How Israel is failed by its war of words

Sitting in a room at the Israel Defence Forces’ Hakirya base in Tel Aviv, I listened – along with a room full of delegates, mostly European MPs and members of the House of Lords – to a briefing from an IDF spokesman. He was a British-born reservist recruited back to the front lines of Israel’s communications war, and he did not inspire. He repeated basics about what happened on 7 October, and the horror of those events – something that everyone in that room, all there as pretty major fans of Israel, desirous to see it triumph in its hour of adversity, already appreciated. We wanted new information: dispassionately and intelligently presented. Stuff that would add to our understanding, so that we could share it at home.

This underwhelming presentation, which took place a fortnight ago, pointed to a bigger, long-running issue with Israeli comms. It’s a saga stretching right back to the start of Israel’s existence, in which military officialdom, combined with government bombast, has shown a tendency to produce a soul-sapping mixture of arrogant boilerplate and grandiose claims that can make even the state’s biggest champions cringe.

It’s not hard to figure out why: Israel has always felt embattled, and rightly so. It has to do things its way, and has developed a distinctive culture of warmth and informality, but also rudeness and standards that fall short of the professionalism by Euro-American norms. It’s part of what makes the country both intensely lovable – and very hard to love. 

Even now, in a conflict Israeli PR is taking more seriously than usual, the state’s communications war is veering off course. Take the interesting case of Eylon Levy, the 32-year-old Oxford PPE graduate, formerly of an elite boys school in Hampstead, north London. Levy is whip-smart, cocky and a digital native. Having been on a professional break from the government before 7 October, a period in which he campaigned against the government, Levy was suddenly rushed into place. He has become something of a celebrity in the UK for his lively, tough-guy approach to Israeli government communications. A gif of his eyebrows, responding to a ludicrous question by Kay Burley on Sky News back in November, went viral. Beleaguered supporters of Israel greatly appreciate him. 

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And yet, I struggle to imagine Levy winning over a single flip-flopper. It’s not that he is wrong. ‘We are fighting psychopaths,’ he correctly noted this week. But it takes more than being right and being impassioned to win people over, as I know from bitter experience.

Another interesting case is that of Dr Eli David, a self-styled (unofficial) representative of Israel, who has twice the Twitter followers of Levy, who is also always right, but who deploys a tone that does no more than inform and bolster the already-converted. He can be rude or sneering. ‘Name one thing invented by Palestinians, without Googling,’ tweeted Visegrad 24, the right-wing Eastern European consortium, to which David responded: ‘You know what, go ahead and Google…’. Not helpful.

Then there’s Tzipi Hotovely, the Israeli ambassador to the UK, who is – to put it frankly – too right wing. A centrist, or even a leftist, in full command of the facts and Israel’s moral case, would be a far more efficient person to represent Israel in the West – inasmuch as it makes a difference, which I think it does.

Instead of allowing Israel’s communications strategy to be shaped by unofficial representatives on Twitter, Israel ought to have the very best people in charge, relentlessly and soberly setting the record straight. Since everyone thinks Israel is too right-wing and ethno-nationalist under the Netanyahu leadership, this person should be a left-winger, a centrist, or even better a Druze or an Arab-origin pro-Israeli figure who has been granted honorary citizenship (my picks would be Mosab Hassan Yousef, formerly of Hamas, now resident in the US; the Canadian Yasmine Mohammed, whose father was from Gaza; or the British-Palestinian John Aziz). 

As Israelis will rightly retort, PR is the least of their problems when they face an existential threat every day from bloodthirsty neighbours. And since, in the eyes of ‘the world’, they can do no right, why should they try to win people over? Small and mighty by terrible historical necessity, Israel will never again depend on anyone else.

And yet: this attitude, while psychologically entirely understandable, misses a trick. There are always people that can be persuaded. While all matters involving Israel generate unshakeable allegiances, there are also many people who don’t know much, and who are ripe for persuading. For these people, and for the cause in general, a sober, dispassionate, information-based approach is best. Those of us who want Israel’s case to be disseminated to the world want that case outlined almost entirely through evidence for the specifics of Israel’s actions, key historical facts (which is constantly occluded by anti-Israel lies and distortions), and some concise moral framing. For the rest – the outrage, the feeling, the cleverness – there’s us: opinion writers.

Making this tweak should be easy. When it comes to raw information, the gunpowder of unassailable argument in its favour, Israel is richly endowed. It is cram-packed with experts and analysts of the first degree. But its army of lively, well-informed keyboard warriors should be bringing up the rear, not leading from the front.