, an absurd claim, for it to be effective, must fall on fertile ground.

AP: And there's plenty of fertile ground. It's very easy to make a claim that is factual, but is so crafted that it elicits a certain response. The point about making claims is not about giving people information. This is not how psychological warfare works. It's about fighting the war inside your head. And the war continues; it is still a war. So, if there is a claim made about, since we're on the subject, starvation in Gaza, for argument's sake, to counter that with statistics showing that there is no starvation in Gaza, you have already lost. Prime Minister Netanyahu has never understood this.

The claim that there is starvation in Gaza is not about either truth or lies. It's about achieving a certain psychological objective: disarming you psychologically for the next stage, for the next move. You can say something completely outrageous that is obviously wrong, but if it gets people in the gut, if its pure emotion, that is the point. The truth or untruth of it is completely irrelevant.

[skipped 33:37 - 1:14:43, but very much worth watching]

There is nothing pure about war to begin with. Killing other human beings, there is nothing pure about that. The devices and subterfuges we engage in in order to achieve our objective are whatever it takes. Now, the smarter way of fighting a war is to keep it psychological: disarm the enemy by taking away the enemy's will to fight before the kinetic war even begins. Then you've won both wars, the psychological war and kinetic war.

The idea that psychological warfare is all about lies, irrationality and emotions is to foreclose a really important aspect of warfare. The Palestinian Arabs fight psychological warfare all the time non-stop. It never stops, even when they are not engaged in actual kinetic warfare. When there are no terrorist attacks and when there's no Gaza, no invasion, nothing like that, but their psychological attacks on Israel and the Jews have never stopped. It's the same continuous war that sometimes drops in and drops out of physical, kinetic warfare, but their psychological warfare has been continuous, denigrating the Jews, denying the Jews, describing the Jews as this, that and the other. There's this incessant degrading of respect for Jews in the minds of the world that has never stopped. That is the war.

So by the time you start shooting, the world is already primed and prepared to believe anything that the Arabs say about the Jews, absolutely anything. And anything the Jews might say about the Arabs, they did this or that—the Palestinian Arabs killed, butchered, so many babies on October 7. Yet within a week, that fact was gone from people's minds! And this is thanks to all the psychological warfare that the Arabs have been waging against the Jews since the First World War. Decades later, it bears fruit.

MA: It bears fruit also when you have self-degradation, when you play that game. When you lack moral fibre and you disarm yourself. You're not willing to fight the war. [Think: Shaul Moffaz, Dan Halutz, Ehud Barak, Benny Gantz, Herzi Halevi, Ronen Bar, the list of capitulators and traitors is very long, indeed, AP] This is psychological warfare. This is when you succumb to it. It's very much a schtetl mentality, which has continued. Israel doesn't act as a state; it acts as a schtetl—

AP: I'm sorry to say, but this is true.

MA: We are our own worst enemy. While for years, Israel has been speaking about peace, the enemy has been speaking about destruction. We've been living in a fool's paradise.

NF: This has been going on forever. Israel has been unable to understand this and has made many, many mistakes. It has always tried to make peace with the Arabs, tried to get along with them, tried to understand them, and what has this brought to Israel? Only mayhem and hate.

MA: You're right. You say something very important. It certainly hasn't brought us respect, this self-degradation. Just the opposite.

NF: The mainstream mentality has been this: we need to make peace. We are the Jews. We are good people. We are those who have been victims before. We don't want other people to be victims. So we need to show ourselves at our best. We are the best.

We also have this sense of superiority – in a good sense, being the best of the best. And this is something that enemies of the Jews and of Israel have taken advantage of.

MA: You raise a very important point: it's all the time trying to say, we're nice. It reminds me of what the Israeli Chief of Staff [Herzi Halevi] at the beginning of October 7 was saying to the soldiers, "We're not like them." We're nice people. In the aftermath of the butchering of children, the mutilation of people, the rape, he was saying, "We're not like them," which conveys the mental state here. We're talking psychological warfare, except you're waging psychological warfare against yourself.

NF: By saying to the Jews that they have a moral standard that is above the moral standard of other people, this is anti-Semitism in disguise, because it is saying to the Jews, you are those who need to succumb to people who attack you, to brutal people, to enemies, because you have this moral standard that is so far above the moral standard of your enemies that you always need to show it and to wear it on your sleeve. This is a very big mistake, because to those who do not have and couldn't care less about a high moral standard, you don't win a war with a high moral standard.

During the Second World War, when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and when they dropped bombs on [cities in] Germany, when Churchill said, we need to do this, and Roosevelt said, we need to do this, and Truman said, we need to do this, they were not abiding by high moral standards. They wanted to put an end to the Third Reich, to Nazism and to this evil. And they had to do evil themselves.

AP: In order to do good. I agree one hundred percent. On a different point: I think that the current young generation in Israel, 18 - 25 year-olds, have a few more surprises in store for us. I think this generation is not weighed down by the complexes of the generations that came out of the Second World War and the generations that capitulated after the Yom Kippur War, psychologically capitulated, and saw themselves as the dhimmis of the Arabs, ready to hand over everything, despite having won the kinetic war. There's this whole 1973-stratum that's now moving away and there's another generation rising that has surprised everyone with their commitment, their clarity, their resolve, their Jewishness and with their readiness to defend not only their country, but themselves in their identity as Jews. My hope lies with this generation.

I'm positive. I think the future is bright. All we need is to get through this blip, so that all those old people pass on and this young generation rises to fill the future gaps that are now held by catastrophic people, like the leaders of the IDF and the political echelon, etc. When they move on from their places, they will still try to run the show from retirement, as we see from the 1973 generation who are trying to run the show out of retirement, and they are prepared to sabotage their own country and their own society out of retirement. Thankfully, retirement leads only one way. This younger generation will fill all those spaces and we'll see a new Israel. We'll see a new, Jabotinsky-type nation rising. This is what I see and what I look forward to.

Picture credit:

Screenshot from https://www.youtube.com/live/jQ8bPe4J5OA