The Ethics of Psychological Warfare – Lessons from Israel

ABSTRACT

The start of the twenty-first century saw many changes in the way war was being conducted. Alongside war at sea, in the air, and on land, there is now psychological warfare (referred to as psywar), which has proven to be an extremely powerful military dimension. The power of psychological warfare is a result of the revolution in information and communication in the first years of the current century: the Internet, instant global communications, smartphones, and social media. All these channels have become arenas for warfare and powerful influencers on leaders, militaries, and entire populations. Historically, democracies have been reticent about employing psychological warfare for a number of reasons, but in recent years, they have been unable to ignore its existence and have increasingly been making use of it. However, in contrast with other forms of warfare for which there are international ethical rules, there is no ethical regulation of psychological warfare. This article assesses the challenges and dilemmas facing democratic countries in their use of psychological warfare and for the first time offers proposals for ethical rules toward that end by way of an Israeli test case: the long-term use of psychological warfare by the Israel Defense Forces.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethics
• psychological warfare
• democracy
• IDF

Introduction: democracies, dictatorships, and psychological warfare

The era of post-modern wars and the dramatic-evolving rejection of the legitimacy of using force against uninvolved civilians at the present time require different thinking about the use of military force.¹ The campaigns in which the Israel Defense Force (IDF) has operated in recent years against asymmetrical hybrid foes and terror organizations reflect the difficulty that now exists in reaching a decision to destroy the military forces of the enemy. Since the beginning of the development of knowledge about the world of war, the psychological warfare dimension, or the use of its previous name, “propaganda,”² has been perceived as a vital element in a battle. As a result, military leaders and their armies have had to sharpen their psychological operations (psyop) capabilities.

The definition of psychological warfare varies from army to army and from one period of time to another. Derived from a sociological context, a very broad definition was posited by Jacques Ellul in the late 1950s in light of the Communist and Nazi regimes that he had experienced. According to Ellul, propaganda was “a manipulation for the purpose of changing idea or opinions, of making individuals ‘believe’ some idea or fact, and finally of making them adhere to some doctrine – all matters of the mind.” As understood at the time, propaganda was designed to convince, to bring about a decision, and to create a firm adherence to some truth. However, Ellul’s definition is no longer valid. Modern propaganda is no longer meant to modify ideas, but rather to provoke action. It is no longer designed to change adherence to a doctrine, but rather to make the individual cling irrationally to a process of action. It is no longer a method for transforming one’s opinion but rather is developed to engender an active and mythical belief.”³ The Americans who felt uneasy because of Goebbels’s of World War II legacy changed the label propaganda to psychological operations (PSYOPS) and began using that term during the Vietnam War. For the purpose of this article, we use the current US Army definition of psychological warfare:

Planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of foreign governments, organizations, groups, and individuals. The purpose of Psychological Operations is to induce or reinforce foreign attitudes and behavior favorable to the originator’s objectives.⁴

The roles of psyop are first and foremost to provide a grounding for support of a war by the home population, to weaken the support of enemy populations for the war, and to arouse the international community to support your war aims and prevent such support for your enemies.

Psyop has been employed by armies since the dawn of warfare – it even appears in the Bible, for example, in the case of Rabshakeh, the representative of the king of Assyria, who was leading his army’s siege of Jerusalem (2 Kings 18:18-37). Similarly, in China in the fifth century BCE with Sun Tzu and with Herodotus in ancient Greece. However, it was only after the World War I that liberal democracies started to question the morality of the use of psyop. One of the leading doubters at that time was Arthur Ponsonby, who abhorred the manipulation of the British Government to advance its war aims, especially its efforts to encourage enlistment. Apparently, the reservations were a reaction to the enormous loss of life during the war.⁵ In contrast, in Germany after the war, the completely opposite direction was taken by Hitler, who believed that Germany’s collapse in the war was due to effective British use of propaganda. In Mein Kampf, he stated it quite clearly.⁶ At the same time, after the Communist revolution in Russia, the new regime continued to develop its propaganda system in order to prop up its rule.⁷

Since the end of the World War II, governments and militaries have been involved in a nonstop search for a sufficiently neutral term to reflect a country’s psyop’s efforts without being marked as a proponent of methods typical of totalitarian regimes, which characterized the darkest regimes of the twentieth century. Thus, the United Kingdom used the term “political warfare” at the beginning of the World War II, which was changed to psychological warfare when the joint SHAEF command was established. At the beginning of the Vietnam War, the term “psychological operations” was coined to indicate short, focused exercises in persuasion. With the onset of the digital age, the ideological confusion about information operations/strategic knowledge/image increased. Furthermore, with the growth of the Politically Correct movement, the term – Military Information Support Operations (MISO) was coined, which today (for the time being) is known as “psyop.”

