Not a PR Problem: Why Israel’s Story Is Heard but Still Hated
Every few months, someone offers me what they believe is a breakthrough insight: Israel’s problem is PR. If only Israel explained itself better—told the world about Hamas rockets hidden in schools, soldiers risking their lives in door-to-door combat rather than flattening neighborhoods from the air, warnings issued before strikes, and aid sent even to those under the rule of a sworn enemy—then, surely, the world would understand. It is an attractive theory because it offers the illusion of control. If the problem is messaging, the solution is messaging: hire better consultants, flood social media, charm the influencers. It recasts a century-old conflict as a marketing challenge. But what if the problem isn’t that the world doesn’t know Israel’s story—but that it knows it and hates it anyway?
In Gaza today, Israel is fighting one of the most asymmetric wars in modern history: a democratic state against a terrorist army embedded among civilians. Militarily, the fastest, safest method would be to bomb from above. Instead, the IDF chooses the slow, costly, dangerous path: street-by-street combat, tunnel-by-tunnel clearing. These are operational decisions rooted in both strategy and morality—to minimize civilian deaths, even when the enemy hides behind civilians. Yet to much of the world, the images are the same: rubble, wounded children, grieving families. The painstaking decision-making that preceded those images vanishes in the compression of the news cycle. The moral calculus does not survive the headline.
The PR theory assumes that hostility toward Israel comes from ignorance. And for some—especially the young—facts still matter. They are surprised to learn Israel left Gaza in 2005, that it treats Palestinians in its hospitals, that military legal advisers sit in the war room to vet targeting decisions. But that pool is shrinking. For many, the issue is not a lack of facts—it is a worldview. As Micah Goodman notes, the dispute is existential: the legitimacy of Jewish collective identity itself. Einat Wilf observes that much of the hostility to Israel is hostility to the idea that Jews are a people with the same right to self-determination as any other. This is not the racial antisemitism of the 19th century; it is a moralized antisemitism dressed in the language of universal justice. If you believe a Jewish state is inherently unjust, no demonstration of restraint will change your mind. In fact, Israeli restraint becomes maddening—because it undermines the caricature of Israel as a brutal colonial oppressor.
Pointing out that other conflicts—Syria, Yemen, Sudan—can produce far greater civilian suffering without provoking the same outrage is not whataboutism. It is not a dodge that says, “others are worse, so Israel is fine.” And it is not an argument about proportionality, as though the moral debate were simply a matter of balancing the ratio of force to threat. It is a diagnostic claim: the outrage is not determined by casualty numbers or ratios of force. The disproportionality lies not in Israel’s conduct but in the world’s reaction. For a certain ideological class, hostility toward Israel is not triggered by what Israel does — it is a standing verdict on what Israel is. They hate us not because of a ledger of actions, but because Jewish sovereignty violates their moral map of the world.
This reality is difficult for many assimilated Jews to accept. It does not fit their worldview to imagine that the world still sees us as fundamentally different, no matter how similar we try to be. In their lived experience, they have been the friend, the neighbor, the business partner—welcomed into civic life and social circles. It is tempting to believe that this proximity and acceptance prove antisemitism is a relic. But history poses a brutal question: how did it end for the Jews who were friends with the Germans, played with their children, did their taxes, and lived next door?
Berlin in the 1920s was the most cosmopolitan city in Europe. Jews were professors, artists, bankers, physicians, and civil servants. They spoke perfect German, fought in the Kaiser’s army, and composed symphonies that filled the city’s concert halls. In the salons of Charlottenburg and the cafés of Unter den Linden, they debated literature and politics as equals. Many believed they had dissolved the ancient boundary between Jew and Gentile through achievement, patriotism, and shared culture. Then, almost overnight, that boundary reappeared—first as a shadow in politics, then as law, then as a train schedule. The friendships, business partnerships, and neighborhood bonds proved no defense when the state decided that Jewish existence itself was a problem to be solved. Assimilation did not erase the perception of Jewish otherness; it merely covered it, waiting for a political moment to make it useful again.
Prejudice against Jews has rarely been evidence-based. Medieval blood libels were not born from proof but from the need to justify a pre-existing hatred. Soviet antisemitism thrived despite Jewish contributions to the state. Today’s anti-Israel activism functions the same way: tragedy is filtered through a pre-written conclusion—that the Jewish state itself is the crime. Deuteronomy recalls Amalek attacking Israel not when it was strong but when it was weary. The Talmud (Shabbat 89a) imagines the nations resenting Israel not for failing the Torah but for claiming it at all. In modern form, the resentment is directed at Jewish sovereignty in the ancestral homeland. The core grievance is not what Jews do—it is that Jews are.
If this were truly a PR problem, the answer would be better ads. But if the root is an ideological refusal to accept Jewish sovereignty, Israel’s approach must change. Rav Yehuda Amital, the Holocaust survivor who founded Yeshivat Har Etzion, warned against calibrating Jewish morality to the applause of the nations. For him, the question was never “Will this make us look good?” but “Will this make us worthy of the miracle of sovereignty after two thousand years?” His teaching was simple but demanding: Jewish power is a gift from God, and the measure of its righteousness is not found in the headlines but in the soul of the Jewish people.
That means first recognizing that some minds will not be changed. This is not license for moral carelessness—it is a reminder that our ethical obligations come from Torah and Jewish principles, not from the hope of applause. It means prioritizing allies over elites, focusing less on ideologically hostile opinion-makers and more on building solidarity with those who share Israel’s moral and political framework. And it means remembering that the primary audience for Israel’s moral conduct is Israel itself. The soldier must live with his choices. The citizen must live in the society those choices create. The covenantal question—what kind of Jewish state do we want to be?—is more important than the question of what CNN thinks.
Israel fights two wars: one against Hamas, and one against delegitimization. The first can be measured in territory gained; the second, if it can be won at all, is won by endurance. Here, Micah Goodman’s insight is essential: Israel’s challenge is not to “solve” either conflict in the short term, but to manage them with moral clarity over the long haul, to outlast the hostility without letting it corrode the foundations of the state. The question is not whether Israel can win the PR war. It is what moral purpose should guide Israel when the PR war is unwinnable. The answer must be the same one that justified Jewish sovereignty in the first place: the safety of Jewish life, the flourishing of the Jewish people, and the pursuit of justice.
When Israel fights door-to-door instead of bombing from above, it is not a branding decision—it is a Jewish decision. When Israel treats wounded Gazans, it is not angling for a headline—it is fulfilling the commandment not to stand idly by the blood of your neighbor (Leviticus 19:16). Those who hate Israel will not be persuaded by these acts. But the Jewish people will be defined by them. And in the long arc of history, that is the audience that matters most.