Czechoslovakia, again.
With a diplomatic tsunami swelling for days, Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar stood before the international press on Tuesday and drew a line in the sand: Israel, he declared, would not be the Czechoslovakia of the 21st century.
The reference was clear. Just as Czechoslovakia was sacrificed by Western democracies in 1938 to appease Nazi Germany, Israel would not be similarly pressured into concessions to placate genocidal actors, Sa’ar was warning.
Responding to France’s announcement that it would recognize a Palestinian state in September – a move quickly echoed by the UK, Canada, Portugal, and others – Sa’ar said: “We are aware of the fact that there are countries in Europe today with huge Muslim populations. Sometimes it affects the policies of their governments. But this cannot and will not lead Israel to commit suicide.”
He continued: Israel won’t “allow a jihadist terror state in the heart of our ancient homeland. We won’t allow a Hamas terror state to be formed just a few kilometers away from our population centers. Israel will not be the Czechoslovakia of the 21st century. We won’t sacrifice our own existence for the sake of the appeasement countries. We won’t give up our basic interests for the sake of internal politics in certain countries that lost control over their own streets but still arrogantly presume to decide for us what’s good for our security.”
Harsh words, and by uttering them, Sa’ar seemed to be channeling his inner Ariel Sharon, at least the Sharon of the pre-disengagement years.
In October 2001, a month after the Twin Towers fell and as the Second Intifada raged, then-US president George W. Bush was pressing Israel to moderate its military response to Palestinian terror and resume high-level truce talks with the Palestinian Authority. The goal: to help build an Arab coalition against al-Qaeda. In response, Sharon famously warned, “Don’t repeat the terrible mistakes of 1938, when the enlightened democracies in Europe decided to sacrifice Czechoslovakia for a comfortable, temporary solution.”
Israel, he declared, “will not be Czechoslovakia.”
Sa’ar was Sharon’s cabinet secretary and a close confidant at the time. He was in the room. He’s seen this movie before and is now repeating some of the dialogue.
But while the instinct to rhetorically push back hard against mounting international pressure is understandable, the question is whether that alone will be enough.
Not enough clarity after two years of war
Sharon, for all his rhetorical defiance, eventually followed words with policy. He understood that while Israel was fighting a brutal war against terrorism, the images of tanks rumbling into Palestinian cities hurt Israel internationally.
He also recognized that for the world – or, more specifically, for Bush – to grant him leeway to combat the intifada as he saw fit, he had to offer some kind of endgame, provide some political horizon.
Ironically, the horizon he provided – Disengagement from Gaza, carried out exactly 20 years ago this month – led to Hamas’s takeover of the enclave and ultimately to October 7. But the instinct behind the move was sound: the world expects not just a fight, but a plan. Without one, the space gets filled by others.
And that is precisely what is happening now.
As former Israeli ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan said in an Army Radio interview on Wednesday, “Even someone like me, who is involved in public diplomacy efforts, I also do not know how to explain the endgame.”
After nearly two years of a bloody war, he admitted, there is not enough clarity.
Europe's rhetoric is performative - but so is Israel's
WITHIN HOURS of Sa’ar’s tough speech, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer declared that the UK would recognize a Palestinian state unless Israel agreed to a ceasefire – apparently on Hamas’s terms – and committed to a peace process that would result in a Palestinian state. Malta Canada, and Portugal followed suit.
These recognitions are largely performative – aimed at domestic audiences and unlikely to change realities. But so, too, was much of Sa’ar’s rhetoric. Strong words may stiffen spines at home, but they will not halt the momentum abroad.
Israel saying “it ain’t gonna happen” – as Sa’ar did multiple times about a Palestinian state during his press conference – won’t stop countries from issuing recognitions. And their recognitions won’t prompt Israel to withdraw from Hebron, Bethlehem, or Nablus.
International pressure will intensify. Companies – moved by horrific images from Gaza – will likely increasingly shy away from doing business in or with Israel. Public opinion, particularly in the West, will continue to sour at alarming rates, as it is doing in the US among Democrats and Independents. The narrative is hardening, and not in Israel’s favor.
As Erdan warned this week, while these recognitions carry little short-term weight – the UN General Assembly cannot create a state, and the US would surely veto any such measure in the Security Council – the long-term threat is much more serious.
“These moves are reinforcing a dangerous narrative: that Israel is a state that occupies, oppresses, and kills children,” he wrote on Thursday in Israel Hayom, adding that history has shown that “narratives can be as powerful as tanks.”
And the narrative now taking hold – with images of emaciated children and throngs of people clamoring for food – is that Israel is starving Gaza and committing genocide there.