Meanwhile, in the United States, there were efforts to restrict psywar through legislation (the Mundt Smith Law, 1948).⁸ In the Korean War (1950–1953), the Communist Bloc developed a new approach to the struggle. Appreciating the enormous difference in power between the blocs, the Communists started to make increasing use of campaigns to reduce international support for the United States and support for the Cold War. The Americans were uncertain about how to use the propaganda tool, of which some elements went underground, that is to say, to the CIA, which was quickly set up based on the OSS, and which established the gigantic United States Information Agency (USIA), to distribute propaganda to the Eastern Bloc.⁹ During the Vietnam War, the agency was geared toward raising international support for the fight against Communism.

The Korean War signaled the move from conventional wars between armies to “other” warfare (in practice, guerrilla), which was formulated by Mao Zedong and improved upon by the North Vietnamese General Giap, which went by many labels: revolutionary, military operations other than war (MOOTW), low-intensity conflict (LIC), hybrid war, and more. Its underlying themes were very long-term struggles, blurring the lines between the army and civilians, absorbing heavy losses, and a great deal of psywar.

The North Vietnamese, who had much more limited resources, interfered with the American effort to garner support by inciting opposition to the war within the United States. They publicized the deaths of civilians as a result of US raids and bombings and made no mention of their own casualties.¹⁰ It arranged for a number of celebrities, such as the actress Jane Fonda, to visit North Vietnam, where she saw the war damage, which led to the start of a public debate that moved on from there to patriotism and morality. In other words, how loyal are citizens who disagree with the policy of their government, while the enemy exploited the dissatisfaction of the embittered American citizens for its own victory.¹¹ At the same time, inadequate treatment by the US Army of media personnel together with the growth of individualism caused a breakdown between the army and journalists, who did not trust the Army’s messaging.¹² Similarly, competition for the hearts and wallets of viewers created a situation in which media reports led to a misrepresentation of a military defeat in the war, while the military situation on the ground was quite the opposite.

Revolutionary psywar was thus directed at two fronts. The home front to convince one’s own citizens and the international one as in the past the enemy sought to reduce support for its foes. According to Mao’s doctrine, when those aims had been achieved, it was possible to move on to conventional warfare against the enemy. Thus, psywar emphasized the enemy’s cruelty, the unjustness of its acts, the horrors of war that it had committed, and more. Frequent revolutionary warfare initiates deliberate harm to the population in order to demonstrate the horrors of war that the enemy had carried out.

President Reagan put to a halt a long Western tradition regarding psywar. During the World War II, democracies developed psywar systems, but immediately after the war was over, they dismantled them so that in the next war they had to reinvent them all over again (e.g., the US Office of War Information (1942–1945) was disbanded and reestablished at the start of the Korean War).¹³ Some psywar capabilities were relegated to the US secret services. In contrast, in authoritarian regimes the situation was the opposite: in each war, the psywar systems just expanded and were bolstered. It was only after President Reagan entered the White House that the American approach to psywar began to change, and the US Army received orders to rebuild the military psywar doctrine and not to dismantle it.

Israel and psychological warfare

The ideological confusion surrounding the term psychological warfare in Western armies is also evident in Israel, which considers itself a liberal democracy in a region where most regimes are authoritarian. Until the end of the nineteenth century, the word “propaganda” was used in Hebrew but was replaced at the end of the century by the word “taamula,” which signifies making an effort to achieve something. As explanation in a of the twentieth-century Hebrew-English dictionary defines the word as “agitation.”¹⁴

In the 1920s the Zionist activist Nachum Sokolov coined the term “hasbara,” from the root “to explain,” which is still in use. At the end of the War of Independence at the beginning of 1949, the use of the term “taamula” was dropped as a tool (except in elections) and the next organizational arrangement was formulated (and from that also a terminological one). The word “taamula” was ascribed to the propaganda of Arab states against Israel, while the term “psywar” was reserved for the IDF and the Mossad, whereas the term “hasbara” was associated with the Foreign Ministry.¹⁵

