The battle for Israel’s ‘brand connectome’
Antisemitic hate campaigns have huge advantages. Their lies spread instantly, fueled by social media and mainstream media that echo their claims. They’re sponsored by regimes like Iran and Qatar that pour in funding and resources, unencumbered by pesky challenges democracies face like the need to actually serve constituents. And they’re able to follow long-term strategies, while democracies and democratic movements focus on each upcoming election.
Those elements empower hate groups to reach people where it matters most: in the subconscious mind. Ultimately, that is where the battle for truth lies. In the latest episode of They Stand Corrected, an expert joined me to explain.
“People would be quite upset to learn that their views about Israel have been shaped over 30 years by an insidious campaign that’s been operating on a subconscious level to get them to hate this country that has done so much to help the world,” says Leslie Zane, author of The Power of Instinct. Take the incredible stream of life-saving and life-improving technologies Israelis create for everything from healthcare to agriculture and to environmental efforts. Or being among the first on the scene to help other nations in need.
Leslie coined the term “brand connectome,” which refers to the network of associations and memories people have with any given brand in their subconscious minds. In this context, a “brand” isn’t just something you buy in a store — it can be a person, movement, nation, or nearly anything else. Those brand connectomes, she says, guide people’s decisions on what to buy, how to vote, and where to stand on an issue. (The top neuroscientist at Wharton agrees with her discovery.)
“Most people think they’re in control of their decisions. And as it turns out, approximately 90 to 95% of the decisions we make are actually made by the instinctive mind. And then it’s rationalized after the fact by your conscious brain.”
The simplistic appeal
Her company, Triggers, diagnoses what lies inside these brand connectomes — including the brand connectomes for Israel and the Jewish people. “Antisemitism never really went away. It’s thousands of years old — as you know, blood libel and all the things that Jews have been blamed for. But it generally stayed latent during the aftermath of the Holocaust, partly because it was socially unacceptable,” she says.
Organizations like BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Students for Justice in Palestine have been working to reawaken it. Using repetition and a “placard strategy,” they’ve swarmed people with images and text that place the word Israel or the Israeli flag next to “three words: genocide, apartheid, and colonizer. If I keep creating those same associations over and over again, little by little, the brain is going to believe that that association is truth, even though it may be completely fabricated.” (Those associations are, indeed, fabricated, as previous episodes have explained.)
Also, she says, “Our brains are lazy. We don’t like to do a lot of thinking. We don’t like to do a lot of homework. The simplicity of these messages fit very neatly into the brain’s binary thinking. There is a very binary construct that’s being used here, which is oppressor versus oppressed, and good versus evil. They’re trying very hard, and succeeding, at branding Israel as evil, and putting it on the evil side of the mental paradigm. It’s really a character assassination.”
So, what can be done about it? She explains in our interview.
