Opinion | Screening Hamas Atrocities: Why Hasbara Is Another Israeli Concept That’s Failed
Benjamin Netanyahu convinced Israelis that the country only needed to improve its messaging to the world, not itself. The horrific response by some Westerners to Hamas’ slaughter of Israelis shows the folly of that concept
About 18 months ago, after returning from a reporting trip to Ukraine, an Israeli general asked me what I thought the main lessons were from that war. I answered that I’m sure he didn’t need any lectures from me on the proper usage of tanks in combined arms warfare, but that if there was anything Israel should learn from it, it’s the power of videos made on the battlefield to influence the international narrative of a war.
“For the first weeks of the war in Ukraine,” I told him, “very few journalists, if any, had access to the battlefield in Ukraine and most of the reporting was being done from the cities. We knew of course that both sides were taking heavy casualties, but very few visuals came out. What did emerge were well-produced videos of Ukrainian missile teams ambushing and destroying Russian tanks. It doesn’t matter that this was only a small part of what was happening: it was the image of those early stages of the war.”
In a future war in which Israel is involved, I warned the general, the tanks will be Israeli Merkavas and even if the enemy side manages to hit just a tiny handful of them, the videos will be online almost immediately and Israelis back home will suddenly be seeing their sons dead and wounded besides the tanks. The Israel Defense Forces has to think how it handles that.
Today, it turns out I was only half-right. When Israel’s next war began on October 7, there were plenty of videos from the battlefield around Gaza of Israeli tanks being hit by missiles, but these were not the ones shocking the Israeli public. At least, they weren’t the main ones.
By now, many of us have seen so many of them: An unending sequence of horror unfolding on our phone screens of young people cowering under fire, bloodied captives being dragged into Gaza, the wounded and the dead. Shocking for any viewer, and unimaginable for those seeing their loved ones in those last terrifying moments.