Israel Must Win the Story Before the Question Is Asked

For decades, Israel’s public advocacy has largely operated in reactive mode. A war begins, a terrorist attack takes place or an accusation is leveled, and Israel scrambles to respond. Officials appear on television to explain military operations, rebut allegations and provide context that should have been established long before the crisis erupted.

By then, much of the damage has already been done.

The encouraging development is that Israeli public advocacy is beginning to recognize this fundamental weakness. The discussion is gradually moving beyond defending the latest action towards addressing the deeper questions that determine how Israel is perceived: Who are the Jewish people? Why are they in this land? What rights do they possess? What does Israel represent, not only for Jews, but for the wider world?

This is a necessary strategic shift. Israel cannot successfully explain each individual battle if it has already lost the argument over why it has the right to exist and defend itself.

For too long, Israel’s advocates have relied on a narrow set of messages. Israel is a democracy. Israel contributes technology to the world. Israel seeks peace. All are true and important, but none adequately answers the ideological campaign that presents Jews as foreign colonizers who arrived in someone else’s country.

The answer must begin with Jewish history and indigeneity.

The Jewish people did not select the Land of Israel as a convenient refuge in the twentieth century. Jewish identity, language, faith, calendar, collective memory and national consciousness were formed in this land. Jerusalem is not merely Israel’s capital. It has been the spiritual and national center of the Jewish people for three thousand years.

Even in exile, Jews prayed towards Jerusalem, mourned the destruction of their Temple, celebrated agricultural festivals tied to the seasons of Israel and ended the Passover Seder with the words, “Next year in Jerusalem.” Hebrew was revived as a spoken national language because it had never ceased to be the language of Jewish prayer, scholarship and memory.

This is not the behavior of a foreign colonial population. It is the story of an indigenous people returning to its ancestral homeland.

Jewish rights in the Land of Israel are not dependent solely on the Holocaust, the United Nations Partition Plan or international sympathy. They are rooted in history, continuous Jewish presence, religious and cultural attachment, and modern international recognition, including the decisions at San Remo and the League of Nations Mandate.

This does not erase the rights, dignity or aspirations of others. Rights are not a finite resource. But any serious discussion must begin by acknowledging that Jewish national rights are not inventions and Jewish sovereignty is not an historical accident.

Israel must also speak more confidently about its relationship with the Christian world. Christianity was born in the Land of Israel from within Jewish civilization. Its foundational places, figures and texts cannot be understood without the geography and history of the Jewish homeland.

Today, Israel is the only country in the Middle East where the Christian population has grown substantially over the decades and where Christian holy places are protected by a sovereign government committed to freedom of worship. At a time when ancient Christian communities have been devastated across parts of the region, Israel stands as a guardian of a shared biblical inheritance.

This connection is not merely theological. Israel and much of the Christian world share a civilizational challenge. The assault on Israel is part of a wider confrontation between democratic societies and Islamist movements that reject religious freedom, pluralism and the sovereignty of non-Muslim peoples in the Middle East.

Israel is not fighting Islam, nor are Muslims collectively its enemy. The threat is Islamism: a political ideology that seeks to impose religious supremacy through coercion, terrorism and, where possible, state power. Hamas, Hezbollah, the Iranian regime and their allies may focus their violence on Israel, but their ambitions extend far beyond it.

Israel is on the front line, but it is not the final destination.

The next arena in this struggle is artificial intelligence. Increasingly, people will not learn about Israel by reading books, visiting museums or even searching traditional websites. They will ask large language models to explain Zionism, the origins of the conflict, Jewish indigeneity or the status of Jerusalem.

The answers they receive will be shaped by the material on which those systems were trained and the sources they retrieve. If the digital information environment is dominated by decades of anti-Israel activism, distorted terminology and endlessly repeated falsehoods, AI models may reproduce those prejudices with the appearance of neutral authority.

This means Israel’s advocacy organizations must do more than publish responses on social media. They must create authoritative, well-sourced and digitally accessible bodies of knowledge about Jewish history, archaeology, law, religion and national rights.

Primary documents should be translated, indexed and placed online in formats that AI systems can recognize and use. Hebrew sources must become accessible in multiple languages. Organizations should test major AI models for recurring distortions, publicly document their findings and engage technology companies with evidence-based requests for greater accuracy.

Most importantly, Israel must flood the digital public square with substance rather than slogans. Artificial intelligence cannot draw upon historical evidence that has never been digitized, translated or presented clearly.

Israel’s advocacy challenge is therefore no longer simply to respond faster. It is to shape the intellectual foundations upon which future answers will be built.

The battle for Israel’s legitimacy will increasingly be decided before a spokesperson enters a television studio and even before a user types a question. Getting ahead of the game means ensuring that when the world asks who the Jewish people are and why Israel exists, the truth is already there.