For the first few weeks after 3,000 Hamas operatives smashed into Israel, torturing, raping, mutilating, and murdering 1,200 Israelis and kidnapping 251 others, taking them back to Gaza, much of the world sympathized with Israel. Marches were held to declare solidarity with the Jewish state; political leaders spoke of their “ironclad” support for Israel. That support, however, was fleeting, for as the number of casualties among civilians in Gaza rose, more and more people identified with the Palestinians and saw Israel as a bullying little Sparta. We have all seen the results: the International Criminal Court (ICC) threatens to convict Israel of “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity”; the foreign policy head of the EU, Josep Borrell, denounces Israel’s conduct of its war; the same malevolence toward Israel has been displayed, too, by the antisemitic Secretary-General of the UN General Assembly, Antonio Guterres. The UN’s Special Rapporteur on Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, the viciously antisemitic Francesca Albanese, continually accuses Israel of “genocide.” On campuses throughout the Western world, but especially in America, students march, protest, set up encampments, occupy campus buildings, interrupt classes taught by Israelis, all so as to be able to disrupt university life while demanding that “Palestine shall be free/From the river to the sea,” which means the Jewish state must disappear, to be replaced by a twenty-third Arab one.
Israel has clearly been losing the PR war. Mitchell Bard insists that Israel can do better; it must now prepare for the newest phase of that war, as the Gaza war continues to bring damaging news of more civilian deaths, and both Iran and Hezbollah threaten to attack “the Zionist entity.” Israel may feel compelled to launch a pre-emptive strike on Hezbollah, or Iran, or both, and it had better have its justification at the ready for such an act, detailing all the reasons that made such a pre-emptive strike essential.
More on Mitchell Bard’s recommendations can be found here: “Preparing for the coming PR war,” by Mitchell Bard, JNS, August 8, 2024:
The pro-Israel community was completely and inexcusably unprepared for the public-relations nightmare following the events of Oct. 7. It took two months for major organizations to create the “10/7 Project” to push “for accurate and complete coverage of the Israel-Hamas war.” Does anyone know anything the project has done in the last 10 months? If it did anything at all, it was a total failure. War with Hezbollah and Iran was as predictable as a confrontation with Hamas, and yet the community seems equally inept, so let me lay out what we know will happen:
The media will:
- Ignore Israeli casualties and focus on Arab victims.
- Accept fabricated Arab statistics.
- Interview unreliable Arab sources.
- Air stories without researching their accuracy.
- Focus on dramatic photos and stories without context.
- Fail to explain Hezbollah dictates what can be reported.
Israel’s accidental bombing of civilians in the Arab town of Kfar Kana in the Galilee shifted opinion against Israel in the last war with Hezbollah. This was not a case of media bias—it reported what happened accurately—but an example of Israel being unable to offer explanations in a timely and persuasive way to mitigate the impact of the stories. This is also an example of a predictable event that PR war planners should have anticipated. On July 18, 2006, an Israeli pilot told a reporter: “One mistake can jeopardize the whole war, like Kfar Kana, in one of the last operations in Lebanon, where artillery bombarded a refugee camp, killing over 100 people, which resulted in international pressure that halted the operation.”
Israeli statesman Shimon Peres argued that good policy results in good PR, but sometimes, Israel’s policy options are limited or poor, as is the case of needing to destroy buildings above tunnels and attack schools, mosques, hospitals and U.N. facilities where terrorists are hiding. Hezbollah uses the same tactics as Hamas, and Israel will need to have explanations for its actions.
Israeli spokesmen must be prepared to repeatedly explain as lucidly and compellingly as possible, that it is Hamas that embeds its men and weapons in civilian areas; that Hamas wants to maximize civilian casualties while the IDF always wants to minimize them; that the IDF has an elaborate system to warn civilians in Gaza to move away from neighborhoods and buildings about to be targeted, a warning system that by March had included nine million dropped leaflets, fifteen million text messages, and sixteen million robocalls. These warnings have been effective, and allowed the IDF to achieve a ratio of civilian-to-combatant deaths of 1:1, which is unheard of in the history of modern warfare. Compare that 1:1 ratio to the UN’s data, which concludes that in all the wars fought since 1945, the average civilian-to-combatant ratio has been 9:1. In Afghanistan, the Americans managed to attain a 4:1 ratio, and in Iraq, they did even better, with a 3:1 ratio. Those ratios should be mentioned by Israel’s PR spokesmen, who then must be sure to add “and in Gaza, Israel has achieved a 1:1 ratio of civilian-to-combatant deaths, which no other belligerent has ever come close to equalling.” The Israelis have not been shouting this information from the rooftops, but they must start to do so now.
Stive says
Israel for sure could do a better PR war. Israel should also have an international news site all can view like al Jazeera provided it’s not run by Israeli leftists.
Not much hope when Israeli army radio is contracted out to an anti Israel bias.
But truth be told, a better job can be done but win the media war is not possible as the spiritual evil side has greater power.
mgoldberg says
The old saw, ‘A lie goes half way around the world, before the truth gets up and puts on it’s pant’ comes to mind. The speed of the internet age, the AI age now, is increasingly deadly towards the propagation of the values that once stood as bedrock for the world, courtesy of the western world. These ethics are now more like birds aflight, and people shoot them down before they even get a chance to be the bedrock truths we all once at least acknowledged. Those ‘ten commandments’, the basic idea that the truths have to be agreed upon, not spit upon, is essentially gone. People can get away with saying and asserting the most idiotic, false, counter intuitive things before reason, decency, an honorable assessment of the facts ever takes place. And that is the situation for Israel, as with the rest of us. The Jihadists who bombed Israel with explosive missiles for years then invade and murder, slaughter 1200, and kidnap the old, infirm, babies, women, children, men, including rapes, mutilations and no sooner demand a ceasefire, and continue to do so… even as Israel fights with both hands tied behind their backs, trying not to slaughter ‘civilians’ even as the Jihadists proclaim their love of death, of doing this again, and again, and whining about the lies of a genocide, they didn’t endure, at all, but one which they promise to others, again and again…….
Wellington says
The Jews excel in so many things, arguably more so than any other people in history (easily in the top ten), but they suck at PR. It’s their Achilles Heel.
࿗Infidel࿘ says
Not so sure about that. They’ve made excellent legal arguments for their actions from the early 1920s to now. It’s another thing that half the Gentile world is Leftist who hates them, and that from the remaining half, you have a good number of muslims
࿗Infidel࿘ says
Must prepare? They have been plunged in one since October 7th, since unlike any other time, the level of anti-Semitism in the West has been unprecedented
OLD GUY says
Unfortunately the world wide media is so afraid of Islam they slant the news so as not to offend these islamic murders and rapist.
simba says
so the Jews dont control media. neo-nazis or 4th reich and muslims still wont get it