The Israeli Army puts a woman’s face in its messages to the world

2023-10-14 23:53:41

“As a military, we operate to cause the least amount of damage possible and lose the least amount of life on both sides. Our enemies know this and decide to use it against us. Because when you are at war with a terrorist group that values ​​the death of our people more than the lives of their own civilians, every second becomes more difficult. This is one of the messages that the Israeli Army has sent to the world in recent hours, as it prepares to invade the Gaza Strip by land, after subjecting it to intense bombardment and demanding one million inhabitants of the north of the territory to leave. area. The novelty is that it is communicated by a soldier who puts a woman’s face on the horror that has happened and that which is yet to come. For the first time, Israel has chosen to make its messages feminine.

The communication policy of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) has changed after the brutal attack by Hamas against southern Israel. On social media, female officers and soldiers appear in training and in teams that enter attacked locations to examine evidence. They are recorded live, as if it were an Instagram story, in the devastated kibbutz or on the Nova stage, the concert for peace that was attacked by the Gaza jihadists in which there are more than 700 confirmed deaths and dozens of kidnapped And their message is much more human than that of the male soldiers who offer the daily balance of operations or promise revenge to their people. The soldiers make efforts not to cry or become emotional. And the message they repeat is: “We are here to protect our families.”

International support

This communicative effort has a clear political meaning. Israel knows that one of the fields in which victory is played is in that of international public opinion. Their bombing campaigns on Gaza are the great political Achilles heel that could lead some of the countries that have provided them support in recent hours to modify their position in the face of the protests of their communities. For example, within the change in its public relations policy, it is a woman chosen by the IDF to explain the imminent actions on the franca as well as the blockade to which the two million Gazans have been subjected.

In the video, an Army major explains that the crossings that connect Israel with Gaza were blown up on October 7 by Hamas, so they are closed. “We will not provide Hamas with any supplies or materials. “We are in a war that they started and we have no obligation to provide material to our enemy,” she adds. The image they are offering is, in a certain way, that of courageous mothers who defend the family. This narrative obeys Israel’s intention to present itself as a community that only seeks to defend itself against external aggression, one of the country’s communicative obsessions.

“One heart”

But in the videos recorded with women, other types of more internal messages are also offered. In one of them, a woman who appears to belong to the Druze minority – a complex religion that incorporates the Bible, the Koran and other scriptures with beliefs such as reincarnation – emphasizes the different ethnicities and religions that make up the IDF. The young woman remembers how in the Israeli Army there are Jews, Arabs, Bedouins and Druze. “Together we are a team, a single heart fighting against terrorism,” she says.

The messages with a female face also have obvious symbolism, at a time when images of Hamas have been shown murdering women and it is known that it has committed kidnappings and rapes of young people, Israel remembers that it is the country that opposes denial of the minimum rights of women that characterize jihadists. In this sense, it was the third country in the world to be presided over by a woman after the election in 1969 of the socialist Golda Meir as prime minister.

The young Inbal Rabin-Lieberman, in a family photo.

This feminization of communication has also reached the stories that reach citizens. Women are not part of frontline units in the IDF. However, on October 7, there were young people in the kibbutz protection services or in the barracks that were attacked. The country’s media have told stories like that of the young Inbal Rabin-Lieberman, the head of security at Kibbutz Nir-Am, near Gaza. This settlement was the only one that was not razed by Hamas thanks to the fact that Inbal, 25, organized the defense of the compound and coordinated the team of armed citizens who resisted the jihadists’ siege for three hours – 25 of them lost their lives. until they were rescued by the IDF. The newspapers are telling this and other stories of heroism in which, for the first time, women are the protagonists.