Hasbara is failing. What’s next for Israel’s desperate image war?
As the world increasingly sees through Israel’s propaganda, its steadfast supporters scramble to stick to the narrative.
“It is up to you to be our soldiers abroad” – says Miriam Adelson to a conference of starry-eyed young Jews at the annual Taglit Birthright convention in Jerusalem – “swaying public opinion in Israel’s favour.” This speech from the film Israelism, which chronicles the culture of unwavering support for Israel in much of the American Jewish community, fittingly captures how Zionists are educated on Israel: a religious duty to unconditionally advocate for the self-proclaimed Jewish state.
Hasbara, literally meaning "explanation”, but more accurately "propaganda", describes Israel’s particular style of public relations, which aims to shape its perception abroad. Unlike other foreign disinformation campaigns, for instance Russia’s use of online bots, Hasbara isn’t a covert misinformation campaign. It can’t be traced back to one person or organization; rather it’s part and parcel of pro-Israelism itself. The people spreading it, from government ministers to American mothers, are genuine believers in the cause. They see showing the morality of Israel’s case as a way to fight the war for public opinion.
The Website of the Pro-Israel Organization "Stand with Us"
Ironically, while Israel promises Jews the freedom to live solely on their terms, its supporters spend a lot of time on the defensive. Many of us raised in the pro-Israel world are taught that there’s an obligation to defend Israel from the “lies ” and “ignorance” spread about it. A strong Israel, the logic goes, is the only way to protect the Jewish people from another tragedy. This logic makes Judaism and Zionism inextricable. As the anti-Zionist Rabbi Shaul Magid writes in The Necessity of Exile, “matters of Jewish practice and commitment to the Jewish people have been replaced by political affiliation.” This culture, coupled with the robust propaganda arm of the State and its allies, has, until recently, fostered overwhelming tacit consent for Israel’s decades of occupation and apartheid.
The Culture of the Zionist Bureaucracy
Over the years, Israel and its allies have designed a sophisticated bureaucracy to disseminate their message. In Israel, the “IDF Spokesperson’s Unit” and the Ministry of Public Diplomacy are tasked with developing and communicating Israel’s official positions to the world. In the United States, Israel’s most powerful allies, AIPAC and CUFI, invest heavily in convincing politicians that Israel, “the only democracy in the Middle East” is “aligned with American values”. At the same time, organizations like the Anti-Defamation League silence and fearmonger, by effectively labeling all criticism of Israel or support for Palestinian rights as an attack on Jews everywhere. Trips like Birthright bring young Jews from all over the world to Israel to “find their belonging”. And on the internet, organizations like the Tel Aviv Institute, the employer of Israel’s darling mouthpiece Hen Mazzig, are “focused on uplifting Jews on and offline through innovative social media-driven strategies”; a string of euphemisms for spreading propaganda via Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok.
Whatever its strategies, Hasbara, much like Israeli politicians themselves, can count on an army of Israel supporters abroad. Whether Diaspora Jews convinced of a responsibility to their people, Evangelical Christians hoping for divine redemption, or old-fashioned proponents of Western military might, Hasbarists are more than happy to regurgitate Israel’s position daily, or, at the very least, never call them out.
A common Hasbara tactic is to use snappy phrases to cynically cooptation identity politics to present "Jews" and thus "Israel" as the victim.
Hasbara organizations, along with the Hasbarists themselves, have been remarkably effective at shaping the narrative around Israel, and silencing its critics. So effective, in fact, that anyone raised in a Pro-Israel environment like myself, can regurgitate the list of talking points as if by rote:
- Judaism cannot be separated from the Zionist project, and questioning or criticizing Israel or the Zionist project is really an attempt to deny Jews of their right to self-determination, which is discriminatory. This is the argument of the IHRA Definition of Anti-Semitism, which has been adopted by 43 countries.
- Israel, as the only “Jewish state,” is held to a “double standard” and is “singled out” for criticism in the media and in the public in a way that far less “democratic” or “civilised” countries are not. This is the “why the silence on Syria?” argument.
- Palestinians are responsible for their own oppression because “they” don’t want peace – that Israel has “no partner for peace.” This usually goes hand in hand with the argument that “they educate their children to hate Jews” or that “Hamas uses Palestinians as human shields”, which portrays Palestinians as a dehumanized other who can “only understand the language of force”.
- Jewish history is defined by persecution, and a strong Israel is the only way to prevent another Holocaust. Therefore, Israel is somehow entitled to (ironically, given the above claim) be above scrutiny. Jews, as victims of a genocide themselves, are ontologically incapable of being the aggressors and any claim to the contrary is just “blood-libel”. A version of this argument was recently made by Aharon Barak, an Israeli ad-hoc Judge at the International Court of Justice, when he accused the court of “imputing the crime of Cain to Abel” for taking up the case of Israeli genocide in Gaza.
