Fixing the Empathy Gap That Threatens Israel’s Survival
On May 13th, Yoseph Haddad, an Israeli-Christian journalist and IDF veteran, published his interview with a woman who survived the Supernova massacre. Her harrowing testimony is horrible beyond words. That she managed to overcome such a trauma enough to talk about it on TV is an inspiring testament to extraordinary resilience.
But did anyone outside of Israel even notice? There are essentially two parallel universes concerning Israel: 98% of the global media, which is totally indifferent or actively hostile to Israel, and the Israeli and Jewish media, which cover Israeli victims and heroes, while highlighting Israeli humanity when fighting forces of diabolical cruelty, and all while maintaining enough reporting independence to expose government corruption, military abuses, and other problems.
Consider this more recent, heart wrenching Israeli news story about young, Israeli female hostages that will also likely get virtually zero coverage outside of Jewish and Israeli media organizations. The article includes a video from Hamas bodycam footage that provides a chilling reminder of the pure evil that Israel has been fighting, and of how the world has completely forgotten about the Israeli captives still enduring a living hell every day.
Here is yet another morally critical piece of information that won’t get covered by 98% of the global media: video of an October 7th perpetrator talking about how he, his father and his cousin took turns raping an Israeli woman before murdering her, as part of the Gazan massacre of Israelis that day.
How many global media outlets covered this February 25th interview of Emily Hand, the 8 year old Hamas hostage who turned 9 in captivity, and her father, who talk about the lingering trauma and challenges of that nightmare? International news organizations have been all but silent regarding the 240 Israeli hostages that have endured unfathomable conditions and cruelty (with reportedly only about 40 still alive). Imagine if those 240 hostages had been Gazans kidnapped by Israelis: their plight would be given the same obsessive daily coverage as the media has given to Gazan suffering in the wake of Israel’s military campaign.
This severely skewed media coverage is at the heart of Israel’s most serious strategic challenge, producing anti-Israel bias at the UN and other NGOs, on universities, in most governments around the world, and in global public opinion, effectively preventing Israel from conclusively defeating the Islamist terrorists that constantly threaten it, whether Hamas or Hezbollah.
If for every five news stories about Gaza’s suffering civilians, there was just one showing Hamas’s jihadi essence – including hatred of LGBTQ people, Christians, atheists and any other non-Muslims, and its brutal rejection of free speech and assembly – would campus protestors be so blindly supportive of Gazans and hateful towards Israelis? While Qatar and other Mideast countries have spent billions corrupting academia in ways hostile to Israel, students might not have been converted so quickly if the news they consumed outside of the classroom didn’t share the same overwhelmingly anti-Israel bias.
If for every five news stories about Gaza’s civilian death toll, there was just one about how many Gazans in some way support Hamas, as Alan Dershowitz has tirelessly explained, would Norway, Ireland, and Spain so shamelessly recognize “a State of Palestine” (effectively incentivizing future terrorist atrocities by confirming that they ultimately produce diplomatic dividends)?
If for every five stories about Gazan’s losing their homes, the global media published just one about how 200,000 Israelis in the north and south of Israel can’t live in their homes because of the non-stop threat from Hezbollah and Hamas, might there be a bit more sympathy for the terrible choices imposed upon Israel because of its singular, geostrategic vulnerability?
If for every five stories about hunger in Gaza, the global media published just one that provided a comparative global context and showed all of the times that food aid failed to reach Gazans because of Hamas theft or NGO incompetence, would the International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor Karim Khan have announced arrest warrants against Israel’s prime minister and defense minister, for “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare as a war crime?” The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) cited Hamas-run Health Ministry reports that, as of March 15, 2024 (“Day 160”), a cumulative total of 31 people had “died of malnutrition and dehydration.” While every civilian who dies of starvation is a tragedy, there are exponentially greater famines, each affecting well over ten million people, in conflict-torn countries like Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, Ethiopia, and Nigeria, with no shortage of war crime allegations, and yet there have been no ICC arrest warrants for leaders or military officials from those countries. Such misapplied justice is possible thanks to extreme media bias.
The heavily distorted information landscape effectively dehumanizes Israelis by making the average uninvolved observer acutely aware of Palestinian suffering while creating the impression that Israel has no widows, orphans, terror victims, or severely injured and/or traumatized soldiers, and no humanity when dealing with the civilian population from which unspeakable atrocities against Israelis were inflicted, unprovoked, on October 7th.
I have been writing about the anti-Israel media bias for years, and such articles are essentially evergreen. For example, these articles from 2014 and 2015 could have been written today:
2014: How the Media Support Hamas’ Efforts to Delegitimize Israel
2014: Two satirical love letters from Hamas – one to the media and the other to ISIS.
2015: An Idiot’s Guide for the Media on How to Do Your Job Properly
And countless other observers have complained about the problem. This article explains how the media improperly compares casualty figures as if intent weren’t relevant and takes Hamas numbers at face value, even though inflated Hamas numbers have been uncritically accepted by world media since at least 2009. This very detailed media critique published by Forbes in 2014 still applies remarkably well ten years later.
Indeed, the problem has only gotten worse, in part because of demographic changes in which older generations, with memories of Israeli vulnerability, are replaced by people who have known Israel only as an economically and militarily strong country. Technology and the shrinking human attention span have also produced legions who know nothing of history and decide the merits of this conflict on the basis of 30-second viral videos.
Those who care about Israel must address this urgent strategic challenge ASAP by ensuring that Israel’s story is widely and fairly covered. Maybe pro-Israel investors and entrepreneurs from the tech community can create a rival to TikTok that favors Israel and other Western democracies, but without the many surveillance concerns associated with the China-produced app.
Another strategy that can be pursued in parallel or separately is to create a counterweight to Al Jazeera, the Qatari-owned network with an annual operating budget estimated at one billion dollars. That war chest funds “70 bureaus around the globe, and more than 3,000 employees” to produce a nonstop anti-Israel narrative that reaches “over 150 countries and territories in more than 430 million homes.” The fastest and most cost-effective way to counter such a propaganda powerhouse would be simply to invest massively in expanding the reach and coverage of a leading English-language Israeli news organization. One obvious candidate would be The Times of Israel, which was the fastest growing news site in the world last October and, unlike the tarnished brand of Al Jazeera, has a reputation for fair and reliable journalism. A group of investors concerned about Israel’s future could fund massive additional resources that would enable the media outlet to cover and reach many more regions and countries, in far more languages, and in a way that makes it a valuable and trusted source for global news, enabling the site’s already excellent coverage of Israel to reach far more people.
And there are undoubtedly other, better ideas. The point is that those who care about Israel must recognize how much the empathy gap driven by anti-Israel media bias now threatens the long-term survival of the world’s only Jewish state, and how critical it is for massive resources to counter that threat in a sustained manner.
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Noah Beck is the author of The Last Israelis, an apocalyptic submarine thriller about Iranian nukes, Hamas, and Hezbollah.
