Israel’s Invisible Front
Herb Keinon writes (Jerusalem Post, August 29, 2025):
“WHAT UNITES these various threads – Australia’s expulsion of Iran’s envoy on the one hand, and Macron’s rebuke and Brazil’s downgrade on the other – is the sense that Israel is confronting headwinds on multiple fronts.”
One of these fronts is the invisible front that we’re not talking about. And I think we’re not talking about it because it doesn’t have a geographical line, it isn’t military, and we’re losing. It is the Psychological Front.
I am not talking about the trauma of war, whether with an identified country or a terror organization like Hamas. I am not talking about PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). I am talking about the battlefront of our collective psyche.
Back in January 2025, I wrote on ToI a blog titled; Communal fatigue. I coined this phrase and said that this fatigue is different from any individual experience. It is a communal one with its own language and essence. Today, I understand it to be the culminating battle fatigue of the invisible Psychological Front.
Keinon continues:
“Yet there is a paradox: the countries that once embraced Israel most warmly – the liberal democracies among those states Netanyahu spoke of in 2017 – are now turning against it, while Arab states, once solidly arrayed against Jerusalem, are turning out to be more pragmatic partners.”
These “more pragmatic partners” are there because they have not bought into what the rest of the world has.
Propaganda vs Hasbara: Hamas and terrorists have historically been better at propaganda, and we’ve often said that we need people who are better at hasbara. Right there is our first problem. Our enemies know that propaganda is “information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view.” While we, on the other hand, try to employ hasbara, which is defined as: explanation, clarification, or making something understandable. In everyday Hebrew, ‘hasbara’ just means giving an explanation. Hamas is successfully using this weapon of propaganda and hitting its targets over and over again.
There are no early detection warnings or sirens. Just the aftermath of the bombings, what we see and hear from those targets. They use cluster bombs, a bomb that releases several projectiles on impact to injure or cause damage. The damage of lies and distortions, rewriting history, and just making things up. We don’t use weapons; we send out spokespersons to explain and clarify.
Gaslighting: You may have heard of the term “gaslighting”. It comes from a reference to a 1944 movie, Gaslight. In the movie, one character manipulates the other to believe something else has taken place other than the experience at hand. Even while the memories of the person are accurate, the person has seen and heard the evidence for themselves, the manipulation was so convincing that the person doubts themselves. The manipulator effectively becomes the source of truth. That’s gaslighting.
“To manipulate another person into doubting his or her perceptions, experiences, or understanding of events.”
The take away:
- A military front line is the place where two opposing armies are facing each other and where fighting is going on. Terrorism is the use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims. There is no front, no two opposing armies facing each other. It is the continuous bombardment of violent acts, which are not restricted to physical assault. It is also an assault through words and images, photos and videos. Even when the fake news is clarified, it is not the clarification that remains, but the impressions of those words and images.
- There is only one way to fight the effects on this front: through asking questions and thinking. What works against us is the time factor: we are reacting to what is thrown at us. We need to try to actually breathe and regroup. Stop and see beyond the attack. And most of all, remember. We do know what happened. We can trust our experience. Don’t let them succeed at redefining our boundaries between our internal challenges that exist in the development and forming of a democratic state, and being used. They are trained for this type of warfare to achieve their political aim.