Azaria's conviction
In the beginning of January 2017, Israeli sergeant Elor Azaria is going to be found guilty for the execution of Abd al Fatah Al-Sharif lying prostate on the ground in Hebron last March 24. And the Israeli political reaction to that verdict will be transformative. It is then that the hasbara culture cultivated by Benjamin Netanyahu will at last be confronted by a sane Israel led by former Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

The discourse that will resound in Israel in defense of Azaria will be incoherent to anyone who is not an adherent of the hasbara culture that now permeates that society. Naftali Bennett, the education minister under Netanyahu, has already been saying that Azaria needs to be pardoned if convicted.

We have already heard from soldiers who say they will go "AWOL" or even desert should their fellow combatant be convicted of manslaughter charges by the military court.

The saga of the Murdering Medic is so important because it has revealed the way that "hasbara" - or the Israeli tradition of spinning its actions to try and make them acceptable to the world - has so deeply affected the spinners themselves that hasbara has hardened into an Israeli construction of reality, so much so that the many participants in that reality no longer think it is necessary to even spin bad events.

Observers who think the Israel of 2016 is an Israel of Netanyahu "cowering before the settlers" are wrong in my opinion.

The real struggle in Israeli leadership is who can control a sacred ethnocentric discourse of Jewish persecution and innocence. That is what has shaped Israeli politics in recent years: the heavyweight battle between Netanyahu and Bennett over control of the reins of hasbara culture.

Let us recall the Israeli government reaction to the video of the killing when it came out last March. Here, after all, was irrefutable evidence of the IDF behaving as its worst critics around the world claim that it does. The whole scene in its hideous naked glory — with the indifferent Israeli soldier "bystanders" to the shooting, as well as the congratulatory hand shake for Azaria from his friend the settler leader Baruch Marzel at the end (as Larry Derfner revealed)—was a nightmare for the difficult business of hasbara.

The video gave the lie to the carefully cultivated image of the world's most moral army.

But that is not what happened. What happened is that high officials in the government said, we saw exactly what you saw in that video, and it is fine.

Let's go back to the timeline. A couple of days after the killing, Amos Harel in Haaretz described it as a "coldblooded execution" and an inevitable one, but he anticipated official condemnation.
"The chief of staff, who was once a brigade and division commander of soldiers in the territories, knows [that]... Animal-like behavior like that seen in Thursday's incident in Hebron can quickly become the unwritten procedure for units in the field. That is the reason that the shooter was immediately arrested, an unusual move for the IDF these days, and the reason for the sharp public condemnations issued by [chief of staff Gadi] Eisenkot and Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon..."

"Meanwhile, we've seen no right-wing campaign in support of the shooter."
Even Netanyahu was on board at this point. He said
"that the soldier's conduct does not represent the army's values and even insinuated that the soldier failed to act in accordance with the military's open-fire rules.
This story might very well have ended there were it not for hasbara culture. Azaria would have been a bad apple. Even the most moral army in the world has a bad apple or two!

But then Education Minister Bennett came into the picture. Three days after the killing, he began lecturing Netanyahu in the very way Netanyahu lectures human rights groups.
"This soldier was sent by the State of Israel to defend against terror during war," he said before entering the [Cabinet] meeting. "That some of this country's leadership has jumped to conclusions before the trial is a mistake and are dancing to the tune of B'Tselem..."
Once the Azaria incident got defined as a story of "us" vs our "enemies," Netanyahu had nowhere to go except to agitate with Bennett. Because it is Netanyahu himself who has cultivated the world view that the Palestinian on the ground should be killed.

Netanyahu can't be on the B'Tselem side of this fight!

It should be stressed what the environment is in Israel since the so called "knife intifada" started.
Naftali Bennett states that "terrorists must be killed, not freed"; Yair Lapid clarifies, "You have to shoot to kill anyone who pulls out a knife or a screwdriver"; Bezalel Smotrich cries, "A terrorist who sets out to murder Jews, whatever his age, must not return alive"; and Gilad Erdan declares, "Every terrorist must know he won't survive the attack he is about to commit."
Bennett best summed up the government line on Azaria:
"Talk of a murder charge against a combat soldier during a combat operation is a moral mistake that blurs the lines between good and evil. I expect this mistake to be mended."
Netanyahu then reversed himself. He called the parents of the accused medic, and described Azaria as "one of our children." He later compared his empathetic call to calling a parent of an IDF soldier fallen in combat.

In Netanyahu's Israel, hasbara culture is the only game in town. You're either on the side of hasbara culture and all that's good in the world, or you're on the side of the devil. Remember what hasbara culture ideas Netanyahu most champions. From his speech at the teens' funeral in 2014:
"A deep and wide moral abyss separates us from our enemies. They sanctify death while we sanctify life. They sanctify cruelty while we sanctify compassion."
That statement and Bennett's statement of "a moral mistake" in blaming Azaria is why I insist that we are dealing with hasbara culture.

Hasbara began as the need to make sense to outsiders, to spin reality. But these leaders are no longer concerned with that project: they will not convince unindoctrinated outsiders that Azaria doesn't belong in prison with this type of talk. Any ordinary person seeing that video realizes that Elor Azaria does not represent "good" and his going to prison is not a "moral mistake."

But for the indoctrinated these statements fall on fertile soil. Bennett is reflecting the Israeli experience of reality when he says that the idea of charging Azaria "blurs the lines between good and evil." We are good, they are evil. Bennett is saying that the scene of the Azaria shooting of Abd al Fatah Al-Shari is "sacred." It's part of the us vs them, good vs bad, narrative that is at the heart of hasbara culture. Hasbara culture understands Jewish history as one long morality tale. It is the foundation of an extreme Jewish ethnocentric narrative, which in its telling, started over two millennia ago and runs through all of hasbara culture's tendentious telling of Jewish history up to today.

We are going to be hearing a lot more of this kind of talk after the inevitable guilty verdict for Azaria in early January.

See entire article here.