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.