Israel Matzav

Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Poll faked!

No, this post is not about the poll in the previous post.

It's about another poll that claimed that Jewish residents of the Jordan Valley would like to leave. That poll was a lie.

Left-wing organizations are waging a psychological war on Israelis living in the Jordan Valley, activist Danny Dayan, the former head of the Yesha (Judea and Samaria) Council, has accused.

Dayan revealed a recent incident in which one organization tried to rally support based on a poll showing that most Israelis living in the Jordan Valley want to leave – a poll which, he says, turned out to have been a complete fabrication.

“They called me from Reshet Bet. The group ‘Atid Kachol Lavan’ [‘A Blue and White Future’, which promotes a withdrawal from Judea and Samaria - ed.] was going to present the results of a survey conducted among residents of the Jordan Valley showing that most wanted to evacuate with or without a diplomatic agreement [between Israel and the Palestinian Authority],” he recalled.

“’Would you like to reply on air?’ they asked. ‘Yes, definitely. It sounds very strange to me,’” Dayan continued. “'It’s a poll done by Mina Tzemach,' they announced happily."

Mina Tzemach is widely renowned as a political pollster.

“So we went on the air. The chairman of that organization, and me. He said that according to the poll by Mina Tzemach, so-and-so many people want to leave the Jordan Valley,” Dayan said.

“I saw there was clear manipulation, because the results contradicted reality – which is that new residents are moving to the Jordan Valley. ‘It can’t be true,’ I said. ‘But Mina Tzemach did a poll!’ was his unequivocal response.

“A poll that nobody in the Jordan Valley heard about?” Dayan wondered. “After all, a poll would need to include at least 500 households. In the Jordan Valley, news [of the poll] would spread like wildfire.”

Dayan’s skepticism led him to conduct his own investigation. “I asked them to speak to Mina Tzemach, and she said, ‘I haven’t done any recent poll about the Jordan Valley. I have no idea what they are talking about,’” he reported.

The incident with the fake poll is a sign of things to come, he warned. “In the near future, we – residents of Judea and Samaria in general, and of the Jordan Valley in particular – are likely to face psychological warfare against us from the extreme left, in an attempt to weaken us, to delegitimize us, to cause us to despair,” he said.

After all, all is fair in the war against the Jews. I just have to wonder why they messed up by forgetting to ask Mina Tzemach to cover for them.

Labels: Israeli polls, Jordan Valley, psychological warfare

Thursday, January 06, 2011

New IDF spokesman has no media experience

Yoav Galant, who replaces Gabi Ashkenazi as IDF Chief of Staff next month, has raised some eyebrows by appointing Lior Lotan to be the IDF spokesman. Lotan, an attorney and a combat soldier in the elite Sayeret Matkal unit, has no media experience.

By appointing a decorated combat soldier to fill this post, which has gained great importance due to the intense media focus on the IDF in recent years, Galant is both sending a message and taking a calculated risk: The new spokesman will be a soldier's soldier, not a "spin doctor" like the incumbent, veteran journalist Avi Benayahu.

This is also Galant's first solo appointment. While he has already filled three other key posts, those appointments were made in consultation with Barak and current Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi.

Lotan, 45, commanded the 1994 raid on the house in the West Bank town of Bir Naballah where Hamas held Wachsman. But Wachsman and Capt. Nir Poraz were both killed in the raid, while Lotan was seriously injured. The citation he later received noted that despite being wounded twice, he refused to abandon the fight until all the terrorists had been killed.

...

After leaving Sayeret Matkal, Lotan, who is also a lawyer, spent almost a decade heading the General Staff's negotiations unit, and later, MI's unit for tracing MIAs. He played a major role in negotiating the 2004 deal under which Hezbollah returned businessman Elhanan Tennenbaum and the bodies of three kidnapped soldiers in exchange for Israel's release of more than 400 terrorists, and was later involved in negotiating with extremist settlers who barricaded themselves in their homes during the 2005 disengagement from Gaza.

But Lotan was not involved in the negotiations over kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit, and later criticized how these talks were conducted in op-eds written for Haaretz.

Lotan has no media experience whatsoever. Nevertheless, the prevailing assessment among both journalists and the staff of the IDF Spokesman's Office was that his long experience in both negotiations and psychological warfare operations would stand him in good stead.

Psychological warfare. There's a good way to describe how the IDF has to deal with the media here.

Labels: IDF spokesperson, Lior Lotan, psychological warfare, Yoav Galant