I kid you not. This is a real story from Haaretz. Hard to believe that Mark Regev is such an obtuse idiot along with the rest of Israel’s hasbara apparatus, but there you go.
Before I cite the story, I should preface it by mentioning that Israel’s ironically named Gaza invasion, Operation Cast Lead, derives from (of all things) a children’s Hanukah poem by Chaim Nachman Bialik:
Teacher bought a big top for me,
Solid lead, the finest known.
In whose honor, for whose glory?
For Hanukkah alone.
Here is what I wrote on this subject at the beginning of the war:
It is just like modern Israel and Zionism to appropriate Jewish history, holiday and tradition to justify its own agenda. Quite macabre also to think that the IDF has defiled a delightful children’s poem by Bialik in order to convey the power of its onslaught against Hamas (”solid lead”).
Here is shmendrik Regev’s commentary on this subject:
Naming Israel’s incursion into Gaza Operation Cast Lead was a public relations faux pas, a top government spokesman said on Wednesday.
“I didn’t like the name,” Mark Regev, the prime minister’s spokesman for international media, told a crowd of some 150 listeners in English. “From a public relations point of view, it was a mistake.”
“…The Israel Defense Forces chooses its names by some computer or by some system which I don’t understand. And the truth is that the Hebrew name Oferet Yetzuka [referring to Hanukkah dreidels] sounds lovely. It’s the translation into English which sounds inappropriate.
Regev, 49, added that whenever he spoke to international media, he “never once said ‘Cast Lead’ because it has connotations in English that are problematic…”
“The English translation wasn’t the most effective way to get our message out and it’s an important point because if you can control the terminology of the debate, you can win the debate,” he said.
Hmmm, calling it “cast lead” was quite problematic, eh? They could’ve done worse. They could’ve called it Operation Drop Dead or Vast Dread. That would’ve really conveyed Israel’s intentions. As it was, I thought “Cast Lead” perfectly conveyed Israel’s intent to drill Gaza full of lead (as they indeed did).
It seems grisly to call this humorous, but it really is if you look at it in a M.A.S.H.-Catch 22 sort of way. The IDF always seems to provide dark comedy in spite of itself.
They could’ve called it Operation Drop Dead or Vast Dread. That would’ve really conveyed Israel’s intentions.
Bravo.
Hanukkah Massacre might also have been appropriate
“And the truth is that the Hebrew name Oferet Yetzuka [referring to Hanukkah dreidels] sounds lovely.” Regev doesn’t seem to recognize the incongruity of affixing a “lovely” name to plans for a military assault.
One doesn’t want to aid the Israeli government in it’s warfare, so I am not going to say all that I initially wrote in response to this, but instead ask, why are the Israelis so susceptible to errors of this type? One expects greater intelligence from such a technologically advanced society than is demonstrated.
Why is there no auto-edit function for it’s and its!
I don’t know what Regev is complaining about.
When Hamas won the legislative elections the Western Community immediately responded by applying further sanctions. When the Israelis upgraded the Siege of Gaza to a full scale assault the Western Community responded with ringing condemnations along the lines of “Israel has a right to ‘defend‘ itself”.
And our response to the continued blockade is … um … er …
Well, I guess it’s just “Keep going Israel”.
Heck, even Goebbels would have been happy with this result.
On a more serious note: Regev is a very clever and astute analyst. He has devoted his career to propagandising for Israel but he is clearly worried about the speed with which it is approaching the tipping point of Western opinion and Israel’s apparent obliviousness of the fact.
The names are computer-generated and randomly assigned. And it’s not like Operation Defensive Shield, which followed on hundreds of deaths by terror in Israel, wasn’t followed by the same bad press and allegations of massacre.
Agree. It is remarkably stupid to think that the badly chosen name somehow contributed to the negative image of the campaign. There is absolutely no evidence to this idea. But I guess some people need this to convince themselves that had they only chosen a better name, everything would have been hunky dory. Regev is not alone – Shlomo Avinery, for example, also wrote an editorial in Haaretz calling “to fire the IDF computer”.
What an unbelievable lie. Wherever do you find any evidence to support this wild bit of hyperbole.
Eurosabra: If one wants to discuss numbers of dead, one needs to include the dead of both polities. One cannot, to any useful purpose, address the dead of only one.
Richard: Btselem and the MFA have cumulative totals, but the total for March, 2002 was 130, and added to the previous months, Israel had indeed suffered “hundreds” of deaths by terror, on the order of two hundred and change.
Margaret: The scale of killing is consonant with an “armed conflict short of war”, thus it is a perception-driven conflict to a great extent. Certainly the Palestinian naming of “Al-Aqsa Intifada” did not help Israelis’ perception of it, to the extent that it problematized Israeli perceptions of Palestinian militants as waging secular conflict resolvable by normal means of statecraft.
This is “hundreds?” And can we compare that to how many Palestinian civilians were killed during the same period?
THis is a political conflict which Israel refuses to resolve by “normal means of statecraft.” Hence the unfortunate resorting of the Palestinians to non violent resistance at first & later to violent resistance.
I’m sure you can find the Palestinian number if you like, I think it was on the order of 500, btselem’s numbers are the closest we’re going to get, and again only aggregate figures.
It would have been interesting to see what would have happened if negotiations had continued under fire in 2000-1.
They should have called it: “The war to bring an end to Hamas’ war of terror against the civilian population of southern Israel.”
It’s hard to argue with facts.
Those are YOUR facts. But not necessarily THE facts. Gazans would have a different name for it that wouldn’t be reflected in your own.