Several retired Israel Defense Forces generals are publicly denouncing their own government for permitting settlers living in the illegally occupied West Bank to wage a campaign of violence against the Palestinian population. As The New…
Page A9From§Eachthe noon edition — 31 August 2026
Israel's 'most effective diplomat' is a beauty queen as retired generals call settler violence ethnic cleansing.
As it ran on the front
Here's a trick as old as public relations itself: when the story is ugly, you find something pretty to put in front of the camera. This week the ugly story is retired Israeli generals — men who ran the actual army, not pundits, not activists, generals — using the phrase 'ethnic cleansing' to describe what settlers are doing to Palestinian families in the West Bank. Not accusing quietly. On the record. That's the story that should be leading.
Instead, somewhere in the coverage, you'll find a piece describing a beauty queen as 'one of Israel's most effective diplomats.' I'm not saying the two stories were assigned by the same desk to distract from each other. I'm saying that's what distraction looks like when it works: a pageant sash next to a war crime, and the sash gets the softer headline every time.…
…(cont) And in case the generals' language felt abstract to you, there's a third piece of the same week: masked settlers attacking an NBC News crew and a Palestinian family, in the same territory the generals were talking about. Masked. Attacking a news crew. That's not a metaphor for ethnic cleansing, that's what the retired generals are describing when they use the word, in real time, with a network's own crew as the witness.
So line them up. You've got the men who used to command the actual military calling it what it is. You've got the actual attack, on camera, the same week. And you've got a beauty queen doing press. Only one of those three is actual policy. The other two are the wrapping paper.
This isn't complicated. It's the oldest move in the book — you put something pleasant in front of the camera so the eye doesn't wander toward the thing that's actually on fire. It works because most people don't read past the first headline. But the generals aren't press-shy men. They spent careers being careful with language, and the word they chose was ethnic cleansing. When the guys who used to command tanks start reaching for that phrase, the diplomacy beat is not the story anymore. The war crime is the story. Everything else is scheduling.
“They're selling you a pageant winner as diplomacy while the generals who used to run the army are calling what's happening in the West Bank ethnic cleansing, on the record. One of those is a press strategy. The other one is the actual war.”
“Public diplomacy takes many forms, cultural ambassadors have always played a — it's soft power, it's outreach, it's not meant to distract from the generals' statement, no, I wasn't trying to connect those, that's not what I said.”
The receipts
Masked Israeli settlers attacked an NBC News crew and a Palestinian family in the West Bank village of Qusra, drawing condemnation from Netanyahu.
Israel’s most consequential battles are not only taking place in diplomatic chambers, newsrooms, or political debates. They are also unfolding in cultural spaces where millions of people form opinions without ever meeting an Israeli or…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.