Story by Donald H. Harrison; Photos by Fred Kropveld
LA JOLLA, California – Two reserve Israel Defense Force officers, speaking for themselves only, are touring the United States discussing the statuses of the military war and the propaganda war against Israel. Maj. Ilan Shulman discussed Israel’s precarious military and strategic situation, and Lt. Col. Amit Grinfeld described Palestinian techniques in creating blatantly false propaganda against Israel.
Grinfeld, founder of “We Walk Together,” told an audience at Congregation Beth El on Thursday evening, Sept. 12, that Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs historically has done a poor job countering anti-Israel propaganda, so he feels that volunteers like Shulman and himself must talk to American audiences wherever they can be found. As an example, he said he will speak to a group in the near future in Bozeman, Montana.
Shulman, a resident of Kibbutz Meron Golan, within sight of Israel’s border with Syria, said he believes Iran persuaded Hamas to start the war with Israel on Oct 7, when Islamist soldiers and civilians from Gaza crossed the border and massacred, raped, and pillaged in Israel and took hundreds of hostages to barter for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons.
He suggested that Hamas was misled into believing that Iran and all its proxies – Hezbollah in Lebanon, Shi’ite militias in Syria and Iraq, and Houthis in Yemen – would simultaneously attack Israel, and thereby overwhelm the Jewish homeland. However, according to Shulman, who served in an IDF intelligence unit while on active duty, Gaza was just a pawn to be sacrificed in Iran’s deadly chess game against Israel. Rather than an all-out regional war which might bring destruction to its capital Tehran, Iran prefers to sponsor a war of attrition by its proxies to weaken Israel’s economy, undermine its people’s morale, and sap its military strength.
“In terms of the [Israeli] army, it is tiny. We have 176,000 soldiers in active service, and we recruited 350,000 to do their reserve,” Shulman said. The cost is very high of keeping so many reserve soldiers in the IDF, away from their regular lives and jobs. So is the cost of maintaining an estimated 76,000 evacuees from northern Israel, whose homes and workplaces are endangered by Hezbollah rockets fired from Lebanon.
Shulman believes Iran pushed Hamas into starting the war on Oct. 7 because it feared that a normalization deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia was imminent. He noted that in the Islamic world, the Shi’ites who dominate Iran and the Sunnis who are in large majorities elsewhere , including Saudi Arabia, are bitter rivals. Just as Iran has tried to encircle Israel with hostile forces, it fears Israel might be successful implementing a similar strategy against Iran.
“Saudi Arabia is not just a country in the Middle East,” Shulman said. “It is not very, very big compared to Iran, or to Turkey, or to Egypt but it is a very important one trying to lead the Arab world. [It has] 37 million people, very rich, having many aircrafts, all of them American. The thing is they don’t have enough talented pilots to fly them, and they have many anti-aircraft systems they bought from America. Guess what? There are not enough officers who know how to operate it. Think about Saudi Arabia working with Israeli [technicians], Israeli pilots, Israeli intelligence.”
“If Saudi Arabia signs a peace agreement [with Israel], others will join,” such as “Oman, Indonesia, maybe Pakistan—a radical Sunni country with 100 nuclear warheads.” Iran fears potential Israeli cooperation with Azerbaijan on Iran’s northern border, and “the Iranians cannot trust the Afghanis and the Pakistanis on the eastern border.” On its west, while Iran controls much of Iraq, the Kurds there have a cozy relationship with the Israelis. “Then when they look to the south, they see over the Gulf, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, and then there are Jordan and Egypt – all of them will work together….”
Shulman credited U.S. President Joe Biden with deterring Iran and the other countries from committing themselves to a regional war with Israel. Biden projected American strength by sending two aircraft carriers (USS Gerald R. Ford and USS Dwight D. Eisenhower) along with a nuclear strike- capable submarine, and B-1, B-2, and B-52 bombers to the Middle East. In such circumstances, a war of attrition, fought by Iran’s proxies, suited Iran just fine, Shulman said.
However, Shulman said Israel cannot forever sustain such a strain on its economy. He hopes Israeli leaders will “make a deal with the devil” to get the hostages out of Gaza, as part of a temporary ceasefire agreement that will enable Israel to move three battalions to its northern border in preparation for a “full-scale” war with Hezbollah “to get them away from the border.”
“We probably won’t stop the missiles but at least we will reduce the chances of another Oct. 7th,” this time, with Hezbollah forces crossing into Israel from Lebanon.
As Shulman’s presentation took more than an hour, Grinfeld kept his deliberately shorter. He told of a young Jewish woman in San Diego – whom he did not identify – who received death threats after she put a mezuzah on her doorpost. She decided to change her address.
He attributed such contemporary antisemitism to malicious, antisemitic, Palestinian propaganda.
Grinfeld showed a cartoon, which he said has flooded social media, in which Israel is represented as Goliath and the Palestinians as the little David. A photograph of a little Palestinian child throwing rocks at an Israeli tank was meant to show the courage of Gazans against overwhelming odds. But, in fact, the tank was parked, empty, without hatches open. “Pollywood” is the term Grinfeld and other Israelis use to describe false images manufactured by the Palestinians.
A Palestinian man in a shroud is pictured on a gurney. A captured image shows that same “dead man” sitting up from the gurney and checking his cell phone. A picture of a child lying in rubble was made using AI (artificial intelligence). “They flood the internet with that,” Grinfeld said. “Social media comes immediately, unchecked, it is free of charge, and you don’t even have to see commercials,” he said, noting that Tik Tok, a social media site most popular among youth, is owned by mainland China.
Many of the messages are spread over and over by bots, he said. He paraphrased the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) in noting that “there is a decrease in activity by bots when there is a lunch break in China.”
Jewish donors to American universities typically endow medical and scientific centers, he said. The Qatari government, Saudi Arabia, and other wealthy Arab countries endow programs in political science, Middle Eastern studies, gender studies, “trying to influence politicians of the future,” according to Grinfeld.
It’s not all bad news, Grinfeld said. He suggested there is a “silent majority” around the world who will resist such propaganda and judge matters on their merits.
He cited the case of the recent Eurovision contest in Malmö, Sweden, a city which has a large Islamic population. There were demonstrations against Israeli contestant Eden Golan, who had to be protected by a large contingent of police. Judges at the Eurovision contest were told to give her song “Hurricane” low grades, Grinfeld said, “but the people voted.” The song originally had been called “October Rain,” alluding to the October 7th massacre. Despite an anti-Israel campaign, she came in fifth in the contest in which musicians from 37 countries competed. “Some people can separate truth from lies,” Grinfeld said.
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Donald H. Harrison is publisher and editor of San Diego Jewish World.