Israel could go to war with Lebanon without international support as a result of the Israeli government’s abandonment of the public information battlefield, former Israeli government spokesperson and international media adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Eylon Levy exasperatedly told The Jerusalem Post on Friday afternoon, just a few hours after news broke of an Israeli airstrike in Beirut.
Levy, who was controversially removed from his position earlier this year, was preparing to speak on a panel about social media and Israel advocacy at the Israeli-American Council National Summit in Washington.
Levy is a notable proponent for encouraging ordinary people to speak on behalf of Israel.
The problem with Israel's international outreach
He berated the Israeli government for failing to speak on behalf of itself, having decided the information war is one not worth fighting.
According to Levy, the government created a production line of spokespeople who would go on TV all the time and never drop a single interview request, maintaining a presence on international TV, which he said Israel does not have anymore.
“So with all due respect to a statement from the prime minister here, a remark from the defense minister in Hebrew, that message needs to be taken out into the public forum and amplified,” Levy said. “And Israel simply does not have an information war machine to do it. It built one at the beginning of the war and then allowed it to fall into disrepair.”According to Levy, people are “not aware that Hezbollah started this war.”Levy accused the international community of broadly accepting Hezbollah’s linkage of the northern and southern arenas, and accepting that it’s legitimate for Hezbollah to “rain hellfire on our cities as long as Hamas drags out the war in the South.”That’s not acceptable, he added.“They’re not aware that all Israel is trying to do is to make it stop, and stop in a way that it can’t restart it. We have not managed to get international pressure on Hezbollah to back off,” Levy said.There was actually deliberate effort from a communications standpoint to downplay what was happening in the North at the beginning of the war, he noted.“After the country decided not to launch a preemptive attack on Hezbollah, we said we’re focusing on Gaza. We’ll contain the North, we’ll contain the Houthis, and we’ll pivot when needed,” Levy said. “In hindsight, I think that was a mistake, because the situation in Lebanon spiraled out of control without people really understanding where it had come from. We didn’t frame this as basically a simultaneous attack by Iranian proxy armies on two fronts. We talked about Hamas and then said we’ll deal with Hezbollah later.”Levy also accused the government of failed diplomacy, scoffing at the country having a foreign minister, Israel Katz, who doesn’t speak English.Katz needs to be engaging in “shuttle diplomacy”: getting on a plane to a press conference with his counterpart in London, then going on the BBC, then doing the same in Paris, and from there, proceeding to Berlin and Rome, according to Levy.“And it’s not happening, and the messaging is coming through the army, mostly, which is a mistake,” he said.
What Israel must do, according to Levy
Israel needs to be clear that it is demanding not just an immediate ceasefire that allows it to explode “at a time of our enemies’ choosing,” he said, but Israel needs the removal of illegal terrorist armies from its borders.
Israel also needs to make clear that its goals are “extremely modest,” he added.“We need to get tens of thousands of people safely back to their homes. The reason they are not home is an ongoing act of aggression and unprovoked war by an Iranian proxy army that is illegally present in southern Lebanon. All we are asking for is the implementation of international law,” he said. “Sometimes it works to our favor.Hezbollah must back off, or Israel will have to push it away.”Israel has given up and decided that it doesn’t matter what the international community thinks, and that’s a terrible mistake, he added.“We need our allies to be backing us and hamstringing our enemies, and at the moment, they’re pressuring us while subsidizing our enemies,” Levy said. “It’s a terrible position to be in, and if an all-out war with Lebanon kicks off, it’s going to start without a shred of international sympathy.”