“The Directorate, which has been up and running for eight months, began planning six months ago for a Gaza operation. A forum with representatives of the press offices of the Foreign and Defence ministries, the IDF Spokesman Unit and other agencies held numerous meetings to decide on the message.

The forum held two system-wide exercises in the past two months, one aimed at foreign media and, last week, one dedicated to the Israeli press.

“One of our lessons from the Lebanon War was that there were too many uniforms in the coverage,” says Yarden Vatikay, director of the National Information Directorate, “and that doesn’t come over very positively.”

The international media were directed to a press centre set up by the Foreign Ministry in Sderot itself so that foreign reporters would spend as much time as possible in the main civilian area affected by Hamas rockets. When the IDF was represented on the international TV networks, it was by Major Avital Leibovich to project a feminine and softer image.

Ministers have been ordered by the Cabinet Secretary not to give interviews without authorisation so as not to repeat the PR disaster of a year ago, when Deputy Defence Minister Matan Vilnai threatened the Palestinians with a “holocaust”. …”

More at Jewish Chronicle.

And some analysis by Juan Cole at Informed Consent:

“Having been treated to these propaganda techniques repeatedly and continuously for 8 years, the US public can suddenly hear the similarity in the assertions of Israeli officialdom and its supporters.

Of course, the Neoconservatives had borrowed a lot of their techniques from the Jabotinsky/ Likud tradition of revisionist Zionism, so what goes around comes around.”