PM meets with spokespeople to sharpen PR message

By Aluf Benn
Haaretz
Aug. 07, 2006

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert met yesterday with some 50 spokespeople from the Foreign Ministry, the Israel Defense Forces, the Prime Minister's Office and other government agencies to instruct them on the principal messages that they should be delivering in appearances before the foreign media.

"Our enemy is not Hezbollah, but Iran, which employs Hezbollah as its agent," he told them at the meeting, the first of its kind.

He also urged the spokespeople "not to be ashamed to express emotion and appeal to feelings" and to emphasize Hezbollah's attacks and the damage that Israel's home front has suffered. "When Israel kills civilians, it views this as a failure. When Hezbollah kills civilians, they see this as a success," he stressed.

Israel, Olmert said, did not choose to go to war; rather, the war was forced on it. However, he added, Israel's situation would have been even worse had the war broken out a few years later, since Hezbollah's military capabilities would have been even better.

"In the future, they might have had far better quality weapons than they do today," he said.

Responding to criticism of his predecessors, Ariel Sharon and Ehud Barak, for allowing Hezbollah's build-up to proceed unimpeded, Olmert said: "If Israel had attacked two or three years ago, with no cause, would we have enjoyed internal consensus and international support?"

Strategic surprise

"The strategic surprise of this war was Israel's determined response," he continued. "[Hezbollah leader Hassan] Nasrallah and Iran did not expect us to react in this way."

The IDF, he added, "never promised that it would destroy all the missiles, or that it would employ the air force alone. But our maximum advantage is in the air, so we needed to employ this first."

Brigadier General Yossi Bidetz, head of Military Intelligence's research division, told the group that Hezbollah has a "hard core" of 1,000 to 1,500 fighters, and "if you hit 200 of them, that's a real blow to this cadre."

Olmert said that he had ordered the intelligence services to make all information that would not endanger national security available to the spokespeople.