Israel Can Either Win the Narrative or Win the War

Why have the Jewish people long occupied mental real estate in non-Jews’ minds? Andrew Klavan recently clarified. The Jewish people are, Klavan said, “The theater in which God plays out his relationship with humankind.”

The God of the Jews harshly judged child sacrifice (Isaac and Jacob), sexual immorality (Sodom), and slavery (Egypt); these were common in pre-biblical civilizations. Introducing a new moral code was disruptive and revolutionary to the established order.

The Jewish followers of Jesus, a Jew, introduced Christianity to mankind. Muhammad was, according to Islam, a descendant of Ishmael, son of the Jewish patriarch Abraham.

The Jews are the theater in which God plays out his relationship with humankind.

What movie are we watching today? The West’s mainstream understanding of just war is shifting, and Israel is the theater.

Our traditional view of good and evil emerged from the Torah.

“The destitute you shall not favor in his complaint” (Exodus 23:3).

“You shall commit no injustice in judgment; you shall not favor a poor person or respect a great man” (Leviticus 19:15).

Justice, strength and wealth are not mutually exclusive. Neither are injustice, weakness and poverty.

But news coverage has reduced a war that Hamas started on October 7 to a scoreboard where Israel’s relative strength becomes its greatest diplomatic weakness. In this movie, the higher the body count reported by Hamas, the crueler Israel becomes.

But more German non-combatants were killed in World War 2 than American or British.

So the Allies were baddies, and we ought to feel guilt over the 1-3 million dead German civilians, including many children.

In future conflicts, will the U.S. military’s rules of engagement be further tightened to account for voters’ preferences?

A post-biblical moral philosophy will also poison the past. Bin Laden’s “Letter to America” enjoyed a comeback tour on CCP spyware app TikTok. When can we expect “Mein Kampf” to receive similar acclaim?

It’s difficult to find a white pill in any of this, but…

TikTok is probably assigning pro-Hamas opinions to over half of 18-24-year-old Americans—51% of whom believe the October 7 attack was justified, along with 48% of 25-34-year-olds.

How is this reason for optimism? As Mike Solana wrote of the pro-Hamas masses online, “We are probably all underestimating how many of them are foreign. Not agents. Not intentionally malicious. Just regular a—sh-tposting a–holes from Bangladesh … After Americans, the second largest population on TikTok is comprised of something like 100 million Indonesians, a majority of whom are Muslim, around 10 percent of whom speak English.”

As for America’s jihad-adjacent youngsters who belong on a terror watchlist or something, the typical 18-24-year-old is shallow, impressionable and stupid. That’s a good thing. Their takes can and must evolve over time for us to have a country in 30 years.

And we have a lever: banning TikTok. The next Republican administration must ban TikTok, and blow up federal funding of universities, and tax their endowments, and let the de-programming begin. Or is it too late?

John Robb warns that “Israel is on track to lose U.S. support in less than a generation” due to what he terms “networked tribalism.” The gist is that masses of people around the world already accept an anti-colonialist worldview. So, in the context of that narrative, when they see images depicting oppressed colonized Palestinians suffering at the hands of colonizer Israel’s aggression, their empathy and “fictive kinship” with Palestinians is triggered.

This dynamic was palpably evident in the summer of 2021, when Israel was obliterated on social media during its brief war with Hamas. Coincidentally, that war occurred a couple of weeks after Derek Chauvin’s sentencing in the 2020 death of George Floyd, which supercharged networked tribalism.

Robb offers a recent CNN poll finding under half of Americans ages 18-49 believe Israel’s response is justified. “Less than a decade ago,” Robb writes, “Well over half of the people surveyed in all age brackets were sympathetic to Israel.”

Ominous trends, but not calcified.

Israel and her supporters must audit the marketing department. For over a decade, a pillar of Israel’s messaging has been to highlight the IDF’s unprecedented efforts to minimize harm to Palestinian non-combatants in the middle of a war—even when those efforts damage military effectiveness.

Over and over, this tactic, at best, is smashed by the dominant narrative of the powerful colonizer Israel oppressing weak colonized Palestinians. At worst, it backfires by highlighting Israel’s technological edge and minimizing the existentialist nature of Israel’s wars.

But re-examining Israel’s struggle for hearts and minds is a between-wars effort. Its enemies won that battle before October 7.

Israel’s wartime persuasion challenge is more narrow. Maintain enough U.S. support for Israel to dismantle Hamas without endangering its most critical alliance. Achieving this objective will create new evils, but “this hour’s suffering is enough.”

Jared Sichel is partner and co-founder of Winning Tuesday, an award-winning political marketing agency. He was previously an award-winning Senior Writer for The Jewish Journal.