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Summary: on 27 September 2024 the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was assassinated in Beirut in an Israeli airstrike. Four days later Arab Digest invited the security and defence specialist Dr Andreas Krieg onto the podcast to discuss the assassination and the broader picture within the context of his study on the weaponisation of narratives.
Today we continue our all new top ten podcasts countdown. Sitting at #8 is Andreas Krieg’s Netanyahu and the war of weaponised narratives first podcast 1 October 2024.
Andreas is an assistant professor at the Defence Studies Department of King’s College London and a strategic risk consultant working for governmental and commercial clients in the Middle East. His latest book Subversion: the strategic weaponisation of narratives was published by Georgetown University Press.
When we launched the podcast in 2020 we had no idea what sort of reception to expect. Now more than 275 podcasts later we are delighted they have been listened to a quarter of a million times in countries right around the world. The response is a measure of the outstanding quality of our contributors. We are fortunate and very grateful to have them.
In today’s newsletter we publish a short excerpt from the podcast. You can listen to the full podcast here.
The narrative Benjamin Netanyahu is providing is that Nasrallah was the world’s leading terrorist and the world is far better off without him. He, Netanyahu, is leading Israel to a safe and secure future with Nasrallah dead. I just wonder, Andreas, what you make of that narrative and how well it is playing for Israel, both in Israel but also to the outside world.
We have to understand who the key audiences are for all these different narratives. Israel has a massive problem with trying to address different audiences, domestically, internationally, allies as well as competitors and obviously addressing the enemy but doing so in a public domain that is extremely transparent. So you say one thing that’s meant for one audience but it will obviously have a negative effect on another audience. And so that’s the issue that Netanyahu has been stuck with. Netanyahu has become a lot more consistent, though, over the last 12 months, a lot more radical, saying things he probably wouldn’t have said 20 years ago but he is quite happy to consistently say now because his number one priority is not national security for Israel. It’s personal survival. And so the narratives are everyone else is a terrorist. Everyone we kill is a terrorist. Every civilian we kill was a terrorist or was used as a human shield by a terrorist. These are the sort of narratives that are being used very broadly to justify what Israel is doing, that is to justify the unjustifiable.
Netanyahu has two concerns. One is the constituency at home. His key core constituency is extremely ideological. They respond very well to ideological narratives in a kind of zero sum, black and white sort of way where there isn’t any grey zone. And the other audience that he needs to address is the diaspora and pro-Zionist networks in the United States. And they want a message of strength. They also view the world in a zero sum way, good versus evil. Israel obviously being good and all the Islamists and other Arab leaders are bad unless they’re actually normalising with Israel. In that very simplistic worldview, the narratives of Netanyahu work very well to mobilise people.
On the other hand, you have Hamas, and I think it’s very important to understand from the point of view of pre-7 October, that Hamas has one constituency primarily and that is obviously the home front. And then secondly, it’s the wider Muslim Arab world and then thirdly, maybe, the international community at large. And what Hamas was trying to do on 7 October was try to use, try to exploit an occasion, a surprise attack so disastrous for Israel that it would a undermine the myth of Israel’s invincibility. And then second of all to show the world that it was a way of dragging Israel into a trap where they would overreact, defy international law and would not get away with it. This was something that we would call reflexive control. Reflexive control is about weaponised narratives. It’s about trapping someone, triggering someone to do something they otherwise wouldn’t want to do without the person that you’re targeting knowing that they’ve been influenced. And 7 October was exactly this. It was supposed to drag Israel into a war that it can’t win and also a war where it would have to use excessive violence, where the international community would say, we don’t stand with that, even allies like the US and Germany would not stand with Israel.
Was that not a huge miscalculation by Hamas?
Reputationally speaking it has been a disaster for Israel. But it’s a bit like madman theory. Netanyahu has said ‘I don’t care about the international community. I don’t even care about the United States. I’ll do what I need to do. And if I have to kill 100,000 people, I will kill 100,000 people, whether this is in Gaza or in Beirut or somewhere else in order to show that narrative of strength.’ And so Hamas has been winning, to an extent, the international community especially the Arab world, the Muslim world which is fairly united when it comes to standing with Palestine. The issue of Palestine is now back at the very top of the agenda when it comes to regional politics. And Western states are talking about Palestinian statehood and that again is an achievement, if you will, of 7 October. That was part of that reflexive control that Hamas was trying to exercise on Israel. However, Hamas underestimated how far Israel under Netanyahu was willing to go.
