How Israel’s ‘hasbara paradigm’ collapsed in Gaza
Israeli activists protest the IDF’s interception of the Global Sumud Flotilla at the Gaza border, October 2025
Dahlia Scheindlin writes in Haaretz on 15 October 2025:
Embedded within U.S. President Donald Trump’s long, lavish speech in the Israeli Knesset on Monday [13 October] were a select number of truths.
“Now you have peace,” Trump began (this is not the truthful part). “You have people that really like Israel.” (Nor is this.) “It was getting to be a little nasty out there in the world. And ultimately the world wins. You can’t beat the world.” This is closer to the truth. He recounted encouraging Benjamin Netanyahu to approve the cease-fire deal by telling the prime minister: “Bibi, you’re gonna be remembered for this far more than if you kept this thing going, going, going – kill, kill, kill.”
Translated, Trump meant that you can’t beat world opinion, which had a nasty view of Israel, because Israel was doing a great deal of killing.
Failed faith
With this statement, Trump inadvertently smashed through one of the most axiomatic beliefs in Israeli life. He asserted that Israel’s image is suffering because its policies are so wrong – not because its hasbara isn’t good enough.
For decades, Israelis of all political backgrounds have placed nearly religious faith in the notion that a sophisticated, pervasive system of messaging and nimble communications could purify its image. This image-boosting effort is known as hasbara, derived from the Hebrew word for “explain.”
With the cease-fire now in place, one of Israel’s many reckonings must address that belief that good hasbara can fix anything. That paradigm has collapsed and may never recover.
The government invests major resources in hasbara and has multiple agencies or individuals responsible for communicating Israel’s actions, including the Prime Minister’s Office, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the army; in the past it has had a Ministry of Hasbara, a Minister of Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy, and has contracted non-governmental groups for hasbara missions.
Yet during this war, Israel’s credibility, favorability and acceptance of its policy positions have sunk lower than ever.
Each fresh poll is a stinging new testament. In June, a majority of respondents in 20 out of 24 countries held unfavorable views of Israel in polling by Pew Research, the highly regarded U.S. polling firm. In five of those countries, over 70 percent held unfavorable views; even in the U.S., 53 percent felt unfavorable towards Israel. Gallup polling in the U.S. from July found that approval of Israel’s actions in Gaza hit a new low, at just 32 percent.
A Washington Post poll published last week ahead of the two-year anniversary of October 7 found that a firm majority of American Jews, 61 percent, believe Israel is committing war crimes and nearly 40 percent believe it is committing genocide. Why didn’t hasbara help – was it inadequate during the war, or did it fail for deeper reasons?
A technical problem
In one view, the fundamental problem with Israel’s image-making during this war was how poorly the system worked. Journalists grumbled throughout the two years that there was no centralized clear, accessible source of official information.
Lt. Col. (res.) Peter Lerner is a veteran former IDF international spokesperson who served nearly a full year of reserve duty during this war communicating with the foreign press; he noted that hasbara is conducted through a plethora of bodies, which yields “mixed signals, timing clashes and avoidable credibility gaps.”
At the start of the war, almost all communications in Hebrew and in English fell to an IDF spokesperson, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari. At the same time, a young British Israeli former media advisor to President Isaac Herzog, Eylon Levy, was thrust into the ill-defined position of a government spokesperson under the Prime Minister’s Office, with little direction. The office then dropped him after half a year for murky reasons that may or may not have involved Sara Netanyahu. Lerner characterized the hasbara efforts overall as “understaffed [and] weakened by politics.”
One veteran analyst with decades of experience in Israel-U.S. affairs was sure that Israel focused too heavily on traditional media, appealing to the dinosaurs of modern communications, and was lagging far behind on social media. Perhaps the government now wants to rectify the problem: This August, the Diaspora Ministry invited a number of social media influencers to see aid distribution sites in Gaza to counter what Israelis believe to be a Hamas campaign fabricating hunger in Gaza. Two weeks ago, while in the U.S., Netanyahu himself met with a group of social media influencers in New York to tell them…how important social media is (thanks unc).