Israeli propaganda received a great deal of criticism in the Jewish world, particularly following the Six-Day War in 1967. The critics highlighted the apologetic messages that Israel transmitted, particularly abroad; they considered that the apologetics had started with the use of the term “hasbara,” which implied apology and a wish for sympathy. In addition, there were internal political constraints (Israel did not have television until 1967, and there was total governmental control of the radio), as well as a lack of Israeli cultural understanding of the target audience abroad.

In 1977, the IDF set up a unit to handle psywar, though its name was “Intelligence Warfare.” The vague term was just one of the first stages on the long and confused roads: the unit was closed and reopened several times, each time for different security reasons, and of course under different names.¹⁶ In the 1990s, the term psywar was abandoned in favor of “consciousness,” a term ironically borrowed from the Marxist lexicon.¹⁷ Persuasion became the term “burning into the consciousness,” perhaps influenced by the technology of those times which referred to burning a disc. The unfocused term held its own for about a decade and a half but was eventually abandoned for the new, no less focused, term “legitimacy.” The rationale was apparently that IDF activities had to be carried out with a purpose that of winning approval for Israeli actions from countries and international bodies. The common term today is “influence campaigns”, but it can be assumed that this is not the final move on the long trail that is attempting to describe the relevant military activity while making an effort to refrain from any use of the original, basic term, propaganda.

Uses of psywar in the Israel–Arab dispute

Over the years in the Arab world, the old term to describe psychological warfare has remained in place unchanged, “harb el nafsieh,” which means the war on the mind. At the end of the 1960s, the Palestinians started to implement the doctrine of revolutionary struggle. They visited Algiers, Cuba, and Vietnam and produced a series of guidebooks called The Cuban Example, The Algerian Example, etc. It was General Giap who taught the leaders of the PLO how to engage in revolutionary warfare against Israel during their visits to Vietnam, and the fingerprints of Vietnamese influence can be perceived right up until today.

When the PLO was expelled from Jordan to Lebanon in September 1970, the organization sited its artillery in the heart of refugee camps in Beirut toward the south and fired on Israel. When Israel returned fire to the sources of the shelling, the organization was quick to invite journalists to see the horrors. The Hamas tunnels that were discovered in 2016 are the direct imitation of the Vietcong’s tunnels. The Gaza border fence incidents of 2018–2029, during which Hamas enticed young people to demonstrate or to breakthrough the fence, created a situation in which IDF snipers fired to wound; Hamas presented the wounded amputees as victims of Israeli barbarity.¹⁸

At the end of the Six-Day War in June 1967, the Palestinians understood that their former strategy of relying on Arab armies had failed and that they had to find another way. Yasser Arafat, then head of the PLO, announced that the new strategies to achieve Palestinian ambitions were to create a demographic advantage over the Jewish population in Israel and to overwhelm the IDF and Israeli society by using psywar. To what extent Palestinian demographics will succeed in determining the eventual outcome of the Israeli–Palestinian dispute has been the source of academic dispute for many years (Ettinger vs. De la Pergola),¹⁹ but on the subject of Palestinian psywar, it can be clearly stated that the Palestinians have succeeded in defeating Israel for years. From an organization identified with terror and international violence, the PLO has rebranded itself as a peace-seeking body, presenting itself as David fighting the Israeli Goliath. Today, the body has international standing, operates more than 100 embassies around the world, enjoys the status of observer at the United Nations, and receives unprecedented attention from the global media, which has led to the establishment of a de facto state (the Palestinian Authority) with its own media channels. What has been the secret of their success? Palestinian psywar made use of the old principle – shift from asset to liability. That is to say, convince the foe to renounce its achievements because the continued control of the Occupied Territories will only lead to losses: the actual control of these territories will lead to Israel losing its democratic, Jewish character, the world’s sympathy, and in the end will become extinct.

