Israel lost the ‘propaganda war’ because of policies

Near the end of his recent 60 Minutes interview, Benjamin Netanyahu picked up a smartphone and held it toward the camera. It was a telling gesture — half warning, half grievance. Anyone, he explained, could use this little instrument to say anything about anyone. You could paint Major Garrett (the interviewer) as a monster. Say it often enough and people would believe it. Israel, he argued, has been the victim of exactly this kind of machinery, besieged on the media front by enemies who lie relentlessly. His solution? Fight back with truth, and fight harder.

It was a revealing moment, not for what it said about Israel’s critics, but for what it revealed about how Netanyahu understands the problem. His diagnosis was from a Cold War mindset: the propaganda war is a contest between competing narratives, and the side with the better apparatus wins. By his account, Israel has simply been outgunned by more competent liars. What he does not seriously entertain is a more uncomfortable possibility — that the policies themselves, and the statements and actions of his own cabinet, are the core of the problem. When a product fails in the marketplace, the answer is rarely that the advertising wasn’t slick enough.

This is the fundamental confusion at the heart of Israel’s communications crisis: mistaking a product problem for a marketing problem.

Netanyahu is not entirely wrong that Israel faces genuine disinformation. Many of its loudest critics are ill-informed, some are nakedly antisemitic, and a significant portion of viral content about the conflict is factually distorted or decontextualized. These are real phenomena, and they deserve to be challenged. But Netanyahu’s framing — that Israel is a virtuous actor being buried under lies — leaves no room for accountability. When asked directly whether Israel has made mistakes in Gaza or the West Bank that might have contributed to its negative image, he conceded, almost in passing, that yes, mistakes happen in war. Then he pivoted immediately to comparative exculpation: your forces did worse in Fallujah, in Afghanistan. The acknowledgment lasted about four seconds. The deflection lasted considerably longer.

This is not the communication of a leader engaging seriously with legitimate criticism. It is the behavior of a brand manager protecting market share. And the international public, particularly younger audiences, has developed a finely calibrated sensitivity to exactly that kind of corporate-speak.

Emotional resonance beats institutional authority

Here lies the deeper strategic miscalculation. Netanyahu and his advisors appear to believe that Israel’s propaganda war can still be won through the channels that worked in 1970 or 1990: sympathetic coverage in mainstream Western outlets, well-funded think tanks, powerful lobby organizations, and relationships with conservative political establishments. These tools retain some influence, particularly with older demographics and institutional elites. But they have been catastrophically insufficient for the audience that has actually shifted against Israel most dramatically — younger generations, who do not consume news the way their parents did.

Younger audiences, in particular, do not receive their understanding of world events from the top-down architecture of elite media. They build it laterally, from peer networks, short-form video, independent journalists on the ground, and algorithmically curated feeds that amplify emotional resonance over institutional authority. In this environment, images carry more weight than position papers. Eyewitness accounts from Gaza spread faster than any embassy press release. The infrastructure Israel and its supporters have invested in — network ownership, the lobbying apparatus, the editorial relationships, the diplomatic messaging — is optimized for a media landscape that no longer dominates.

Israel has not been entirely absent from the social media battlefield. Polished short-form videos have appeared across platforms, and some users have reported being contacted by AI-powered chat tools disguised as opinion surveys — automated debaters designed to engage, and presumably persuade, one respondent at a time. The production quality is professional. The messaging, however, tends to mirror exactly the problem Netanyahu demonstrated in his 60 Minutes interview: it is deflective, evasive of the core issues, and calibrated for an audience that was already supportive. Sophisticated packaging around a message that sidesteps accountability does not persuade skeptics; it confirms their suspicions. And the demographic math remains brutal regardless of platform. Every poll tracking American attitudes toward the conflict shows support for Netanyahu’s conduct of the war continuing to erode. The audiences these campaigns might conceivably reach — older Republicans, established pro-Israel donor networks — are already persuaded. Everyone else is not, and slicker execution of a flawed message is unlikely to change that.

Netanyahu’s response to this reality was to point at his phone and invoke bots. He is not wrong that bots exist. But blaming algorithmic manipulation for the scale of Israel’s reputational collapse underestimates how much of the shift in opinion has been driven by people watching, in real time, events that are not fabricated. The question is not whether Israel’s enemies are lying — many are. The question is whether enough of what people are seeing is real enough to harden opinion regardless. And the evidence strongly suggests that opinion, particularly among younger voters, has already calcified. At this point, the most Netanyahu can realistically hope for is damage containment — perhaps slowing erosion among younger conservatives who might otherwise be lost entirely.

The effort to pursue that containment, however, has taken a form likely to make things worse. Netanyahu’s alliance with the American right has included encouraging Republican legislators to classify criticism of Israeli policy as antisemitism or even domestic terrorism. This is a strategy borrowed from the same Cold War playbook: suppress dissent by delegitimizing it. It worked, to a degree, in an era when institutions controlled the terms of acceptable discourse. In the current environment, it backfires at scale.

The company Netanyahu keeps

There is also the matter of the company Netanyahu keeps. His close alignment with an American president whose approval rating hovers around 35 percent is not simply a diplomatic liability; it is a messaging liability. The demographics most skeptical of that president are, with considerable overlap, the demographics most skeptical of Netanyahu’s conduct of the war. To be photographed in ideological solidarity with a figure those audiences distrust is not a neutral act. It compounds the brand problem.

Politics, in the end, is a form of marketing. And the foundational rule of marketing is that advertising cannot, over time, rescue a disappointing product. A slick campaign can generate initial attention, even initial enthusiasm. But if the experience of the product — Netanyahu’s policies, the conduct of the war, the cabinet ministers who speak openly about the coerced expulsion of an entire population — contradicts the messaging, the public does not conclude it was lied to by the critics. It concludes it was lied to by the advertiser. Recovery from that impression is extraordinarily difficult, and no volume of corrective messaging tends to accelerate it.

Netanyahu believes Israel is losing a propaganda war because its enemies fight dirty, and it has been too slow to fight back. The more plausible explanation is that Israel is losing trust, which is a different thing, because trust is built by actions, not communication strategies. What the smartphone in his hand actually shows is not a disinformation machine to be defeated. It is a mirror that a global audience is holding up and refusing to look away from.