Israel is facing a disaster of epic proportions. Not on the battlefield, where the IDF is making painful but steady progress, but in the dangerous war of perceptions.
How is it possible that a liberal democracy like Israel, open, pluralistic, and self-critical, is losing the moral narrative to a genocidal Islamist group whose founding charter calls for the extermination of Jews?
How is it that the most careful army in modern history, one that warns civilians before striking and holds itself to impossible ethical standards, is accused of genocide while the terrorists who raped women, butchered families, and dragged hostages into tunnels beneath schools and hospitals are embraced as “resistance”?
How does a society where women, gay people, and minorities enjoy equal rights get condemned, while Hamas, which throws gay people off rooftops and trains children to die, is supported by “feminists” and LGBTQ groups who ignore the brutal rapes of October 7?
Yes, antisemitism plays a role. The double standards, the age-old conspiracy theories, and the obsessive scrutiny are reserved only for the Jewish state. Yet that is not the whole story. The additional factor is this: the truth of what is actually happening is almost too hard to believe.
The human mind recoils from what Hamas has built. An entire society weaponized for war, governed by a regime no different in ideology from ISIS or al-Qaeda. Hamas spends foreign aid not on schools or hospitals, but on a fortress of terror tunnels the size of Manhattan beneath its own civilians.
Hamas's strategy is working
Their strategy is to provoke Israeli strikes, film the suffering, and broadcast it worldwide as propaganda.
They embed weapons in mosques. They hide command centers under neonatal units. They rig ambulances for terror operations and use UN schools as rocket depots. And they do it all on camera. Much of the world still refuses to believe it.
This is not just disbelief; it is denial. To accept what Hamas is doing would mean admitting that evil not only exists but also organizes itself, governs territory, and openly vows to do it again.
After the October 7 atrocities, rapes, mutilations, families burned alive, and babies beheaded, Hamas’s leaders declared on camera, “We will repeat it again and again.” And they were cheered, not condemned, by the society that surrounds them.
Thane Rosenbaum calls this “The Denial Disease” (Jewish Journal of Los Angeles, August 17). The West is so invested in the idea that everyone is basically good, that all conflicts can be solved with diplomacy, and that victimhood equals virtue that it can no longer recognize evil.
So the narrative gets rewritten: Israel must be the villain, because admitting the truth about Hamas would shatter the worldview of entire societies.
And Israel itself fell into this trap. That is how October 7 happened. Israelis projected their own values onto their enemies. They thought Hamas wanted what they wanted – stability, peace, and prosperity. They were wrong. And they are paying in blood.
As Liel Leibovitz wrote in Tablet, modern Jews and Western liberals built a fantasy world in which evil no longer exists. When it returned in full force, they could not process it. So they defaulted to blaming the victims.
Meanwhile, Hamas built its strategy around the media. Ben Kerstein explains it bluntly: Hamas’s war plan was theatrical. They provoke an Israeli military response that cannot avoid civilian casualties and bet on journalists, NGOs, and world governments to frame the story their way.
They gambled, correctly, that the world will side with the “victims,” even if the victims are evil and the real aggressors.
Israel must go on the offense and expose Hamas
So what can Israel do? First, face reality. Second, accept that the PR war is stacked against us. Between ancient Jew-hatred, global media bias, Western leaders appeasing hostile populations, and Israel’s own failure to speak with one voice, the odds are overwhelming.
Add social media sheer numbers and the world’s cognitive dissonance, and Israel cannot expect fairness, let alone understanding.
However, that does not mean helplessness. Israel can still change the rules of the conversation. Stop playing defense. Stop answering charges of genocide as if they deserve respect. Instead, go on offense. Indict Hamas.
Expose the human shield strategy. Ask the world: Did you know Gaza’s hospitals were designed with military uses in mind? Did you know journalists and NGOs are embedded in Hamas’s war machine?
Say it. Show it. Do not defend yourself; condemn your enemy.
Take comfort in this: we are on the right side of history, and many people around the world do see the truth. They are not fooled. They are standing with Israel.
It is time to stop chasing approval from those who will never give it and start standing tall for the truth we know, the cause we serve, and the values we embody. Because in the end, the real question is not whether Israel will be loved, but whether the world is willing to see evil for what it really is.
The writer, a rabbi, is the executive chairman of OpenDor Media, founder of the Clarion Project, and author of Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Jew: Learning to Love the Lessons of Jew-Hatred.