On the battlefield, Israel is showing signs of success in its war against Hamas. Following the shock and horror of the October 7 attacks, Israelis put aside political differences that threatened to tear the country apart to focus their collective energy on confronting the enemy on their doorstep.
But on the battlefield of public opinion, Israel is losing. Under pressure from massive street protests, leaders on both sides of the Atlantic have already slid back from the staunch support they promised Israel in the immediate aftermath of the carnage of October 7. In just three weeks, that spirit of solidarity has increasingly given way to calls for a ceasefire.
While the desire to speed humanitarian assistant to Palestinians is understandable, a ceasefire would leave Hamas in control of Gaza, certain to rebuild and rearm, readying itself to launch future attacks. Israel will resist such calls, but the mood internationally is unmistakably shifting.
How can Israel lose a public relations war against killers who committed the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust?
To be sure, much of this reflects the double-standard to which Israel has long been subjected. When thousands of Afghan or Iraqi civilians died in America’s legitimate campaigns against al-Qaeda and other jihadist groups, it was called an unfortunate consequence of war. When Hamas keeps Palestinian civilians as human shields, launches rockets from dense, urban areas and prevents families from fleeing combat zones to seek shelter, Israel is accused of genocide.
In this case, there is only one word to explain the perversity of charging the victim with the crime of the perpetrator: antisemitism. For the antisemites, Israel can do no right. They attack Israel when its people are butchered and attack Israel again when it rises to its people’s defense. They are a lost cause who deserve nothing but condemnation and contempt.
But that alone does not fully explain why so much of the world turned on the Jewish state. Indeed, in the court of public opinion, Israel appears to have lost millions who aren’t antisemites — people of goodwill who saw what happened on October 7, watched what happened since, and believe Israel bears a good measure of responsibility for the human misery they see each night on TV or social media.
To be sure, there is a structural imbalance to the battle of narratives. The butchery of October 7 was so heinous that Israel has refrained from releasing the raw footage Hamas attackers took on their own GoPro cameras out of sensitivity to the victims and their families. Hamas, on the other hand, has no compunction inviting media to film children injured in the fighting, glossing over the inconvenient question of whether they are victims of Israeli bombs or Hamas rockets gone awry.
But that’s the reality in which Israel is operating — it makes little sense to harp on the unfairness. Instead, as this war unfolds, we urge Israel to focus on three themes that if repeated, every day, would improve Israel’s information campaign and bring it up to the level of its battlefield prowess.
First, Israel should remind the world what this war is not about. Outlining Israel’s war aims as the destruction of Hamas’s military capabilities and its political capacity to rule Gaza is necessary but not sufficient.
Specifically, Israel should declare it has no plan, desire or goal to occupy Gaza, to evict Palestinians from Gaza or to retain territory in Gaza for its security. While this may be implicit in how Israel is comporting itself in the current fighting, we urge Israel to make it explicit.
Second, Israel should make clearer the distinction between Hamas and the Palestinian people. Yes, Hamas earned a plurality of votes in a legislative election 17 years ago when it ran on an anticorruption, good governance platform. But it came to power in Gaza the following year through a bloody, violent coup, not by the democratic choice of local Palestinians. Since then, it has imposed its strict, theocratic ideology on the people of Gaza, denying rights and restricting freedoms — even as it prepared for the October 7 attack.
It is too much for ordinary Palestinians to believe Israel is fighting to liberate them from Hamas tyranny, but it is not too much for Israel to repeat as frequently as possible that its enemy is Hamas, a group that commands the loyalty of a small minority of Gaza’s population, not the more than 2 million people who call Gaza home. Here, Israel needs to impose wartime discipline to prevent fringe cabinet ministers and extremist politicians from blurring this vital message.
And third, Israel should commit the same effort and ingenuity to saving innocent Palestinian lives as it does to killing Hamas leaders and operatives. As the world saw on October 7, that is very different from how Hamas wages war, but this commitment to innocent life is what separates the Israeli way of war from the path of the jihadists.
In practice, this means taking special precaution to ensure the accuracy and targeting of precision air strikes south of Gaza City, guaranteeing protection for safe zones in southern Gaza, allowing unfettered access to them for inspected trucks with food and medicine, and working with any international agency or Arab state that wants to assist in supporting Palestinian civilians.
Israel should swallow hard and allow carefully monitored fuel shipments too. While Hamas has cynically hoarded fuel to survive in its tunnels and launch barrages of rockets at Israeli cities, Palestinian civilians should not pay for Hamas venality with hospitals stuck in the dark and water that can’t be pumped.
This is admittedly a difficult task, especially since Israel knows that protecting thousands of innocent Palestinians will come at the price of some Hamas terrorists finding rest and shelter in the safe zones. But on balance, it is a price worth paying — and Israel’s leaders should be continually making the point that they are committed to fighting Hamas with the minimum possible civilian casualties, all the while trying to meet the humanitarian needs of the civilians it has urged to move out of harm’s way to southern Gaza.
For the antisemites of this world, none of this will matter. But winning their support is not the goal of Israel’s information battle. The goal is to win the proverbial hearts and minds of millions who need a reason to give Israel the benefit of the doubt. Success in this effort will give Israel the time and space to achieve victory over Hamas.
Robert Satloff and Dennis Ross are, respectively, Segal executive director and Davidson Distinguished Fellow at the Washington Institute.