Many years ago I got interested in a field of military activity called Psychological Warfare,in which all the armies in the world invest considerable resources.
Psychological warfare is the opposite of propaganda. Propaganda tries to convince the otherside that we are right. Psychological warfare does not try to convince anybody, it is aninstrument of war like the air-force or the armored corps. Its aim is to break the enemy andcompel him to submit to our will. If propaganda is honey, psychological warfare is prussicacid.
To achieve this aim, this field uses psychological means in order to break the enemy apart andsow suspicion and distrust between its parts. The main objective is to destroy the personleading the enemy, i.e. break the head: to undermine the trust in him and to get his fighters,followers and the world at large to hate him.
How does one do this? The manuals describe the methods:
The leader of the enemy is corrupt. He sends his fighters to their death while he himself enjoyslife. He steals the people’s money and hides it in foreign bank accounts. His henchmen are agang of thieves, who lead a life of luxury in hotels around the world, while the ordinary peoplego hungry. The leader is a contemptible, loathsome, brutal, effeminate, tyrannical,ridiculous figure.
These stories are repeated thousands of time, they are planted in “neutral” foreign media, sothat they come back from “objective” sources.
Does this sound familiar?
Of course. For several years, already, almost all Israeli media and spokesmen are engaged indemonizing one person: Yasser Arafat. All the classic tricks of psychological warfare, aswell as some authentic Israeli inventions, are used to achieve this central aim. Not againstthe Palestinian people, not even against the Palestinian leadership, but against Arafatpersonally.
The conductors of this campaign do not care a damn whether Arafat is nice or mean, handsome orugly, a peace-lover or a war-monger, super-honest or a highway robber. Quite possibly,Sharon himself admires him in secret. (In 1976 he asked me to arrange a meeting with him, inorder to propose that Arafat become the president of a Palestinian state east of the Jordanriver.) That did not prevent him last week from declaring that he regrets that he did notsucceed in killing him in Beirut.
Arafat is targeted for one sole reason: he is the head of the Palestinian people fightingagainst the occupation. Breaking the head means breaking the whole structure of thePalestinian fight. In the course of war, especially a war of liberation, trust in the leader isessential for steadfast resistance against overwhelming forces. Without it, the movementwill splinter into thousand pieces. No amount of missiles can compete with that.
In the Israeli and international arenas, this campaign has achieved considerable success.The story about the corrupt Arafat, heading a “corrupt authority” and surrounded by a gang ofthieves has been spread throughout the world with relentless effort, until the very words”Palestinian Authority”, “Arafat” and “corrupt” have become synonymous. These days, thesuccess can be measured: If Atafat had been imprisoned in Ramallah ten years ago, there wouldhave been riotous demonstrations in all European capitals, with the pictures of Arafat beingcarried side by side with those of Che Gevara and Mandela. Where are they now?
In Israel itself the success is even greater. The hatred of Arafat unites all parts of thepublic, from the extreme right to the established left. Research shows that out of 300articles published by “leftists” about the Palestinian problem, 284 contained abusiveremarks about Arafat. Like Christians crossing themselves when entering a church, anIsraeli “leftist” has to say something like “I am for peace with the Palestinians, but I cannotstand the corrupt Arafat”, or “I am against the occupation, but Arafat’s corrupt gang has to beremoved”, as a sop to public opinion. The people who write this are not aware, of course, thatthey are serving the psychological warfare campaign aimed at breaking the Palestinianpeople at the decisive point.
One can view Arafat positively or negatively. He can be criticized from many directions. He isnot a romantic figure like Che Gevara (who died in a stupid campaign) or Nelson Mandela (whosetask was incomparably easier than Arafat’s), neither is he a television star. He is only theleader of the Palestinian people, elected by an immense majority in democratic elections(under the supervision of Jimmy Carter). The corruption in the Palestinian Authority is noworse than in Egypt or Jordan, and there is less there than in the United States (the Enronaffair), France (the Elf-Aquitaine affairs), Germany (the Kohl affair) or Israel (Shass).In the middle of a life-or-death national liberation fight, the treatment of this disease cancertainly be postponed.
The Palestinians themselves understand this well. In this arena – the main target of Israelipsychological warfare – the campaign, it now turns out, has completely failed. Sharonbelieved that by shutting Arafat up in Ramallah he would expose him to ridicule and show that heis not “relevant” anymore, in order to install a gang of collaborators in his place. The veryopposite has happened, of course: from Sheikh Yassin of the fundamentalist Hamas to theleft-wing Popular Front, the Palestinian people has closed ranks behind Arafat at thismoment of supreme danger to their very existence. Even the rumbling of criticism from somePalestinian intellectuals – who where also unwittingly exploited by Israeli psychologicalwarfare – has fallen silent.
These methods were used against Churchill, as well as against Castro. To no avail. They will,probably, not succeed against Arafat either.