These achievements were accrued over five decades, with the instigation of two uprisings (the Intifadas) and convincing Israel to carry out two voluntary withdrawals (the first as part of the Oslo Accords signed in 1994 and the second as part of the unilateral Israeli action in the Disengagement Program carried out in 2006). Israeli efforts failed to defame Arafat and to present him as someone using double talk – in Arabic calling on his supporters for the destruction of Israel and in English calling on the international community and Israel for peace.²⁰

Challenges for a democratic nation and the use of psywar

Israel was left with a democratic, liberal tradition that constrained psychological warfare, while its enemies, the PLO, Hamas, and Hezbollah, continued to practice it ceaselessly. Democratic countries are faced with a range of relevant challenges.

First, there is the problem of retaining credibility when promoting messages. This is mainly because at times one can only present part of the truth. Democratic nations believe that government must always apprise its citizens of the true situation, as long as there is no risk to national security. Frequent use of psywar against citizens of the state is perceived as destroying the democratic foundations since the government is not telling its citizens the full truth or when it is a part of the psywar and its leaders are likely to lie to the general public.

Second, psywar in the Western world draws public awareness to controversial subjects, such as propaganda, brainwashing, and demagoguery, which have been the province of dictators and despots who head dictatorial regimes. The actual activity, irrespective of its content, is seen as negative and automatically unacceptable.

Another limitation facing democracies in their psychological warfare against terrorist organizations involves a respect for certain values, including human dignity. For example, one of the key aspects of PSYOPS discussed above is the display of casualties and atrocities allegedly committed by the other side. Whereas the Palestinians use this technique frequently, the Israeli side greatly underestimates its value and employs it only in cases that result in a great deal of criticism. For example, during a suicide attack on Bus 32A in Jerusalem on June 18, 2002, 19 people were murdered and 74 injured. During the coverage of the attack, photos of Israeli bodies were published for the first time, albeit wrapped and covered.

The issue came up strongly again in connection with the shooting and stabbing attack that was carried out on November 18, 2014, during the morning prayer in a synagogue in the Har Nof neighborhood of Jerusalem. Six people – five worshipers and a policeman – were murdered and seven others were injured in the attack, which was carried out by two Palestinian terrorists, residents of the Jebel Mukhabar neighborhood in East Jerusalem. After the attack, the Government Press Office distributed photos from the scene and of the bodies of the murdered but without showing their faces.

In both incidents, Israeli society expressed shock at the presentation of the bodies in the media and their use to portray the horror that took place there. Some saw this as a cynical use of the death of the victims of terrorism, and some claimed that the display of the dead was an injury to the dignity of the dead, the dignity of the families, and the feelings of the public.

Finally, it is acknowledged that there is a traditional preference for the application of violent physical means to pursue a war and a lack of awareness of the effectiveness and success of psywar. As a result, the allocation of resources for psywar in times of both war and peace is low in the order of priorities.

Moreover, unlike totalitarian states, there is a suspicion in democratic countries of the politicization of psywar. Working relations between psywar officers and senior members of the political echelon are constrained by the potential of being dragged into political disputes. To guard against that possibility, psywar officers are obliged to ensure that their contribution to advancing national objectives is supported by a broad consensus, to take care that they do not become a means to advance a political agenda and the interests of politicians, to make certain that assistance offered is based on reliable data available to the psywar warriors, and to be certain that they are not drawn into manipulative use of intelligence data.

Similarly, there is a fear within democratic countries that the objectivity of intelligence officers will be impaired. Dealing with psywar might cause them to lose their focus on their activities and create a bias. They are likely to become enchanted with ideas and their ability to design reality and thereby are in danger of impairing their professional considerations and their commitment to deliver exact, reliable information to the decision makers and those implementing policy. The restraint of psywar is challenging because it is difficult to define and quantify it like other types of attacks, whereas physical attacks can be measured in terms of the amount of explosives they inflict on the target, the extent of the expected impact, and the degree of collateral damage. It is worth remembering, however, that persuading the military commander to surrender or move his forces, which will not interfere with the course of the fighting, and even if this is done manipulatively, it is still far better than taking a life of the enemy.

Israel like other democracies is faced with a range of challenges in seeking to make use of psywar. In order to handle the dilemmas involved, we recommend making use of the IDF Code of Ethics and implementing it in the field of psywar, primarily by focusing on the value of the reining in of power.

