Culture Matters: Strategic Deception in the Arab-Israeli Conflict

In an authoritative culture, where the strong dominate the weak in political and domestic spheres, the weak incline to use deception to manoeuvre their survival. This is the dynamic that developed centuries ago in the Arab culture and has taken deep roots therein. While Western armies need encouragement to conduct deception operations, Arab armies and political movements don’t – because deception is part and parcel of political and military culture. The Western way to deal with what it perceives as a moral issue, namely, the use of persuasion rather than physical damage, is to use the mechanistic approach of technology. The overarching principle is a vaguely defined concept of ‘information war’. In the information age, information is conscripted to war itself, including cyber warfare, psychological warfare (formerly ‘propaganda’), deception, electronic warfare and finally an undefined connection between the interfaces of the military to those of the media. Within the context of the Arab-Israeli Conflict deception has been used on a large scale: The Egyptian deception campaign preceding the 1973 war is a prime example. Furthermore, in the mid-1990s, while purportedly promoting peace through the Oslo Accords, Yasser Arafat actively encouraged suicide bomb attacks against Israel and compensation funding for attackers’ families. To avoid recognition, Palestinians concealed their faces while attacking Israeli forces or civilians, as well as their own people. By contrast, Israeli culture stresses openness to the point of rudeness. Openness is valued throughout the West: Catholic tradition encourages truth telling at all costs, albeit in the cloistered environs of confession. These contrasted attitudes put Israel and the greater West in an inferior position. In light of near future challenges with radical Islam, the West must develop a working understanding of the concept and centrality of deception in Arab cultures.