Israel’s army spokesmen lie

On a May afternoon in 2021, during Operation Guardian of the Walls in the Gaza Strip, a voicemail was published in a very large WhatsApp group. It was attributed to Israel’s air force chief at the time, Amikam Norkin, who purportedly described the operation to bomb Hamas’ tunnels in Gaza. But the speaker was in fact Walla news site’s (cringe-inducing) defense correspondent, Amir Bohbot.

“Friends, I don’t know what you’re thinking or what you know, but these days are very complex and difficult. There have been fatalities on the home front and in the IDF,” he said, sounding as thrilled as the prime minister’s elder son, Yair Netanyahu, lounging on the beach during his months-long stint in Miami.

“But I can’t say everything. Last night the IDF turned everything on its head. We simply ripped them to shreds in one of the air force’s biggest operations ever, sending 160 planes in less than half an hour into a very, very narrow space, one of the most crowded in the world. We took out 450 armed fighters and … all their tunnels and launch pits.

“It’s for good reason they didn’t fire on Tel Aviv last night; they’re still in shock from what we’ve done. After that we played a crazy trick on them – and I can’t elaborate on that either. But it’s really, really exciting, and every person who recites kiddush over the wine this evening should bless the IDF soldiers, amen.”

I recalled this recording this week when IDF Spokesman Daniel Hagari reported on the discovery of a huge Hamas tunnel ranging from Jabalya in northern Gaza to the Erez crossing further north. It’s so wide you can drive a car through it. What happened since that ecstatic boasting by the Israeli reporter back then and the announcement on the discovery of the tunnel now?

Here’s the story: Since the fighting in May 2021, an awareness campaign has targeted the Israeli public; they want to convince us that our military is stupendous. Our air force has no equal in the world, and Hamas has suffered a mortal blow. Israelis love that word. Here’s another beloved word, deterrence, as in “We’ve once again achieved deterrence.”

Politicians, generals in the reserves and journalists had joined together in propaganda that blew up in our faces on October 7. But we can only blame ourselves. Israelis love to be lied to. The whole purpose of the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit is to put lipstick on nonsense. After all, nobody wants to hear that we have a mediocre army whose intelligence corps failed, an army that a terror group brought to its knees.

In Israel, lies are an industry, a commodity much in demand. Anyone who wants to tell the truth is considered part of the depression industry. Leftists, Haaretz, Al Jazeera, sourpusses.

The national strength-and-pride industry glories in everything the Israel Defense Forces does. It weeps over every article in tabloid Israel Hayom’s Friday edition on the cooperation between a paratrooper officer and his buddy in the Armored Corps.

What haven’t they said and what hallucinations haven’t they recounted about that bombing of the tunnels in May 2021? They described the operation as incomparably brilliant.

Sure enough, it began with a deception – though it’s not clear a deception was intended: an English tweet from the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit about a ground offensive. That was supposed to push the terrorists down into the tunnels so the air force could finish the job.

“We scored a big hit on Hamas’ efforts underground,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared at a press conference. “Hamas invested an entire decade in digging tunnels, and most of them, not all, a large part, have gone down the drain. The Hamas metro has changed from a strategic asset into a death trap for terrorists.”

The defense minister at the time, Benny Gantz, added: “In the past few days the IDF, under the command of Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi, has transformed Gaza’s tunnel network – used for storing weapons – from underground hideaways into death traps. The Hamas metro has become a hell train. This strategic achievement in the war on Hamas is puncturing its war doctrine.”

Then came the military correspondents. Once in my youth I sat with a correspondent 10 years older than me. He told me about the moment he decided to become a journalist: He was moving his bowels in a trench during the Yom Kippur War while reading a newspaper that described how we were beating the enemy. He decided to be a journalist and tell the public the truth.

Where is he and where is Yoav Limor? “That was Hamas’ wild card – the strategic plan aimed at giving it a victory in the battle, or at least preventing it from losing,” he marveled in Israel Hayom in 2021.

“They invested millions in it and innumerable man-hours, and they were sure it was giving them immunity. Instead, their secret card became a death trap.

“When the fighting is over and the time comes to draw conclusions, Hamas will have to figure out not only how it was denied its most significant capability, but also what this says about the future: whether its tunnel project changed from a solution to a problem.”

Journalist Nir Dvori added on Twitter before it became X: “It wasn’t out of the blue that security sources in the past said Hamas didn’t understand this, but its tunnels would become mass cemeteries. The IDF already had plans to transform the tunnel threat into an opportunity, and that’s exactly what happened last night.”

Later investigations by Amos Harel in Haaretz and Tal Lev-Ram in Maariv showed that this was more BS. We fooled ourselves. Ilana Dayan, in a report for her investigative news program “Uvda,” interviewed then-Southern Command chief Eliezer Toledano, who said that maybe 10 terrorists were killed in the metro, that crazy death trap.

But what difference does it make? The narrative was already established. The IDF Spokesperson’s Unit won. We all lost.

Israel needs to rehabilitate itself from a lot of things since October 7, especially lying to ourselves. We’re reveling in PR campaigns and videos and “messages,” but we’re ignoring that we’re the only target audience, not people abroad.

For 15 years we’ve had a prime minister whose art is telling lies, whose expertise is BS-ing. He makes his living blinding us to the truth. He always depicts himself and the IDF as powerhouses that rout the enemy. They’re supported by his court journalists.

And just as we’ve gradually returned to our habits of October 6, in our propaganda we’ve returned to the preening, arrogance and empty threats. We’re promising to bomb Lebanon and destroy Beirut – and we’re just a hair’s breadth from toppling Hamas. We’ll bring back the hostages immediately thanks to the military pressure; our presence on the ground will make the difference.

“We’re winning,” the writing blared on the virtual wall of Channel 12’s main Friday night news program a few weeks ago. For good measure, anchorman Dany Cushmaro gave an emotional speech. It’s more fun to say we’re winning than treading water.

You can understand the human inclination to believe that everything is good, not bad, to want to hear about the air force’s amazing planes, the artificial intelligence, the cyberhackers and the special forces.

It’s fun to think about the wily agents in the Shin Bet security service who are getting stones to talk and are sitting inside Yahya Sinwar‘s phone. It’s reassuring to dream about the Mossad assassinating the head of the ayatollahs’ nuclear program in the middle of Iran.

It’s much more fun to wake up to happy analysts than to doomsaying pundits telling us that the IDF is unprepared for the escalation on the way, that we aren’t strong the way we’d like to be, that our leaders are somewhere between mediocre and failed.

Substance abuse comes with a price. The day the substance runs out is an opportunity for rehab.