IDF professional ethics and its place in moderating psychological warfare

The IDF Code of Ethics was first written in 1994. The document titled “The Spirit of the IDF” consists of four sections:

1. The first section is the introduction, which defines the IDF’s mission within Israel’s democratic society, outlines the basic commitment of the army to the state, and introduces the framework within which this commitment is realized.

2. The second section discusses the four sources of the document – the IDF’s fighting heritage; the tradition of the State of Israel based on its democratic principles, laws, and institutions; the Jewish tradition; and universal moral values – and delineates the nature of the document and its function.

3. The third section presents the core values of the IDF, which serve as sources of inspiration for several additional major principles outlined in the document: safeguarding the nation and all of its people; love of and loyalty to the country; and respect for human dignity.

4. The final section is a list of the 10 ethical values incumbent upon all those serving in the IDF.

Despite the IDF having dealt a great deal with the ethical regulation of its various activities, it has not yet regulated restraint of the power of psychological warfare.

Proposals for the restraint of psywar by government bodies and outside companies acting on its behalf

In the IDF, as in many other armies in democracies around the world, engagement in psywar is one of its main efforts. The objective is to influence the grasp of reality of target audiences including the enemy (its leaders, military personnel, terror activists, and civilians), Israeli society, and others that are not directly involved in the issues to help achieve the army’s tasks in peacetime and in times of crisis, emergency, and war.

From the growing concern with efforts to influence its target audiences, the IDF has to define the practical implementation of its values for its psywarriors. One of the most far-reaching challenges for the psywar establishment is the restraint of power. Unlike in the case of kinetic attacks where the direct and indirect consequences are generally clear in advance, prediction is difficult in psywar, but thought must be given to the various implications and to the delineation of the appropriate rules for the constraint of power.

In light of all this, we propose the following rules:

1. The soldier who deals with psywar ops directed at countries with which Israel is not in armed conflict will limit his activity to psywar efforts whose purpose is to harm the enemy.

2. The soldier who deals with negative psywar campaigns will limit his activity to operations whose purpose is to harm a target individual or group outside of Israel defined as an enemy or a hostile party or who has a significant connection with an enemy or hostile party.

3. The soldier who deals with psywar and deception operations will refrain as far as possible from harming Israeli citizens and will make every effort to reduce such harm to situations that involve operational necessity.

4. The soldier who deals with psywar ops will use the tools available to him only to carry out his assigned task and only to the degree required.

Furthermore, unlike its many other activities, the IDF should make use of outside civilian companies that have various technological capabilities that are likely to assist its psywar efforts.

It is therefore important that superior officers be involved in the constraint of these companies power and monitor the regulation of their activities in an ethical manner. Our proposal is to limit the activities of these companies and make them subject to special ethical standards. Accordingly, we suggest that the outsource company will be prevented from publicizing its activities or using them for:

1. Racist and anti-Semitic messaging or messaging that stirs up hatred toward the state of Israel and the Jewish people.

2. Messages that support terror.

3. Messaging that justifies blood libels against an identified or other background.

4. Incitement or calls for physical violence.

5. Encouragement of criminal activities such as murder, sexual crimes, pedophilia, theft, or use of drugs.

6. The company will not carry out actions whose main purpose is to sow terror among the civilian population.

The outsource company will only carry out the following actions if it has received approval in advance from the responsible IDF party:

1. The outsource company will not intimidate, humiliate blackmail, threaten, or engage in similar types of actions.

2. The outsource company will not publicize nor make use of its activities based on information that is not true without first obtaining approval from the IDF Chief of Staff. It will not publicize nor make use of its activities in any content about bodies and persons within the defense establishment, strategic capabilities, defense activity, and operational planning.

3. The outsource company will only carry out an activity that includes content with the official signature of an Israeli governmental body with the prior approval of the competent party in the IDF.

Summary and conclusions

A democratic state cannot waive the use of psywar in its efforts to protect its citizens and to attack the threats against it. Over the years, many democracies including Israel have vacillated about the necessity and moral justification of using psywar, and, in fact, with the growth of social media and the proliferation of global communications, many militaries have started to increase their use of psywar as a legitimate weapon. Israel has limited its psywar activities to a disproportionate degree because it did not have ethical principles that would draw the necessary boundaries. Thus far, only Israel has self-imposed restrictions on its use of psywar, while its surrounding enemies – nations and terrorist organizations – use it without any limitations or restraint.

