PThe longer the Gaza war continues and worsens, the more the parallel between Benjamin Netanyahu and Vladimir Putin becomes apparent. Both have nothing but contempt for their adversaries, stigmatized in the most degrading terms.
The Israeli Prime Minister does not respect the humanitarian law of conflicts any more than the Russian President, particularly in terms of the protection of civilians, which exposes both of them to prosecution by the International Criminal Court. Both leaders willingly rewrite the history of the Second World War to better assimilate their enemies to ” Nazis » to be eliminated mercilessly.
Western opinions nevertheless seem much more aware of the scale and threat of Russian disinformation campaigns than of the risk presented by comparable operations for the benefit of Netanyahu and his government. It is true that pro-Israeli propaganda, referred to under the generic term hasbara (“explanation” in Hebrew), was presented as such for a long time, before resorting to more circuitous biases.
“Pallywood” and other lies
When Netanyahu returned to the head of government in December 2022, after an interlude of a year and a half, he entrusted the information portfolio to one of his loyalists within the Likud, the very combative Galit Distel Atbaryan, qualified as “ minister of propaganda » during heated debates in the Knesset. After the terrorist bloodbath of October 7, 2023, Distel Atbaryan calls on social networks for ” erase all Gaza from the face of the Earth »to expel them “monsters” who inhabit it, and to kill without hesitation those who refuse to leave.
However, these excesses do not allow Distel Atbaryan to save his position, or even his ministry, which has been purely and simply eliminated, due to the propaganda operations now directly carried out by the Israeli army and its very active spokespeople in various foreign languages. The ban on any access to the Gaza Strip for the international press facilitates the defamation campaigns of Palestinian sources, in order to relativize, or even contest the terrible human toll of the Israeli strikes.
A mythical “Pallywood”, a controversial amalgam of Palestine and Hollywood, is thus accused of staging the funerals of victims of bombings in Gaza and even of providing plastic infants to extras paid to mourn the child they would never have had . The parallel is striking with the lies disseminated by the Kremlin in March 2022, during the Russian strike on a maternity hospital in the besieged Ukrainian port of Mariupol.
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