Other suggested solutions for how to improve hasbara come from Israeli right-wingers. A prominent rightist populist commentator Erel Segal told a conference audience in July that certain figures just shouldn’t speak to international media.
Two weeks earlier, Daniella Weiss, a well-known and often outrageously messianic settler personality, told Piers Morgan why she has no sympathy for dead Palestinian children, while Morgan railed against war crimes. At the conference, Segal said: “If you don’t know how to go on Fierce Morgan, then don’t – you’re doing terrible damage!” casually ignoring the distinction between P and F (a single letter in Hebrew). Weiss nonetheless went back on Morgan’s show last week to advocate for Israel owning all the land from the Nile to the Euphrates.
At the July conference, Segal also suggested that ministers simply lie about policies, something Israel’s government might never have considered. Instead of boasting about shutting off water to Gaza – “say the pipe was damaged in bombings and can’t be repaired” – to head off international pressure for relief.
Lerner, who now directs international relations for the Histadrut labor union and lectures at Reichman University, has more systematic recommendations, including the establishment of a National Information Directorate to coordinate all other efforts, tailoring messages to regional sensibilities in the world, more professional training, monitoring of messages and impact, among other ideas. He noted that hasbara efforts were successful, for example, at humanizing the hostages worldwide and keeping their fate high on people’s minds in a way that “cut through politics,” he told Haaretz.
But could those improvements of the system really rehabilitate Israel’s image – and would they have made a difference in the war?
Explaining what can’t be explained
From the mid-1960s, the legendary left-wing politician Yossi Sarid was seen as a natural talent at hasbara for his political party; but he repudiated the whole concept. In an interview he gave for a book published in 2014, the year before he died, Sarid said: “I still don’t know what is hasbara, and I think it doesn’t exist. They say there is such an animal, so let’s try to see what kind of animal it is.” The animal turned out to be a scapegoat.
He noted sarcastically: “Hasbara is always the refuge of all failures. Everything is going great – only the hasbara is garbage. If only the hasbara was ok, then everyone would realize the ideal situation.” He served as a minister under Yitzhak Rabin in the 1990s, and the hasbara mindset was there then too.
But a scapegoat can’t stop problems at their source. There was no good way to spin occupation, and there’s no good way to message what Israel has done in Gaza.
Lerner also noted that there had been hardly any emphasis on, or empathy for, the humanitarian suffering in Gaza. And over time the lack of a clear political horizon or logic to the war made it ever harder to explain.
“In my opinion the empathy-gap and horizon-gap were the core issues,” when addressing how Israel lost credibility from the earliest days. “As the war lengthened and civilian harm mounted, our messaging lagged on two fronts: sustained, proactive humanitarian empathy and a credible pathway to a political outcome,” he wrote to Haaretz. “Messaging cannot outrun policy.”
Just ask Israelis themselves. It wasn’t only external hasbara that failed. Netanyahu spent two years telling Israelis that war would bring the hostages home, blaming Hamas for failed negotiations and claiming he was doing everything to get the hostages back.
Yet polls repeatedly found that the majority of the country preferred a hostage deal over fresh military actions or in return for a cease-fire; believed the government undermined efforts for a deal or wasn’t doing enough. For two years prior to this week, it turned out that Israelis noticed the hostages were not home. Famously, they booed him when Trump’s team joined the crowds in Hostage Square in Tel Aviv ahead of the hostage release.
A decade ago, I wrote an analysis of the hasbara obsession at that time. Right-wing NGOs were targeting high schoolers for hasbara training. International hasbara outfits like The Israel Project and StandWithUs were thriving (though the former has since folded). Then too, one could identify five different hasbara-oriented Israeli government agencies.
I called the article “explaining ourselves to death,” after Neil Postman’s now-quaint 1985 critique of television called “Amusing Ourselves to Death.” Even in 2015 hasbara had been fetishized, distracting Israel from the real issue of bad policy: occupation, settlement expansion, suppression of Palestinian national self-determination. Those were always bound to fuel both negative images and ever-more violent escalation – the background to October 7.
Even Trump realized that bad policy drives bad attitudes toward Israel. A whole industry of message making and efforts at media policing is just useless until that changes.
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