It is therefore important to formulate the rules of ethics for psychological warfare so that it can be exercised to the proper extent – no less and no more. Other democracies and other armies can learn from the described Israeli precedent and abide by the suggested rules in their activities against tyrannically controlled countries or in a just and necessary struggle against terrorist organizations. The increasing use of psywar necessitates new thinking and the introduction of the value of the restraint of power to the various armies and the external suppliers working for them so that its use will be proportionate, rational, and appropriate, and will not be exploited for malign purposes.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. McLendon, J. W. (1994). Information Warfare: Impact and Concerns. AIR WAR COLL MAXWELL AFB AL.

2. There is a great deal of confusion around the loaded term “propaganda.” The term coined by the Catholic Church in the seventeenth century to attract believers from the New World to the Church, which had lost many adherents to Protestant groups, had a neutral connotation for persuading the masses through the spread of religious messages, acquired a bad name following World War II and its horrors: Handbook of Propaganda, eds. Paul Baines, Nicholas O’Shaugnessy, and Nancy Snow, pp. xxiii – xxv (London 2020).

3. Ellul, Jacques (1973). Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, p. 25. Trans. Konrad Kellen & Jean Lerner. Vintage Books, New York.

4. FM 3-05.301 Psychological Operations Process Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures August 2007.

https://info.publicintelligence.net/USArmy-PsyOpsTactics.pdf

5. A Ponsonby Falsehood in Wartime (London: Dutton, 1928).

6. Mein Kampf, translated by Ralph Manheim (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1943), Ch 6.

7. Harold D. Lasswell, The Strategy of Soviet Propaganda. Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science, Vol. 24, No. 2, The Defense of the Free World (Jan. 1951), pp. 66-78; P. Kenez, The Birth of the Propaganda State – Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization 1917-29 (Cambridge University Press 1985).

8. The law prohibits the United States from propagandizing within its own territory. In the Internet age the law does not have much significance, and only significantly reduces the prohibition on financial support.

9. L. Bogart, (Premises for Propaganda: the US Information Agency’s Operating Assumptions in the Cold War (New York, Macmillan, 1976), is an investigative report written in 1953 but had been classified owing to its sharp criticism of failed management over more than twenty years.

10. Hastings, Max (2018). Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975 New York: Harper Collins.

11. Katherine Kinney, “Hanoi Jane and Other Treasons: Women and the Editing of the 1960s,” Women’s Studies, 32:4 (2003), 371-392, DOI: 10.1080/00497870310092.

12. The name given to the US Army’s daily briefings was “Five O’Clock Follies;” see “war is fun” pp. 403-426; Philip Knightley, The First Casualty – from The Crimea to the Falklands: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist and Myth Maker (London: Pan Books, 1989).

13. Ian Scott “Pride and Joy:’ Propaganda Wars, “Projections of America” and the Dismantling of the Office of War Information at the Close of World War II, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 39:4(2019), 768-787, DOI: 10.1080/01439685.2019.1600914.

14. https://hebrew-academy.org.il/2013/01/15/%d7%aa%d7%a2%d7%9e%d7%95%d7%9c%d7%94/.

15. Moshe Yegar, History of Israel’s Foreign Policy Propaganda (Herzliya: Lahav, 1986), pp. 28-29.

16. Saar Raveh, The Story of the Establishment of the IDF Consciousness Center.

https://www.inss.org.il/he/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/05/%D7%A1%D7%A2%D7%A8-%D7%A8%D7%95%D7%95%D7%94.pdf

17. Alan Shandro, “‘Consciousness from without:” Marxism, Lenin, and the Proletariat,” Science & Society Vol. 59, No. 3, Lenin: Evaluation, Critique, Renewal (New York: Guilford Press, 1995), pp. 268-297.

18. https://www.palestinechronicle.com/gazan-amputees-walk-in-each-others-shoes/The Gaza Chronicle. Retrieved 14/6/22.

19. Ian S. Lustick (2013). What Counts Is the Counting: Statistical Manipulation as a Solution to Israel’s “Demographic Problem” The Middle East Journal, 67: 2 pp. 185-205 https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/mei/mei/2013/00000067/00000002/art00003.

20. Said Abu Rish: Arafat – From Defender to Dictator (New York: Bloomsbury, 2004), p. 3.