Chinese general Sun Tzu warned thousands of years ago that “if you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” Today, Israel finds itself losing, not because it lacks military strength, but because it has failed to come to terms with the nature of the modern battlefield.
The fight is no longer confined to any of Israel’s borders or traditional battlefields; it is taking place in universities, on social media, via influencers, NGOs, and activists who have all learned to dominate the narrative space. Israel has mastered kinetic warfare yet neglected the information war for far too long and the consequences of this are now impossible to ignore.
Israel has spent years trying to counter propaganda with facts, statements, and various spokespeople. Still the truth is simple: people don’t connect to governments; they connect to people. Facts alone rarely move people; humans psychologically respond to stories, faces, and lived experience.
Stories make the difference
It’s why the stories of Holocaust survivors shifted global consciousness: hearing from someone who survived atrocity activates empathy, not argument. It bypasses ideology and speaks to the primal human instinct to recognize suffering and moral injustice.
Hostages and survivors of October 7 carry that same truth. Their testimonies are not political, they are lived reality.
Their voices are the only ones capable of piercing the ideological fog on campuses globally and in Western media.
When a college student hears someone’s experience who was kidnapped, tortured or watched their family murdered – that person is no longer debating abstractions – they are hearing a human being.
This is what Charlie Kirk correctly identified; these testimonies need to be everywhere: in universities, podcasts and schools; not as political arguments, but as witness accounts; not as interviews on Hebrew TV aimed solely at Israelis.
Survivors of atrocities have always shaped history because they speak with moral clarity that can neither be faked nor ignored. This isn’t hasbara (public diplomacy); it’s just survivors telling their stories and it remains Israel’s most powerful tool in a world that increasingly struggles to distinguish fact from fiction.
Control of soldiers' social media
Next up, the IDF: Israel’s military strength remains unquestioned but its lack of discipline is a major problem. In the age of smartphones, livestreams and TikTok, the IDF’s image is being shaped not by strategy but by whoever happens to post first from the field. Soldiers filming inside conflict zones, dancing in uniform, leaking footage, and posting political comments – none of this is seen on the same scale in any other Western military. It sends the message that the IDF is unserious, chaotic and emotionally reactive.
Perception matters in modern conflicts. For global audiences, particularly among Gen Z, the line between behavior and morality is razor thin. All it takes is one undisciplined video on social media to quickly become “the truth” about the entire army, racking up millions of views.
Israel cannot afford for such impulsive uploads onto social media to be used to discredit the IDF’s military actions. The IDF needs to enforce zero phones in active combat units, a strict ban on unsanctioned filming and clear consequences for breaches. If it can remotely detonate beepers in foreign countries, it can prevent phones being used in active war zones.
This is not censorship; this is standard military practice in the 21st century. Israel cannot win the narrative war while being perceived as amateurish online.
Few topics are as emotionally and politically charged as the actions of extremist settlers in the West Bank. Still, avoiding the issue has become more dangerous than addressing it. While these individuals represent a tiny fraction of Israelis, their behavior dominates global attention.
Amplifying the right voices
Videos of settlers carrying out despicable acts dominate the typical anti-Israel social media page. It’s not surprising, considering that the human mind generalizes; when people see one extreme example that makes their blood boil, they instinctively assume that it represents a whole group.
For young Western audiences, unfamiliar with the makeup of Israel society, they create a simple yet false association that “Settlers = Israeli = Zionists.” This view, which could not be further from the truth, has gone viral online and Israel has allowed it to propagate by failing to draw clear boundaries.
Fixing this involves clear legal consequences for settler violence and visible enforcement that demonstrates values rather than excuses. People typically judge societies by how they police their worst actors, not by whether or not they exist. Israel needs to prevent these acts from taking place in order to prevent the world from believing that those individuals define us as a country.
While it is admirable that there are so many Zionist and Jewish influencers fighting online every day, the hard truth is that their audiences are mostly Jewish and pro-Israel already. I’m not telling these influencers to stop – it’s important to raise and inspire future generations to be proud Jews, especially online where pro-Palestinian bots often dominate the online sphere.
Yet, in order to make a difference, there needs to be a shift from speaking to supporters to reaching out to the undecided. Take groups like the Kurds or Iranians – many of whom support Israel, yet many do not. It is worth finding ways of appealing to the ones that do not, not by lecturing or moralizing but by showing them the familiar side of Israeli life.
Israel must invest in voices that can enter new spaces and speak in a way that resonates emotionally, not just politically. This requires diverse Israeli storytellers such as Mizrahis, Ethiopians, Druze, Arab-Israelis and LGBTQ+ Israelis.
Highlight Hamas
Lastly, if there is one message that resonates across the political spectrum in the West, it’s that people care about their own communities first. In the US, UK and in Europe, citizens are watching their own public services collapse – hospitals overwhelmed, cost of living increasing, homelessness rising and in the same sentences hearing their governments pledge billions to Gaza. While most believe they are funding humanitarian relief, in reality a significant portion of that money never reaches civilians.
Israel should show how much of the billions of Western taxpayers’ funding flowing to Gaza is siphoned off by Hamas and how little reaches civilians. People care deeply about their own countries and public services – when they hear about the “billions to Gaza” they wonder – why not us?
Israel should also highlight the work of NGOs like IMPACT-se, which reviews the UNRWA curriculum and textbooks provided to Gazan children that continue to glorify martyrdom and feature antisemitic content in children’s textbooks. This kind of stuff is impossible to deny.
The conventional battlefield has expanded beyond borders and into universities, social media feeds, and online echo chambers where perception matters just as much if not more than facts. Israel assumed that the world understood its story, its trauma and its moral foundations, but this assumption no longer works. These reforms are not cosmetic, they are strategic. As Sun Tzu warned, those who know neither themselves nor their enemy will lose every battle.
Israel cannot afford to continue losing the information war while winning on the ground. The stakes are too high and members of the next generation are too influential. The young people shaping today’s narratives will grow up to become tomorrow’s policymakers and world leaders. If they grow up viewing Israel as an outcast, Israel risks becoming one – isolated geopolitically not because of its actions but because of the world’s perception.
The writer is a researcher focused on antisemitism, online radicalization and information warfare, and co-author of one of the first academic studies on hate speech on TikTok.