The Double Message of the Israeli Government

It goes without saying that there is universal disappointment with Israel’s information policies.

The problem is not the lack of funds or professional resources at the disposal of the Israeli government.

The problem remains the double message that the Israeli government conveys.

A case in point:

On October 28, 2001, the state of Israel spoke in two tongues concerning Yassir Arafat’s responsibility for the current wave of Arab terror in Israel.

Throughout the morning of October 28th, Israel’s minister of Foreign Affairs, Shimon Peres, gave an endless round of news interviews, to Israeli and foreign news bureaus in which he said that Arafat was not responsible for the current wave of terror.

Peres spoke of Arafat’s arrests of terrorists, and of Arafat’s efforts to quell Islamic terror groups.

In the afternoon of October 28th, Peres took the unprecedented step of initiating an appearance on the Voice of Palestine radio station in which he assured his listeners that the Palestinian Arab people would soon have a state of their own.

Meanwhile, on the same day of October 28th,, IDF sources met with more than a hundred journalists to provided data that connected Arafat and the PLO to every form of Arab Islamic terror activity that currently plagues the state and people of Israel.

IDF sources noted that when Islamic terror groups train and operate in the full view of the Palestinian Authority security services, they get the message that their activity operates with the full blessing of Arafat’s regime.

IDF sources provided the media with documentation that the Islamic Hamas terror group’s military wing operates as an official integral part of Arafat’s Palestinian Authority security forces in Gaza.

IDF sources told the media that they were were not surprised that on the morning of October 28th that two Hamas terrorists in the service of the Palestinian security services had that very morning murdered four more women and wounded fifty civilians in cold blood at the Hadera bus station.

IDF source emphatically pointed out that the Hamas killers were on the list of wanted terrorists whom Arafat had refused to arrest – especially since they were operating in the open.

This double message that the Israeli government has conveyed to the media and to the world at large, has continued since October, 1986, when Shimon Peres became the Foreign Minister of the State of Israel and when Dr. Yossi Beilin became his deputy at that ministry. Peres and Beilin revised the way in which the government of the state of Israel would relate to the PLO – Even though this seeming policy change did not sit well with then- Likud Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir

At the orders of Peres and Beilin, no longer would the Israeli government ministry of foreign affairs distribute the PLO covenant. No longer would the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs define the PLO as an enemy. The 1986 Peres/Beilin policy change paved the way for the US government to recognize the PLO two years later.

This policy change in the Israel Foreign Ministry became permanent.

Even when the Likud held power in 1990-1992 and 1996-1999, Israel’s Foreign Ministry would not provide governments of the world with the basics of PLO involvement with terror activity.

Even though Israel Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu hired a high level professional staff to provide the media with weekly reports of PLO involvement in terror activity, which functioned under the able direction of David Bar Ilan. Yet when I covered the negotiations conducted by Netanyahu government with the PLO in Oslo in August 1998 and at the Wye Plantation in October 1998, the Israeli embassies in Washington and in Oslo did not distribute any of the material on the PLO that the office of the Israeli prime minister had prepared in Jerusalem. Upon further investigation, Iraeaeli embassy officials informed me that this was a matter of policy.

The bottom line: When the Prime Minister of Israel and the IDF prepare carefully researched material on the PLO, Israel’s representatives abroad, working under the aegis of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, will make sure that material critical of the PLO will never reach beyond the shores of the Mediterranean Sea.

The Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs is invested in an Oslo process that has engaged in a policy of repackaging Yassir Arafat and transforming him from a terrorist into a statesman, reality not withstanding.

The Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs is armed with a substantial budget to promote that view, and works in tandem with Dr Yose Beilin, whose Economic Policy Forum, funded by the European Union, continues to prepare new plans of appeasement for the PLO.

Neither Peres nor Beilin demand that the PLO disarm the Islamic terror groups inside their security services not even to modify the new school curriculum of the Palestinian National Authority which trains a new generation for war with the state and people of Israel

With public opinion polls showing the Israeli left at an all time low, Peres and Beilin recognize that their current Arafat appeasement efforts represent their “last hurrah” of a ministry of foreign affairs which they “reconstituted” in 1986.

Peres and Beilin will now make that one last effort to appease Arafat.

The solution for journalists:To ignore Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and to report the reality of the PLO.