As far as tactics go, Hasbarists will rarely if ever engage with, or even know how to refute, counter-arguments, likely because they have not been taught to even consider them. The claims of “apartheid” or “genocide” are just swiftly dismissed by saying that it is anti-Semitic to even bring them up.
Hasbara is caught flat-footed
However, in the past ten months, the tried and tested playbook that Israel's defenders have drawn from for decades is simply no longer up to the task, given the scale of the violence unleashed in Gaza. Hardly anyone, except Hasbarists themselves, is fooled anymore.
In the desperate attempt to make their position heard, Israel’s legacy propaganda institutions have become even more extreme. UN Ambassador Gilad Erdan talking about “Hamas hiding at Harvard,” or going off about how Hitler would be proud of the UN’s attempt to recognize a “Palesti-Nazi terror state,” is unlikely to win many people over. Equally, calling for Bella Hadid to be dropped from Adidas’ campaign because her father is Palestinian or tweeting that “there are no innocent civilians in Gaza” likely does little to convince the world of the moral justness of their cause. Even Donald Trump, “the most pro-Israel president in US history", has admitted that Israel is "losing the PR war”.
Surely it’s the Tik Tok algorithm, right?
In response to Israel’s declining position on the international stage, a slew of articles have come out about Israel’s "problem of strategy". As Ruth Margalit recently analysed, Israel’s supporters act “as if the vast number of Gazan casualties, the famine spreading in the northern Strip, and the government’s refusal to discuss an exit strategy were a mere inconvenience, a situation that would resolve itself if only we Israelis were given a platform to explain ourselves.” The world has clearly heard their arguments but remains unconvinced.
This does, however, raise an important question: if even Israel’s supporters don’t believe that Hasbara is convincing anyone, why do they continue repeating the same tired talking points?
Stuck in a feedback loop of re-traumatization, Israel and their supporters are incapable of seeing themselves as aggressors. As the Philosopher Hannah Arendt predicted in 1948, the Zionist national consciousness has instilled the idea that anti-Semitism is ever-present, unchanging and only manageable through force. However detached from reality it may be, most Israelis – who are largely unwilling to take seriously the horrors in Gaza -- genuinely see themselves as victims of Amalek. It’s psychological; for those for whom Palestinians are invisible and have been taught that they are history’s victims, any criticism or opposition is simply the latest in a 3,000-year-long smear campaign. In their rhetoric, the centrist mainstream of this camp sounds almost identical to the ultra-nationalist far-right.
Following the ideological tide of those around you is easy. As the Israeli columnist Anshel Pfeffer explains, Hasbara “may be fake, but it is comforting. Because Hasbara means that you don't have to ask yourself hard questions, just try to explain better what you already believe in. Hasbara means being too busy coming up with excuses for Israel instead of asking why it's been getting so many things wrong.”
This cynical thought process gets to the heart of human psychology: it’s easier for people to feel vulnerable, misunderstood or even a victim rather than admit to being the aggressor. And so, when Hasbara is no longer worth the paper it’s written on, many of Israel’s supporters have defaulted to a more fatalistic and tribalist narrative; one which institutionalizes and weaponizes Jewish victimhood.
Rather than Hasbara’s gloating about Israel as a ‘shining civilized nation’, post-Hasbara defaults to the cynical position that the world is and will always be anti-Semitic, and there is simply “no other choice” but to support it come what may. The alternative – the destruction of the State of Israel and the killing or expulsion of its Jewish population – is much worse. A prominent example of this has been the rise of October 7th “dark tourism”, which has brought tens of thousands of American Jews to the Gaza Envelope to “bear witness” and reinscribe “their sense of victimhood”.
Whereas Hasbara positively flaunts Israel’s liberal values, Post-Hasbara has resigned to making excuses for why Israel, and Jews themselves, are exempt from liberal obligations. This increasingly-fatalist “us vs. them” narrative turns solidarity on it’s head, declaring that ”since no one helped the Jews, we are left to only trust each other.” Take, for instance, this since-deleted tweet from one of the editors of Tablet Magazine, where he effectively makes the argument that the history of Jewish victimhood exempts him from obligations to others outside of his group.
A screenshot of the above-mentioned tweet
It’s here that we get to the heart of Post-Hasbara: it doesn’t matter if Israel is morally correct because:
- Jews are nothing without a “strong” Israel
- The world is against us
- It is us or them
Having internalized the fear that not “supporting Israel” is tantamount to supporting its destruction, the Zionist (whether liberal or conservative) is relegated to a kind of “doublethink.” As a family friend told me back in December, “no one likes what Israel is doing, but if we don’t defend it then who will?”
