By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO – Eitan Weiss, deputy chief of mission for the Israel Consulate General in Los Angeles, said during a lunch-time interview here on Thursday that Israel’s Palestinian opponents neither want peace nor have any regard for the truth.
Those pushing BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) against Israel “have no problems with falsification of the truth of what is really out there, what is really happening,” Weiss said.
Palestinian leaders and their supporters “have no problem taking an image and putting it completely out of context, or taking in image from Syria or other places in the world, and saying, ‘Look what just happened in Gaza or in the West Bank’ and saying that the Israeli Army did this or did that. The problem is that they are using their status of being accepted or perceived as an underdog, and they are using that against us, by lying their way in and attempting to brainwash the millennials, and the young adolescents of today who are very easily swayed by image and things that appeal to the emotions.”
Weiss cited as an example a photograph of a young Palestinian boy seemingly being attacked by an Israeli tank. “This picture looks horrific, but when you take a couple of steps back you can see that behind that Palestinian boy is his father pushing him toward that tank… and you can see that this tank is inoperative, simply parked somewhere. And they are saying ‘Look what happens to these poor children and the atrocities of the Israelis.’”
Another example, he said, was a photograph which identified a woman as a French doctor who had come to Gaza to provide help to its residents against the Israelis. However, fans of the television series Grey’s Anatomy recognized the woman in the photograph as actress Katherine Heigl, who is neither French, nor a doctor, nor was she a visitor to Gaza. According to Weiss, the photograph simply was clipped from an old TV episode. When fans pointed this out, the Gazans said it was all a “mistake,” but such “mistakes” are quite common, according to Weiss.
Weiss said newspaper readers and television viewers all need to be quite skeptical of any reporting that comes out of Gaza, which is controlled by Hamas, which is internationally recognized as a terrorist organization.
“When a foreign journalist wants to go into Gaza, the first thing they do is put a Hamas member with him, who says ‘Welcome to Gaza. I am going to be your photographer and let’s work together …. If you have an issue with that, don’t let the door hit you on the way out.’ They kick them out. A great example of that challenge was during Operation Protective Edge [also known as the 2014 Gaza War] where we claimed and showed videos of Hamas shooting rockets from within heavily populated areas, but the media didn’t report on that. Why? Because whenever you had a reporter reporting in English, Hamas was there, and if something was off, they would cut the transmission off immediately.”
The issue began to penetrate reports from foreign media visiting Gaza when the foreign journalists spoke in languages other than English. “It was a Finnish reporter standing at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza in a parking lot and she heard a whoosh and a big boom, and she said it was unbelievable, but a rocket launcher had just launched a rocket 20 feet from the hospital,” Weiss said. “Then, afterwards, an Indian reporter did it. The challenge was this: if you are a news agency and you want to have coverage from Gaza, show me one foreign journalist who would like to live there? There is no such thing. So, they are hiring local people, and the local people get money from Hamas or sometimes are killed by Hamas operatives.”
Weiss said that Israel’s adversaries are “trying to delegitimize the existence of the State of Israel” by its actions in various international forums and “by focusing on Israel by saying whatever it does, it does wrong.” Whenever Israel proposes a people-to-people initiative in an effort to demonstrate that Palestinians and Israelis can get along, he said, the Palestinian leadership torpedoes cooperation. He told of a festival in Ottawa, Canada, at which he proposed “an amazing project to bring an Israeli brew master from Alexander Beer, and a Palestinian from Tiber Beer, together with a Canadian brew master to have some collaborations – ‘Beer for Peace’ –in order to have something positive. The Israelis went crazy for that idea, also the guy from Ottawa. The Palestinian said, ‘that is a great idea, I want to do it,’ but two days later, he is calling me, ‘I have been threatened with my life.”
In his view, the Palestinian leadership prevents peaceful cooperation “because it is threatening their interests…. They have no problem lying and falsifying to achieve their goal. That is why we have the Palestinian leadership promoting a resolution with UNESCO [the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization] saying that Judaism has nothing in common with Jerusalem, and vice versa. And this resolution passed nearly unanimously. We also are seeing the Palestinian leadership putting this conflict into places where it shouldn’t be, for example sports, with the international body for soccer. This is a problem.”
Asked what the Israeli Consulate-General in Los Angeles is doing in the seven states for which it is responsible – Arizona, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, and (Southern) California—Weiss responded that it is sponsoring educational missions to Israel for American student leaders of various religions and ethnicities and is bringing speakers to campuses to tell Israel’s story.
Does Israel plan to use television commercials to tell its side of the story with memorable images? Weiss responded that if Israel were to sponsor such commercials, there would be skepticism because of a general, global wide distrust of government messages. “The only thing we can do to battle it is to use various proxies, which we do, and of course we monitor everything that they are doing,” Weiss said. Additionally, he said, Israel tries to publicize major Palestinian falsehoods as quickly as they appear, as, for example, in the case of Palestinians misusing the image of Katherine Heigl.
Weiss was joined at the interview at the Trails Eatery by Anna Rubin, the consulate’s director of media affairs, and Elliot Miller, its director of political affairs. Prior to taking this position a little more than a year ago, Weiss served as spokesperson in Jerusalem to the Israeli media for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. A career diplomat, he also has served in posts in Angola, Russia, and Canada. I was joined at the interview by former state Assemblyman Howard Wayne (D-San Diego), who occasionally contributes columns on political subjects to San Diego Jewish World.
Wayne, a member of the Jewish community, told Israel’s deputy consul general he considered it “dangerous when the Orthodox in Israel align themselves with the Republican party, and that is pushing [American] progressives away.” Furthermore, he said, progressive Democrats were alienated several years ago during the debate over the Iran nuclear deal “to have the Prime Minister [Benjamin Netanyahu] speak to Congress on the invitation not of the President [Barack Obama} but of the Speaker [of the House of Representatives, John Boehner] and to openly campaign against the U.S. foreign policy agreement with Iran.”
Weiss responded that the Iran deal was “a very bad deal because it not only paved Iran’s way to obtain nuclear weapons without any constraints from the international community, but it also released a tremendous amount of funds into the Iranian terror operations.”
Wayne responded that just as the United States does not want Russia to interfere in its elections, neither does it want Israel to intervene in American foreign policy. The former Democratic legislator added that in his view, the “Israeli government is looking like it is aligning with the Trumpist wing of the Republican party.”
Weiss said that it is very important for people to know that despite some differences with the United States on issues, Israel has sought and values a strong relationship with the United States, regardless of which party is in power. Noting President Trump’s recent actions, he said, “we mustn’t forget that the idea to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem was accepted in 1995 by Congress, and there was a Democrat in the White House,” he said. “We will work with whoever is sitting in the White House, or in Congress.”
*
Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com