And Hezbollah?
The same is true for Hezbollah. Hezbollah’s idea was ‘we will continue with the narrative of resistance where we’re saying we’re helping our brothers and sisters in Palestine and we’re trying to help where we can; we will support them without getting dragged into the war ourselves’ thus creating the narrative of a sustainable war that would not hurt Hezbollah. Again here the idea was always Israel will be deterred. They can’t have a three-front war and they wouldn’t be so mad as to start a war with Iran. And also the idea was that the US would intervene forcefully and say ‘look this is where it stops.’ That hasn’t happened. The Biden administration, (then Secretary of State) Blinken in particular, have played no real role in managing the crisis.
And so in this kind of context, I would say that, at least operationally speaking, Israel has been winning. Strategically speaking, it’s a disaster for Israel. We’ve seen that last week at the UN during the speech from Netanyahu most diplomats walked out. Netanyahu is seen as a rogue leader of a rogue state and any credit that Israel has built over the last 30 years since Oslo has evaporated. Basically, Israel is treated by most, even Westerners, as a rogue country. I think, if you look at polls in the US, in Europe, and I’m not even talking about the Global South, most people have a negative view of Israel now. And that in itself, I think, is a strategic disaster from a narrative point of view. I’m not sure how Israel will come back from that. And I would also say that the narrative of resistance for Hamas and Hezbollah is strengthened. Even if the organisations are degraded the narrative of resistance has been fuelled and empowered. The Arab world, the Muslim world are supporting this narrative and there are a lot of people in Western states who also support the idea of armed resistance. That would have been unheard of just a year or so ago.
Let me take you back now before 7 October into what you in your book describe as that grey zone where weaponised narratives are playing out. Can you tell us how those narratives were working on both sides and what role they played, if any, in driving Israel, Hamas and Hezbollah into this current conflict. Was there a kind of inevitability that those weaponised narratives would lead us to where we are now?
Yes, it was inevitable, particularly from Netanyahu’s point of view. The narratives used by various iterations of Netanyahu governments since 2009 have gradually pivoted further and further away from the centre to the far right, into the ideological realm. And inevitably the narratives that were used were increasingly dehumanising Palestinians and Arabs. They were completely detached from the reality on the ground. The international community believed that the idea of Palestine (statehood) was dead, the mobilising element of Palestine was dead. And so I think that led to a hubris in Israel to think that the status quo can be maintained for an indefinite period of time. And the root cause of insecurity, the root cause of mobilisation – which is the absence of a Palestinian state, which is occupation, which is the blockade of Gaza and also other infringements of international law that Israel is committing – that this was a sustainable situation that would never go away and that since Oslo Israel had somewhat won a manageable chaos that works in its favour. And so that narrative has led to Israel underestimating what Hezbollah and Hamas were willing to do. It led Israel to underestimate how far Iran would go. And has that achieved some sort of deterrence? I think since 7 October all the lines of deterrence have been broken. All the lines on the Israeli side have been collapsed. And also because Netanyahu himself wants to do whatever it takes to stay in power. And as such, he’s willing to take Israel into the abyss. And Israelis are following which is also quite significant.
And I think on the Hamas and Hezbollah side there’s been a lot of hubris as well, thinking that once a massive attack would happen and Israel would respond killing tens of thousands of civilians, they thought that the international community would rally around them, rally around the idea of resistance and tell Israel to stop and thereby address the problem of occupation and the lack of Palestinian statehood. That hasn’t happened. It hasn’t happened primarily because the US government has been unequivocally standing with Israel.
Note: as Israel continues its genocidal war further atrocities emerge. On 13 July an Israeli airstrike killed ten people queuing for water. Among those killed were six children: Abdullah Rahman Ahmed, Badral-Din Qaraman, Siraj Khaled Ibrahim, Ibrahim Ashraf Abu Urayban, Karam Ashraf al-Ghussein and Lana Ashraf al-Ghussein. An IDF spokesperson said the killings were the result of a “technical error” adding “(the military) regrets any harm to uninvolved civilians.”