Israel won its war against Hamas, but now it needs to win the war of public opinion - opinion

Israel defeated Hamas in military terms. However, most of us would agree that Hamas won the war of public opinion.

Across the globe, millions of people, including Westerners, are marching in support of Hamas. In the streets of London, Paris, Stockholm, Berlin, Washington DC, and Sydney, people are unapologetically calling for the destruction of the state of Israel.

The Muslim Brotherhood's infiltration of Western societies and its deployment of ideologies across global media have indoctrinated and influenced the global audience against Israel. Today, Israel has lost support among large demographics, including in traditionally pro-Israel communities.

According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the United States, Israel’s closest ally, recorded the highest number of antisemitic incidents after October 7. The ADL had first begun tracking antisemitic incidents in 1979.

Israel cannot continue with this attitude of being uninterested in improving its global image. Israel's public persona might not have been critical a decade ago, but in the age of social media and narrative wars, winning the war of public opinion is equally as important as winning on the battlefield.

Certainly, following October 7, Israel initially received a huge wave of support and sympathy from the international community. But after two years of war, that support evaporated, and anti-Israel attitudes reached their highest level worldwide, including in the West.

The declining support for Israel is directly tied to the number of antisemitic incidents experienced by the Jewish diaspora. A young couple was murdered in Washington DC earlier this year, two men were killed while attending synagogue in Manchester and Jewish events have been canceled repeatedly across Europe over security concerns.

A recent report conducted by ADL found that the number of people who hold antisemitic beliefs has more than doubled over the past decade to a total of 2.2 billion people.

Israel successfully managed to eliminate the entirety of both Hezbollah’s and Hamas’s chain of command and delivered a serious blow to the Mullahs of Iran by taking out some of its most influential military commanders and hunted down its proxy rats in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. So, how is it possible that Israel successfully managed to deliver serious blows and spread panic in its foes, yet it failed in winning the war of public opinion?

Israel and Israelis cannot afford to continue following Golda Meir‘s “rather be alive with a bad image” than “dead and pitied” mentality. In the age of social media, the war of narratives is equally as crucial as winning on the battlefield.

The unprecedented global rise of antisemitism following October 7 is also unique in the sense that it is largely an imported Jew-hatred.  The West has taken very large immigration from Muslim countries, where the hatred of Jews is not only legitimate but in many parts authorized and a central part of state propaganda.

In the Islamic Republic of Iran and in Hezbollah’s Lebanon, Israel is often referred to as “a cancerous tumour that must be eradicated.” In Houthi-controlled Yemen, the country's official slogan reads “Death to Israel. Curse on the Jews.” Among Palestinian diaspora communities living in London, Paris, Berlin, Stockholm, and Washington D.C., etc, Hamas terrorists are “heroic fighters” and the October 7 barbaric savagery is “a victorious celebration”.

One cannot underestimate the role the Muslim Brotherhood's media is playing in distributing disinformation in order to control the narrative to gain influence not only among the Muslim diaspora but also among Westerners, especially on university campuses.

Across the Western democracies, Muslim politicians of immigrant background are calling on their host countries to “sever all diplomatic ties with the genocidal apartheid state of Israel.” These politicians have won their seats by exploiting the Palestinian cause through repeating Hamas's lies to attract voters. They are to be found in every Western liberal democracy, working side by side with the so-called progressive camp, polluting politics, academia, and public discourse.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s affiliated media outlets have effectively managed to whitewash the brutality committed by Hamas on October 7, but this begs the question: What is stopping Israel from having its own successful anti-Muslim Brotherhood media machinery?

Young people in Europe, in North America, and South America are marching for Gaza, equating the barbarism of October 7 as a legitimate resistance and calling for the destruction of the state of Israel. This is a very worrying development, and Israeli officials must start taking decisive actions and come to terms with the fact that their current diplomacy and PR campaign is a failure.

Let’s take one of the Muslim Brotherhood’s latest tools: AJ+, a social media on-demand news network with over 100 million followers, specifically designed to capture and influence Generation Z, on a cool, highly modern, techno-savvy, and youthful platform. Its content is available in Arabic, English, French, and Spanish, and is available on its AJ+ website as well as on social media platforms including Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. I acknowledge the PR battlefield is brutal, and one must continuously up their game. The team behind AJ+ is highly skilled, driven by people who understand their target audience and know how to exploit trauma to gain maximum sympathy for the cause they are promoting.

Let’s take a look at October 7, when I was among the first journalists invited to the IDF's Glilot military base to watch the raw footage of the atrocities Hamas committed against Israeli civilians. I entered a massive room packed with journalists, and we weren’t allowed to record or take photos/videos of the barbarism Hamas terrorists committed. I saw veteran journalists leaving the room because it was too painful to watch. I heard cries and curses. We were allowed to take notes and write about what we saw. But, in my opinion as a journalist, Israel should have allowed the immediate airing of Hamas’s inhumanity against defenseless Israeli civilians, terrified civilians who were slaughtered one after another. I don’t understand why Israel delayed showing those atrocities on the world stage.

A few months after October 7, I decided to move to Israel. I saw the profound trauma of October 7 on Israeli society. In my opinion, Israel partially failed to deliver the true and raw horrors of October 7 to the international audience. Yes, Israel was adamant that the international community must know about the atrocities committed on that dreadful morning. Still, a lot of emphasis was put on Israel’s predicament and why fighting Hamas matters. Israeli officials wanted an understanding rather than sympathy, and I think this is where they failed.

Sympathy and feeling pity towards the victims in the age of social media is essential. Here, channels like Al Jazeera and its many armed-media links like AJ+ capitalized on trauma and sheer human suffering. Around the clock, they were airing highly emotional content of Gazans flying for their lives, of children crying, and rescue teams pulling people from rubble.  Their skilful team wasn’t looking to get likes, but rather to articulate a diplomatic version. Their content was transmitted globally, and within a year or so, they ensured a total global political shift that more or less endorsed Hamas’s narrative.

One of the measures Israel took to fight the war of narratives was cooperating with influencers, none of whom held journalistic accreditation. Using social media influencers to tell the world there is no famine in Gaza, while AJ+ was airing tailored content featuring hungry Gazans searching for food, was a massive blunder.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s media success stems from their selective approach to who they deliver their message to and how they do so. Add to that, its journalistic crew is composed of skilled professionals, not TikTok and Instagram stars.

Israel should have adopted the first rule of PR, which is to craft a message tailored to the international audience. Israeli officials choose to put a lot of emphasis on antisemitism, but this did nothing to influence Western leaders to take decisive measures to tackle the rising hostility towards Israel and Jewish diaspora communities.

Israel needs to establish a diplomatic PR team led by a veteran, visionary leader —a figure more focused on delivering a diplomatic vision than on the number of likes. Using influencers may be successful, but it is short-lived. The Foreign Affairs Ministry should dedicate an entire unit focusing on deconstructing every anti-Israel report published by AL Jazeera, and exposing the Muslim Brotherhood jihadist gangs supported and funded by Qatar, Turkey, and Iran, the backers of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

A unit that posts daily content promoting and improving Israel’s image and rebuilding bridges between Arabs and Jews could do wonders. Promoting the idea of an international coalition against Islamist terrorism and debunking the Islamophobia myth, which is often used to avoid tackling Islamist violence. A unit that focuses on exposing the connections of those NGOs and figures who are leading anti-Israel demonstrations in the West, exposing their hidden agenda.

The alliance between the Western liberal-left-woke camp and Islamists is a contributing factor in empowering Hamas’s position and fuelling contemporary Islamist-Leftist antisemitism. Israel can’t afford to lose the coming war; the war of public opinion.