Israel Eagerly Fights ‘War of the Words’ : Propaganda: The Jewish state, passive victim of missile attacks, has taken up the public relations battle.

Come cruise the quiet streets of Gaza with an Israeli army escort. Stop in for free translations or an off-the-record whisper of where to chase the latest missile hit. Would you like a list of psychiatrists who can talk about the psychological trauma of air-raid alarms?

This is the information war, Israeli-style.

Barred so far from the real fighting except as the passive victim of missile attacks, Israel has joined wholeheartedly in the fracas of words and images coming from the Middle East, using skills honed over a decade of waging difficult public relations battles.

With fewer constraints than the painfully close-mouthed briefers and media minders of the anti-Iraq coalition in the battlefield, Israeli spokesmen say they adopted a policy of maximum disclosure: within censorship limits, the more information that comes out about Israel at this sympathetic moment, the better.

“The story favors you, and if you superimpose on it the professional spokesman’s techniques, you can get what the military calls a force multiplier,” said Col. Raanan Gissin, the army spokesman in charge of the foreign press.

“It’s a level of service based on self-interest.”

Hence, the travel-agency approach of the army that contrasts sharply with Gulf regulations, the special round-the-clock press centers in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, the made-to-order briefings.

Zev Chafets, who was director of the Government Press Office during the controversial war in Lebanon in the early 1980s, said with a touch of envy: “Innocent bystanders always get good press. I wouldn’t have minded being the explainer in this war, either.”

Yossi Olmert, the current director of the Press Office, acknowledged that the public relations push is intended to offset the damage to Israel’s image done by the three years of the intifada, the Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

“Why are we organizing tours?” he asked. “We have gained by showing 1,000 journalists what Israel is like beyond the intifada. “

Officials say the learning process that produced such solicitous feed and caring of the media began in the 1982 Lebanon War, when access was highly limited, and has continued through the intifada.

“During the intifada, we learned a big lesson,” Olmert said. “We learned that you have to be on top of the news, and to be quick enough, to be credible enough, efficient enough, honest enough and just do that all the time.”

Gissin recalled trying to teach soldiers in the West Bank and Gaza how to interact with reporters, removing their helmets to make them look more human for the cameras, and taking journalists on patrols to get across the Israeli point of view.

But it did little good, he said, because the story always tended to focus on Israeli military brutality and the suffering of Palestinian women and children.

“You try all sorts of makeup, all sorts of technical means, but all this can only minimize the damage, because the story is ugly. Here, it’s a different story because the story favors Israel--we are the underdogs. I have the whole picture painted, and all I have to do is add with the brush a little bit of paint here and there. . . .”

In his briefings, Gissin said, his guiding principle is to release as much information as possible, providing only that it could not help enemy intelligence.

Originally, that meant requiring the media to refrain only from revealing the Israeli locations where Scud missiles landed, but it soon extended to withholding official reports on whether Patriot missiles had been fired to intercept them and with what success.

Still, Olmert maintained, with eyewitness reports and leaks, “You know everything, you just can’t tell it all to your readers.”

Enter the Israeli censor. With its bans on military information as well as reports on Israel’s sources of oil, nuclear capability and some aspects of immigration, Israeli censorship is normally probably the tightest peacetime clamp on the press among developed democracies.

Reporter John Pruzanski had been dictating a story on a Scud hit to his newspaper in Melbourne, Australia, for several minutes when a strange voice suddenly came on the line.

“Excuse me,” it said politely, “We haven’t seen this copy.”

Pruzanski said that the experience spooked him, but he complied. He did not object to the basic principle of protecting the population by withholding locations of missile hits, he said.

Israeli reporters, whose publications sign a pledge to submit material to the censor before printing it, chafe harder under censorship that many believe is more strict for them than for foreigners.

“Stuff has been censored that I thought was silly,” Chafets, now managing editor of the weekly Jerusalem Report magazine, said. “It’s very confining because we know a great deal more than we can say.”

But, he added, “I don’t think there’s any great threat to democracy in the censorship currently being applied.

“You can write that (Prime Minister) Yitzhak Shamir is a moron and (Chief of Staff) Dan Shomron should be hung from a lamppost and no one will touch that.”

Five American news organizations have been reprimanded or punished so far for breaking censorship rules--NBC, CNN, WCBS, the New York Post and Newsweek, which published a two-page photo that showed clearly the location of a Patriot battery.

The Government Press Department issued hand slaps to the violators, taking networks off the air for brief periods or temporarily confiscating press credentials.

“I like to think we’ve formed a covenant,” Olmert said. “We give you everything we can give you--and don’t put us on the spot where we have to take action against you.”

With its confinement to matters that clearly endanger national security and relatively lenient enforcement, Israeli censorship pales these days compared to military limitations on journalists in the Gulf.

The leniency stems in part from realism, one military official said.

“Israel is a small country--everybody knows everybody, and you can’t keep any real secrets here,” he said.