When I was earning my degree at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, I taught bar and bat mitzvah kids at a large Conservative synagogue.
One of the lessons I tried to instill in the children, along with how to chant their haftarah, was to be proud to be Jewish. I taught them that this was what Hanukkah was about – with all due respect to the gift-giving that has become the focus of winter holidays in America.
The Maccabees fought an uphill battle against both the Syrian Greeks and the Jews who wanted to assimilate into the culture of the world’s dominant empire. The miracle was that the Maccabees emerged successful, with the few miraculously defeating the many.
Nowadays, we are also the underdog in a challenging fight: the battle for international public opinion that is being fought on social media. Supporters of Israel are a small minority on Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, Snapchat, and LinkedIn.
It would be totally understandable to pronounce the battle unwinnable, thus surrendering to opponents of the Jewish state. But social media is where young people around the world spend their time and get their news, so Israel cannot afford to abandon the fight.
That is why the organizations and individuals that have fearlessly entered the fray during the current war between Israel and Hamas are modern-day Maccabees, and their victories are worthy of being celebrated.
Who are the Maccabees helping Israel on social media?
The IDF itself has been very active on social media platforms in multiple languages, including Arabic. On Tuesday, the IDF tweeted instructions in Arabic for Gaza residents to enable the entrance of humanitarian aid, supplying helpful maps.
#عاجل سكان قطاع غزة، جيش الدفاع يعمل بقوة ضد حماس والمنظمات الإرهابية في قطاع غزة وبشكل خاص في منطقة خان يونس. فيما يلي عدة تعليمات عاجلة: ⭕️القتال والتقدم العسكري لجيش الدفاع في منطقة خان يونس لا يسمحان بتنقل المدنيين عبر محور صلاح الدين في المقاطع الواقعة شمالي وشرقي مدينة… pic.twitter.com/nKC6YoEXG5
— افيخاي ادرعي (@AvichayAdraee) December 5, 2023
The Israeli government has taken dozens of influencers with huge social media followings to the Gaza periphery. With the help of the partnership-building organization Sharaka, Muslim reporters and commentators were brought from Europe to learn about the atrocities of October 7 and see their impact with their own eyes.
One campaign led by the Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism Ministry highlighted how Hamas has misused Gaza’s hospitals. A video with both Jewish and Arab doctors condemning Hamas was circulated among doctors around the world.
ANOTHER VIDEO that the ministry’s senior director of digital strategy Ido Daniel coordinated with Tel Aviv’s Sourasky Medical Center (Ichilov Hospital) featured gynecologist Ronit Almog speaking with authority about the sexual assaults of Hamas against Israeli women. That important video has been seen by millions of people.
A group of Israeli women founded the #MeToo_Unless_Ur_A_Jew online global campaign in response to the silence and lack of condemnation from the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, also known as UN Women. The grassroots effort resulted in 300,000 people in 50 countries signing a petition proclaiming that every woman’s life is equally precious and that no side of any story should be deliberately excluded.
It took too long, but UN Women finally issued a statement on Saturday condemning Hamas’s use of sexual violence, after having been widely criticized for failing to appropriately decry the gender-based atrocities.
Just ahead of Hanukkah, that victory recalled one of the holiday’s lesser-known triumphs. Judith, the courageous daughter of Yohanan, the high priest during the Maccabean Revolt, killed the Greek general Holofernes when he wanted to seduce her.
Large pro-Israel organizations like Standwithus, small organizations like HonestReporting, and many others in between each did their part in putting out content shared around the world on social media. StandWithUs has had more than one billion interactions on social media since October 7, including viral videos featuring Israeli athletes and actors, as well as Instagram posts shared by Americans Jerry Seinfeld and Kris Jenner, Israelis Gal Gadot and Bar Refaeli, and other top celebrities.
With a social media staff of only one, HonestReporting went from four million impressions in the entire year of 2022 to 85 million impressions in the past two months, of which 46% came from people under 25, and 89% under 45. On Instagram alone, HonestReporting jumped from 5,000 followers before the war to nearly 40,000 currently.
One of HonestReporting’s most watched posts has been of an Arab reporting for BBC about how the IDF has protected civilians in Gaza while targeting Hamas.
The media watchdog’s scoop about Gazan photographers who infiltrated Israel on October 7 resulted in CNN and AP firing Hamas-supporting photographer Hassan Eslaiah and the organization’s website being attacked by hackers.
THESE DIGITAL media warriors have built an expertise in educating the public, calling out bias, highlighting lesser-known stories, and holding the media and social media accountable. There were also plenty of individual fighters on social media who helped spread light.
Yoseph Haddad led a campaign to make the world realize that Israeli Arabs are victims of the war, which is not a fight between Arabs and Jews but between Hamas and Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Israelis. He tweeted polls indicating that Hamas’s massacre has made Arab Israelis feel more Israeli and less Palestinian.
Emily Schrader has highlighted Iranian activists organizing and taking part in pro-Israel protests. Schrader told Fox News Digital that Iranians outside of Iran have become Israel’s greatest defenders and allies during the war.
Australian pro-Israel activist David Lange, who tweets as @Israellycool, debated anti-Israel professor Marc Lamont Hill and got Hill to admit that Jews were in the land first, which makes it tough to call us colonizers. UK-based blogger David Collier, who tweets as @mishtal, has taken on anti-Israeli propaganda to his 162,000 followers.
Former Jerusalem Post columnist Lahav Harkov, who has 158,000 followers on Twitter, had one tweet with more than two million views and a well-researched thread about what Israeli hostages endured in Hamas captivity that responded to Sky News correspondent Dominic Waghorn’s incorrect claim that they were “held in reasonable conditions.”
I’m going to make a thread of ways this Sky News take is egregious https://t.co/HyJkjhtWi1 pic.twitter.com/DjG6WdUTeB
— Lahav Harkov ️ (@LahavHarkov) November 28, 2023
White Plains, New York, Israel advocate Salo Aizenberg did a great job this week taking on the false casualty figures of the Hamas health ministry and proving that its numbers, which have been accepted as gospel around the world, were grossly inflated.
Critical Thread. Close review of Gaza casualty figures reported by UN OCHA based on daily Hamas “Ministry of Health” numbers proves they are FALSIFIED. Women & children are grossly inflated. This is easily proven but media ignores. See detailed expose below: 1/
— Aizenberg (@Aizenberg55) December 4, 2023
When the International Committee of the Red Cross tried to take credit it did not deserve for facilitating the return of Israeli hostages, pro-Israel lawyer Arsen Ostrovsky called the Red Cross “no more than a glorified Uber driver,” and activist Hen Mazzig slammed the organization with moxie. “You have done nothing,” Mazzig tweeted. “You did not call for the release of babies or pressure Hamas to release the hostages. Either sit this one out, or we will continue calling you out for trying to capitalize on an operation you have had nothing to do with.”
The online backlash against the late arch-terrorist Osama bin Laden becoming popular on TikTok led to a particularly damaging video being removed.
But my personal favorite social media effort during the war has been highlighting the false reports of Gaza being out of fuel. Hamas already claimed that there was no fuel left the second week of the war, but in what in a different context could have been another Hanukkah miracle, it has miraculously lasted for two months.
The message that I would give young Jewish students nowadays is that they can do their part in helping win the battle on social media. And, as proud Jews, they can also help win the battle to ensure the future of the Jewish people that was fought in the Hanukkah story – and still goes on today.
The writer is the executive director and executive editor of HonestReporting. He served as chief political correspondent and analyst at The Jerusalem Post for 24 years.