When my wife was pregnant with our first child, she gave me a book on prenatal development. I learned that a baby’s lungs are among the last organs to develop – which is why so many premature babies need to be intubated.
This fact came to mind as I watched Israeli terror unfold at al-Shifa Hospital eight weeks ago now. I became obsessed with the 39 premature babies, the ones who were wheeled out of the neonatal intensive care unit into two beds, wrapped in foil. I imagined them gasping for air, slowly dying.
Then came the news that five unnamed infants had been found decomposing at Al Nassr Pediatric Hospital, abandoned after the Israeli army forced medical staff and patients to flee. I imagined how they died alone, of cold and terror.
I have no doubt that senior officials in the Biden administration have seen the images and videos. I have to believe that many of them are horrified by what they saw. And I also believe that their awareness of the horror and their awareness of their active participation in its production is, in part, what leads them to fabricate intelligence estimates and tell outright lies.
But there is something else at work in the Biden administration’s efforts to spread fake Israeli news: disinformation has been a powerful weapon in the war and in the commission of genocide. And it has been used frequently, perhaps with diminishing effect in the modern media age.
The US government is not very credible when it comes to intelligence. Remember Secretary of State Colin Powell’s lackluster performance at the United Nations in 2003, when he accused Iraq of possessing weapons of mass destruction and presented as evidence a vial of paraphernalia containing white powder.
But when it comes to war, sometimes a lousy presentation and a half-hearted speech is enough. Powell’s antics fooled no one, but his presentation was enough to distract from the impending disaster.
We learned over time what we had always known: there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. And the only yellow uranium cake that we can talk about was prepared by British and American spies.
But lies about Iraq were nothing new; Powell’s efforts constitute a memorable example in a series of acts of disinformation designed by the U.S. government to shape public perceptions.
Perhaps the most infamous example occurred in 1964, in the Gulf of Tonkin, off the coast of Vietnam. At the time, the United States made up a story about a firefight with North Vietnamese forces. The objective was to provoke an escalation of this war on a national level. It worked and millions of Vietnamese civilians were killed in an aimless conflict.
Today, President Joe Biden and his advisors are blatantly lying to us. They claimed to have seen independent intelligence indicating the presence of a Hamas military installation under al-Shifa hospital in Gaza. Biden, speaking to reporters, said: “The first war crime is being committed by Hamas by placing its headquarters, its army, under a hospital. It is a fact. That’s what happened. Only, of course, that’s not the case.
Many didn’t believe the president, but again, that’s beside the point. Disinformation serves a useful purpose from the point of view of those who practice it.
Propaganda blurs perceptions of what is happening. Our media feels obligated to cover breaking news as it happens and government officials are seen as speaking with authority when they do so. Deference to the office of the presidency is deep-rooted and, by definition, the president’s words are newsworthy.
This deference, combined with the importance of the president as a source of information, means that presidential lies are not directly confronted, even if they are widely disseminated. If the untruths are subsequently challenged, the challenges are not considered newsworthy.
By sowing confusion and misinformation, the president diminishes the power of the electorate’s understanding and forceful opposition to violence. In this way, disinformation is used to detach policymaking from the ordinary accountability mechanisms of democracy.
But there are signs that misinformation isn’t working like it used to. Today, the speed of the news cycle is such that the first lie has barely been told before the next one is debunked. Al-Shifa was on our minds, even as Israeli leaders attempted to set the stage for further atrocities in Khan Younis and Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. Today, they have destroyed almost all of Gaza’s 36 hospitals, and Al-Shifa and Al Nassr Pediatric Hospital continue to be on our minds.
And now, as the world turns its attention to South Africa’s credible accusation of genocide against Israel, the White House has chosen to release new “intelligence,” doubling down on their original lie about al-Shifa. To what end is unclear, but the timing suggests the tired manual is still at work.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.