Suddenly, 'podcasts' have appeared which are not really audio presentations, programmes, diaries or polemics on Palestine, but are simply news items. From Voice of America, no less.
I do not listen to VoA, and perhaps it has changed and become more like the BBC World Service, instead of being simply a propaganda voice for the USA. However, it is certainly, having glanced over the website, very much focused on the US angle of vision, and, as we all know, that is much more favourable to Israel
Why, I ask, has a website which says its aim (and a very laudable one too) is to provide a voice for Palestinians and podcasting on Palestine, placing short news items which link to the VoA front page? Discounting the idea that this is not really a 'podcast' as we understand it in the first place, why not choose one from Reuters, Agence France Presse or Al Jazeera?
The intent behind the proponents of the 'information war' is to place as much favourable information to their side as possible in all media, and especially on the internet. The concentration is there, because this is a fundamentally American idea, and Americans have seen newspaper readership, TV and radio audiences decline, while much of the US population now gets its news from the internet.
(Of course, this America-centric idea ignores the fact that large populations do get their news from radio broadcasters like the BBC World Service, which I heard recently has seven million listeners in Kenya alone, and there are many around the world whose access to the internet is limited, through simple lack of electricity, phones or money, never mind the latest 2 gigaHertz Intel-inside laptop.)
Among the various devices proposed to get the 'right' point of view across is to effectively flood sites with supportive stories, comments and refutations (easy enough when you can have as many effectively anonymous email names and addresses from Yahoo! or Hotmail as your Kray computer can hold) and try to get potentially influential or widely read ones to link to 'supportive' sites and thereby diminish both the frequency of appearance of adverse sites and consequently their apparent popularity. And thus relegate their listing in google searches down towards the 2,380,689th of the 2,380,701 results.
I suspect very much that this is actually happening in this conflict. As we non-Americans know well by now (or should have learnt) US methods, while sometimes subtle, can equally be sometimes enthusiastically blatant. Which is why the sudden appearance of relatively bland and uninformative news items about discussions taking place about a ceasefire, made to appear positive just in that, which we have all heard in other news media in tthe hourly news anyway, and which advances oIur knowledge very little, on a site supposed to be dedicated to disseminating information about Palestine and Palestinians makes me suspicious.
However it may be, to become a relay for a news broadcaster (it wouldn't matter whether it was VOA, BBC News, France Inter or Radio Moscow) diverts our attention from those who may be producing podcasts giving us eye-witness or on-the-spot authoritative information. It may not be as obvious as jamming radio and TV broadcasts (which Israel is doing), but nonetheless the effect is similar. It may not be a strategically important battle, but the tacticians of the 'information war' hope to sway public opinion to their side by force, not of arms, but an apparent manipulated and imaginary majority consensus.
It is doubtful, I think that this is going to work in this conflict. Many people around the world come to form an opinion based not on the transitory attitude or fashion of the moment (though there are always those, and they are often among the most vociferous) but on what they have seen, heard, understood and considered over however many years they have lived. And based it, in this case, on the reputation and actions of a state over the last twenty years.
A friend of mine, an Arab who has now lived more than half her life in Europe, tells me she has observed a shift in public attitude towards Israel of fundamental importance. For a decade or more, she says, Europeans particularly have tired of the constant iteration of Israelis as victims, the playing on sympathy for events 60 years ago in which the majority of the world population had no involvement or responsibility for, the almost incessant blame game in demands for compensation for real victims whose numbers sometimes seem to defy the normal attrition of age and illness, and the reliance, finally, on it all as an excuse for violence and inhumanity to another race.
The upshot is that there is a growing (and perhaps now fully grown) feeling that Israel is just another world state and must expect to be treated like one. If, as any other state will, it acts aberrantly or outside international law then it is responsible for its actions and there are no excuses, no more that there would be for any other.
If that is the case, and I have felt it myself, then this time, the information war in favour of Israel was lost before it began. It is, to me, increasingly ironic, that much of the reporting of what Israel (and the US) would prefer not to be heard or seen, and has tried to physically prevent, is being brought out into the open by the traditional media, not only using traditional methods, but all those of the information age as well.
But we should beware. In the information war prospectuses I have read, there is no provision for a cessation of hostilities, a truce, or a ceasefire. There is no guarantee that the subversion of the internet and information would not continue until history is re-written, the out-of-favour faces airbrushed out, the pages rearranged, the books confiscated, photographs denounced as fakes while the fake itself is presented as authentic, publishers banned.
It is just as easy now as it was before the electronic age. Internet service providers can be bullied ('supporting terrorism' and threatened with the freezing of assets), the cables carrying traffic cut. (How many times has that happened accidentally in the last couple of years, when telegraph and telephone cables laid in the nineteenth century survived for decades?) And of course, whatever their mission statements say, search engine companies in search of revenue will allow their supposed fundamental principles to flex or even buckle under government pressure.
We need to become aware again not of the potential for subversion of the state, but by the state. Especially when it is espoused and even practised by states which publicise their democratic credentials and their freedoms so frequently and forcefully.
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