Netflix and Israel: A special relationship

Middle East Eye

Back in 2016, the Israeli embassy in the United States tweeted with regard to Netflix’s global expansion: “For the 5+/- days a year the weather’s not good… @Netflix, now in Israel!”

What fortune, indeed, that Israel managed to erect itself on stolen land with such favourable meteorology. And speaking of luck, Netflix has proven itself a veritable godsend for the Jewish state, for a lot more than five days out of the year. As with various entertainment platforms, Netflix has been willingly subsumed into the Israeli hasbara industry.

The latest pro-Israel production to grace subscribers’ screens is the six-part Netflix series The Spy, starring Sacha Baron Cohen as Israel’s celebrated Mossad agent Eli Cohen, executed in Damascus in 1965. 

Predictably, the series humanises Cohen as a humble, loving and dedicated patriot engaged in noble subterfuge on behalf of innocent Israelis under attack from dastardly Syria. No mention is made of Israel’s preeminent role as attacker-provocateur, while its history of mass slaughter in the service of predatory regional designs is - as usual - disappeared under the mantra of “self-defence”.

But The Spy is only the beginning. Search “Israel” on Netflix and you’re bombarded with all sorts of offerings, from Inside the Mossad to Fauda, a series about “a top Israeli agent [who] comes out of retirement to hunt for a Palestinian fighter he thought he’d killed”. In the trailer, we learn that “Abu Ahmad has the blood of 116 Israelis on his hands” and that “no other terrorist has killed so many: men, women, children, elderly, soldiers”.

Never mind, then, real-life episodes such as that time in 2014 that the Israeli military had the blood of 2,251 Palestinians on its hands, including 299 women and 551 children. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

The IDF Can’t Wait to Go to War

Jacobin

In recent days, Israel has launched attacks against “Iranian-backed” forces in three countries. The motive for the violent triple-violation of sovereignty was not lost on the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, which ran the headline: “A Looming War Lifts Netanyahu’s Spirits” and explained that “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu looked hale and hearty this week … The more security tensions escalated and captured headlines, the more his self-confidence soared.”

Why? Because “the attacks in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, some of them open and official, others less so, and the saber-rattling in the direction of Iran and Hezbollah, were fuel for the fire of his campaign” ahead of the Israeli elections, scheduled for September 17.

On Sunday, Hezbollah retaliated by shooting anti-tank missiles into Israel, while Israel fired “volleys of artillery against three villages in southern Lebanon.” For now, Reuters reports, all is quiet following the cross-border exchange between “Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah group and the Israeli army” (forever immune in the US media from relevant modifiers like “US-backed” or “insanely US-backed”).

But while an all-out physical war may be on hold, Israel’s propaganda war is in full swing. Over at the official Twitter account of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), videos are being churned out that purport to reveal the sinister activities of Iran & Co., including “surveillance footage of Iranian Quds Force operatives in Syria carrying a killer drone that they intended to use for an attack on Israel.” Though the quality of the footage is so poor that one is just as likely to perceive Ewoks traipsing across an extraterrestrial landscape, the IDF has helpfully labeled the video “Syria” and drawn a circle around the blob that is allegedly the killer drone.

Then there’s the video, complete with dramatic musical score, about the “senior Iranian commanders running Hezbollah’s precision missile project in Lebanon” — and the one suggesting that “terrorists” in Lebanon are on the verge of being able to direct missiles to specific Israeli addresses using something like the Waze navigation app.

Even CNN felt compelled to draw attention to the IDF’s “propaganda offensive” and “barrage of agitprop,” although in a grotesque oversight the article’s author, Sam Kiley, refrained from including Lebanese civilian deaths in his casualty count for Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon, “during which the IDF lost nearly 120 troops and scores of civilians and about 270 Hezbollah fighters and 50 Lebanese soldiers and police died.” In reality, some 1,200 people were killed in Lebanon during Israel’s thirty-four-day assault, the overwhelming majority of them civilians.

Among the casualties, for example, were south Lebanese children fired on at close range as they fled their homes in a pickup truck. Veteran Middle East reporter Robert Fisk provided some details of the grisly aftermath: “Two small girls … were blasted into such small body parts that they were buried together in the same grave after the war was over. Other children lay wounded by the initial shell burst and rocket explosions as the helicopter attacked them again.”

Talk about “precision.”  READ MORE AT JACOBIN.