My journey from Post-Hasbara to Counter-Hasbara
I admittedly recognise this process within myself. After moving to Tel Aviv-Jaffa as an idealistic 22-year-old, I was captivated by the romantic dream of the Jewish homeland. Being there, I quickly became disillusioned by the reality on the ground: a cruel and never-ending occupation fuelled by an indifferent Israeli public. Over time, I came to find the fact that I, a Uruguayan-American with a letter from my brother’s second-grade Bible teacher, had more rights than someone whose family had lived there for generations, deeply unsettling. But Zionist normalization allows a Tel Aviv liberal to live in an ordinary Mediterranean city, go to the beach, and take drugs until the early hours of the morning, without any awareness of the depopulated neighbourhoods of Jaffa that they’re doing it on. Despite making an effort to learn about the latter, I internalised the Zionist contention that Jews’ obligations ought to be first-and-foremost to each other. While opposing the occupation, one also had to be weary of “delegitimisers”.
So I became an apologist. Although I was quick to criticise Israel internally, I stopped short of questioning the Zionist project altogether, especially publicly. As I once reasoned, if the world is already against Israel, why should I further discredit it.
If I still lived there, I always think, I might be among those Tel Aviv liberals who complain about feeling misunderstood by the West. I might be in the streets protesting against Netanyahu, while waving an Israeli flag. I might see university protests as “anti-Semitic mobs;” discredit claims of genocide as “blood-libel;” celebrate an operation which killed 200 Palestinians to rescue four hostages. Most importantly of all, I might be comforting myself with the knowledge that, while what is happening in Gaza may be horrendous, thankfully, it is just “them”, not “us”.
Post-Hasbara shows Zionism’s true face
As Israel’s flagrant disregard for international law angers even its strongest allies, Israel’s biggest threat is coming to the fore: Zionism itself. The Zionist project, much like all nationalisms built on the “us vs. them” binary, cannot sustainably continue in a 21st century Western world.
Israel’s leaders have doubled down on their hysterical language. But internally, many are slowly realising that no amount of bombing, destruction, or mass-starvation will guarantee their own security; that it will only kill the hostages, embolden their enemies, and further send their country down the path of self-destruction. This was made evident during Netanyahu’s address to the US Congress last week, when six hostage family members were ejected from the chamber after protesting Netanyahu’s failure to secure a hostage deal. In the US, the notable absence of nearly half of congressional Democrats reveals a clear fissure in the bi-partisan consensus to support Israel without conditions.
The Need for a Counter-Hasbara
Still, for most supporters of Israel, genuinely looking inward is much harder than staying within Hasbara's framework. That’s why, at a political level, only external pressure through boycotts, protests, and sanctions will change the situation.
At the same time, those of us formerly entranced by Hasbara understand too well how people will default to the narrative of Jewish victimhood and violent defensiveness insofar as there is no robust alternative. That’s why a true counter-Hasbara needs to articulate an alternative of Jewish identity. Naomi Klein and Judith Butler’s universalist views of Jewish obligation have revived the solidarity politics of the 19th century Jewish Labour Bund. At the same time, religious figures like Shaul Magid and Michael Manekin have articulated robust theological oppositions to the Zionist narrative. And through events like Hadar Cohen and Avi Shlaim’s Arab-Jewish retreat, many Mizrahi and Sepharadic Jews are redefining the Zionist dichotomy between Jewish and Arab identities.
It is through these kinds of activism and scholarship that we can re-envision alternatives for what Jewish identity looks like. One that allows us to rethink the politics and alliances between Jews and non-Jews, both in the Middle East and around the world.
What’s clear, even to those who support Israel, is that the Hasbara narrative has run its course. The question is what to do about it. For some, it's to shake off the notion of liberalism altogether and slide into militant Judeo-nationalism. By contrast, those of us who have adopted an anti-Zionist politics seek to rethink Jewish nationalism altogether. For those stuck in the feedback loop of Post-Hasbara's message of fatalistic persecution, this narrative of hope can provide a potential off-ramp. As those of us engaged in anti-Zionism know, it’s not enough for the massacres to end. We need to get to the root of the process whereby oppressed to become oppressors; to rethink nationalism, historical memory, and the institutionalization of trauma.
Not for our survival, but for our humanity. ▼
Martin Francisco Saps (@mf_saps) is a writer and PhD candidate covering religion, culture, and community in contemporary cities.
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