The three things Israel must to save public perception
A FORMER senior Foreign Ministry official, who said he has never seen anything like the current wave of anti-Israel sentiment, put it bluntly: “This isn’t just an ugly wave that will pass when the war ends or a new government takes office.” He pointed to Serbia, which still suffers from perceptions of war crimes committed during its conflicts in the 1990s.
According to this official, there are three things Israel must do immediately.
The first is to articulate a plan for Gaza: make clear what Israel wants to see there the day after. If the goal is a demilitarized Gaza, say it and involve Europe in enforcing it. If the aim is to de-radicalize Gaza, as Germany and Japan were after World War II, then make that case and bring in international actors to help.
Right now, there’s a vacuum. And into that vacuum, others are stepping with ideas of their own – chief among them, a Palestinian state.
The second step, one that he said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu needs to take, is to silence voices inside the government that are causing Israel irreparable harm.
Careless, provocative statements from far-right ministers, statements that may be intended for domestic consumption, are being picked up, translated, and amplified abroad, to Israel’s great detriment.
Just on Thursday, for instance, Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu, in response to an interviewer who said that Israel was racing toward a hostage deal, said Israel was racing ahead “for Gaza to be wiped out.”
He said that all of Gaza will be Jewish, and that – unlike when Israel settled in Gush Katif – “there will not be settlements inside cantons, closed up behind a fence.”
Even though Netanyahu may say that this does not reflect the view of the government, and even though Eliyahu is a junior minister with limited sway and influence, he is still a minister, and his words are reported abroad as reflecting Israeli policy because they are made by a government minister.
Comments like these, the former diplomat said, cause Israel tremendous harm because they reinforce exactly the image of Israel the international community is beginning to believe: a country that wants to destroy Gaza, exile its residents, and replace them with “settlers.”
The third necessary step is to retool Israel’s public diplomacy.
This is not the first war Israel has had to explain to the world. After every round, it conducts internal reviews. But too often, the former diplomat said, the lessons go unimplemented.
Take the current policy of barring foreign journalists from Gaza. The result? Major international media rely exclusively on Palestinian stringers, who are providing a steady stream of imagery, often heartbreaking, frequently manipulative, but nearly always one-sided.
The story from Gaza is getting out. Just not Israel’s side of it.
Allowing foreign journalists in – just as Israeli journalists are occasionally embedded – would at least provide some balance.
Then there are the images that Israel is pushing out itself: soldiers in combat gear, tanks in formation, jets streaking through the sky. These may play well at home, but abroad – where Hamas fighters are rarely seen on camera – they fuel a perception of massive disproportion: the super-equipped Israeli army vs defenseless civilians.
The cumulative effect is corrosive, and that corrosion is eroding Israel’s international standing.
Erdan raised a point made often, but one that – just because it’s repeated – doesn’t make it wrong: “Israel cannot afford to keep fighting the public opinion war through ad hoc crisis management. We respond to extreme incidents instead of waging a proactive, strategic, and visionary campaign.”
He complained that “there is no single entity leading Israel’s narrative battle, no public diplomacy chief of staff with a budget, tools, and authority. The Foreign Ministry still operates under an outdated model of classic diplomacy, while the real battles are being waged on TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube – platforms where the Israeli voice is nearly absent.”
Erdan wrote that this is the battlefield Israel needs to enter. Not just to showcase its “better side,” but to expose its enemies: Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran.
“We must present the world with the brutality of Hamas and Hezbollah, the Iranian funding of terrorism, and the cynical use of children and civilians as human shields by our enemies,” he wrote.
For instance, it was left to independent British investigative journalist David Collier on Sunday to expose that a widely circulated picture of an emaciated Palestinian child illustrating starvation in Gaza was actually the picture of a boy suffering from a congenital disease who is currently in an Italian hospital. Why doesn’t the Israeli government have a unit that, in real time, can expose these types of lies?
Erdan called for allocating a “security-level budget and toolkit” to do this job. That call has been made before. It’s never been answered.
An enhanced, coordinated public diplomacy apparatus won’t solve everything. Sometimes the world will not accept your argument, regardless of how well it is articulated. Other times, the problem is not with images, but with policy.
Yet without a better-funded, better-coordinated public diplomacy strategy, the dominant narrative – the one now taking hold today that portrays Israel as the villain – will go unchallenged.
And if Israel doesn’t contest that story – forcefully, strategically, and in real time – it will leave its identity in the hands of its enemies. That’s not just a PR failure; that’s a strategic disaster.