Israel won the military battle in Gaza, defanging Hamas, but lost the PR war worldwide. The country went from Messiah to pariah practically overnight. How could that have happened, and what must Israel do to regain its favorable status?
It’s said that on social media, one person has an idea, nine people amplify it, and 100 people believe it. The one idea these days is that Israel is an apartheid and bloodthirsty state and that Bibi Netanyahu is the lead perpetrator of war crimes. Okay, that’s two ideas, but you get the point.
The Left across planet Earth has repeated these falsehoods so often that the average person, bombarded with social media messaging and lacking interest in any real news source, takes those assertions to be gospel truth.
Goebbels would have been proud.
Otherwise intelligent people are convinced of three dangerous and corrosive untruths:
First, that Netanyahu forced Trump to bomb Iran, as if anyone could force Trump to do anything.
Second, that the Iranians can be trusted with a nuclear weapon, and that they would never use it or share it with the terrorist groups it has funded for decades.
Third, that Netanyahu hatched the Iran war as a means of distracting the world from (utterly bogus) corruption charges, so that he could stay out of prison.
Three Goebbels-sized Big Lies, but they are now indisputable “facts.”
The result is that public opinion has turned firmly against Israel, from college campuses to coffee shops to Congress, with dire consequences for Israel’s future.
How could this be?
The Left brooks no deviation from its orthodoxies. If you consider yourself a progressive, you must buy into every single belief. No exceptions. Even if you don’t know or care about the topic.
So you have people who couldn’t find Gaza on a map condemning Israel, because if they don’t move in total lockstep with their peers, they’ll be ousted from the group and consigned to outer darkness think tanks where they must study the position papers of Joe Biden.
The hypocrisy is shocking. Not a word about the 30,000 Iranians mown down by the mullahs or the eight women scheduled to swing from industrial cranes because they dared speak out against the Iranian regime. Not a word about Myanmar, Yemen, Congo or the dismal plight of the Muslim Uyghurs in China’s northwest, for one simple reason. Those places don’t have any Jews to blame things on.
Since the Left is dominated by its most extreme and vociferous members, any support for Israel has become unacceptable. As a result, Congressional Democrats have been forced to the most extreme position – cutting off all funding for Israel’s military, including the purely defensive Iron Dome technology.
This is new and entirely indefensible.
The best definition of antisemitism comes from Vienna, circa 1900 – “Hating the Jews more than strictly necessary.” In other words, antisemitism has always existed, but these days, it’s become entirely acceptable.
The parlor trick perfected by today’s antisemites is to conflate the government of the State of Israel with all Jews worldwide. So if you’ve been inflamed by social media to hate Israel and Bibi, it’s legitimate for you to harass, attack, or even kill Jews anywhere in the world.
Hatred needs an address, a potent symbol, and that symbol is none other than Bibi. People totally ignorant about geopolitics, who couldn’t name three world leaders if their lives depended on it, feel certain that Bibi is lying when he says that Iran poses an existential threat to the Jewish state.
How do they know this? Because they read it on TikTok, the poor darlings.
To paraphrase the Left, when a terrorist regime tells you who they are, believe them. All Iran has ever done or said since 1979 is Death to Israel and Death to the United States.
In short, Bibi’s telling the truth. Yet only Donald Trump had the courage to do what seven prior American Presidents have failed to do: take on the Iranian regime and eliminate the threat it poses to the entire civilized world.
Israel has not helped its own cause by ignoring its responsibility to Jews worldwide to tell its own story well and often. Israel may have a great war machine, but its PR efforts are pathetic. As a result, pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel and anti-Jewish voices on social media have drowned out anything positive about the Jewish state.
Israel is still the only democracy in the Middle East. Israeli Arabs have political parties and belong to the Knesset. Minority religious groups have civil rights. Show me one other country in the Middle East where that’s true. From a military and intelligence perspective, for more than 70 years, Israel has been America’s only reliable partner in the dangerous neighborhood that is the Middle East.
But all of those facts get washed away in the endless social media onslaught against Israel, Netanyahu, the Israeli Defense Forces, and Jews anywhere.
So perhaps Israel should call the world’s bluff. Let Netanyahu resign so that the world can no longer claim that he is the hidden hand nudging Trump into battle. Let Israel bring in a new leader who can partner with America to end the Iran war and the battle with Hezbollah on terms favorable to the West.
And let the Left hang their collective heads in shame for favoring terrorists, murderers and rapists over the only democracy in the Middle East, and, in so doing, permitting open season on Jews worldwide.