Every few months, someone will tell me—often with the air of having unlocked a great insight—that Israel’s biggest challenge is a “public relations problem.” The refrain is familiar: if only Israel told its story better. If only it explained to the world that Hamas hides rockets in schools, that Israeli soldiers risk their lives by going door-to-door in Gaza’s urban labyrinth instead of simply leveling neighborhoods from the air, that Israel warns civilians before strikes and delivers aid even to those living under the rule of a sworn enemy—then the world would understand. It’s an alluring argument because it offers control. If the problem is presentation, then the solution is presentation: hire the right consultants, flood social media with compelling content, get the right influencers to say the right words. It treats the conflict as a communications challenge that can be fixed with better messaging. But what if this premise is wrong? What if the problem isn’t that the world doesn’t know Israel’s story—but that it knows it and hates it anyway? What if the issue is not a failure of explanation, but a refusal of acceptance?
In Gaza today, Israel is engaged in one of the most asymmetric wars in modern history: a democratic state fighting a terrorist army embedded inside dense civilian neighborhoods. From a purely military standpoint, the fastest, safest way for Israel to fight would be to bomb from above—no urban infantry battles, no booby-trapped apartments, no Israeli soldiers walking into the kill zones Hamas has prepared for them. Instead, the IDF repeatedly chooses the slow, costly method: urban ground combat. Door-to-door searches. Tunnel-by-tunnel clearing. This is not a symbolic gesture—it’s a real operational choice that dramatically increases risk to Israeli soldiers. It’s a choice driven by a moral and strategic calculus: minimizing civilian casualties wherever possible, even when the enemy uses civilians as human shields. And yet, to the outside world, the images are the same: collapsed buildings, wounded children, weeping families. The decision-making that led to those images—the hours of intelligence-gathering, the surgical strikes instead of blanket bombing—disappears in the blur of headlines and social media feeds. The moral calculus Israel lives by rarely survives the compression of the news cycle. The question is: why? Why doesn’t the fact of Israeli restraint register? Why does it so rarely shift public perception?
The “PR problem” theory rests on the belief that the world operates on an information deficit: people simply don’t know the truth. And when they learn it, the thinking goes, they will respond with moral clarity. This was plausible in the decades after 1967, when Israel still held broad sympathy in the West, and when Jewish organizations could credibly believe education campaigns could sustain that sympathy. And it still has some truth today: there are people—often young, often not yet hardened in their views—who are genuinely surprised to learn that Israel withdrew entirely from Gaza in 2005, only to receive years of rocket fire in return; that Israel treats Palestinians in its hospitals; that it embeds military legal advisers into battlefield decision-making. For these people, the facts can move the needle. But the pool of such persuadable minds is shrinking. Because for a growing portion of the global audience, the problem isn’t lack of knowledge. It’s worldview.
Micah Goodman, one of Israel’s most important contemporary thinkers, has noted that the core dispute over Israel is not merely territorial—it’s existential. It’s about the legitimacy of Jewish collective identity in the modern world. For a certain ideological class, especially in the West, nationalism is suspect, ethno-nationalism is abhorrent, and Jewish nationalism is uniquely intolerable. Einat Wilf has argued powerfully that much of the opposition to Israel is really opposition to the idea that the Jews are a people with the same right to self-determination as any other. This is not the antisemitism of 19th-century race theory; it is a moralized antisemitism, clothed in the language of universal justice. Its moral vocabulary casts Israel not as a nation among nations but as a moral aberration—an anachronism to be corrected. If you believe that the existence of a Jewish state is, in itself, an injustice, then no amount of evidence of Israeli restraint will matter. In fact, the more Israel acts with restraint, the more maddening it becomes—because it undermines the caricature of Israel as a brutal colonial oppressor.
For those who have already moralized the illegitimacy of the Jewish state, facts don’t fail because they are unknown—they fail because they are irrelevant. History gives us a grim parallel. The medieval blood libels against European Jewry were not fueled by actual cases of ritual murder; they were fueled by the need to justify a pre-existing hatred. Soviet antisemitism didn’t arise from ignorance about Jewish contributions to Soviet society—it was fueled by the ideological need to frame Jews as an obstacle to the utopian vision. Today’s anti-Israel hostility works similarly. Civilian casualties in Gaza are tragic and real, but their moral weight is harnessed to serve a predetermined conclusion: that the Jewish state is inherently unjust. That’s why other conflicts—Syria, Yemen, Sudan—can produce far greater civilian suffering without producing comparable outrage. The difference is not the scale of human loss. It’s the identity of the combatant.
From a Jewish theological perspective, this dynamic is hardly new. In Deuteronomy 25:18, we read of Amalek, who attacked the Israelites not when they were a military threat but when they were exhausted and vulnerable. In Jewish memory, hatred of the Jewish people has rarely been proportional to our actions—it is often provoked by our existence. The Talmud in Shabbat 89a preserves a remarkable image: the nations of the world protest to God that Israel has taken the Torah for itself. Their complaint was not that Israel failed to live up to the Torah—it was that Israel claimed it at all. In modern form, the complaint is that Jews have dared to reclaim sovereignty in their ancestral land. In both ancient and modern frames, the core issue is not behavior but being.
If Israel’s main challenge were truly PR, then the solution would be to double down on messaging—more viral videos, more high-profile interviews, more carefully curated facts. But if the problem is rooted in something deeper—an ideological refusal to accept Jewish sovereignty—then Israel’s strategy must shift. First, we must accept that there is a segment of global opinion that is not persuadable. This is not an excuse for moral carelessness—on the contrary, it sharpens the moral imperative. Israel’s obligations to minimize civilian harm, to uphold the laws of war, and to maintain the moral integrity of its army are not contingent on external approval. They flow from our own Torah and from the Jewish understanding of what it means to wield power responsibly. Second, Israel’s communications should be aimed less at elite opinion-makers—many of whom are ideologically immovable—and more at building durable solidarity with communities, nations, and networks that instinctively recognize Israel as part of their moral and political world. Third, Israel must recognize that its most important audience for moral conduct is itself. It is the Israeli soldier who must live with the memory of his actions; it is the Israeli citizen who must live in a society shaped by those choices. The covenantal question—what kind of Jewish state do we want to be?—is more enduring than the question of what CNN thinks.
Israel is fighting two wars right now: one against Hamas, and one against delegitimization. The first is fought with tanks, intelligence, and infantry. The second is fought in the terrain of moral imagination, shaped by centuries of theological prejudice and political ideology. The temptation is to believe these two wars can be fought the same way—through precise targeting, clear goals, and measurable victories. But the second war is not won by “explaining” better. It is won—if it can be won at all—by enduring.
The real question is not “Does Israel have a PR problem?” It is: “What moral purpose should guide Israel when the PR battle is unwinnable?” The answer cannot be “whatever looks good on television.” It must be anchored in the core principles that made Jewish sovereignty worth reclaiming in the first place: the safety of Jewish life, the flourishing of the Jewish people in their land, and the pursuit of justice—even in the chaos of war. When Israel sends soldiers into Gaza to fight door-to-door rather than from the air, it is not a branding choice—it is a Jewish choice. When Israel treats wounded Gazans in its hospitals, it is not angling for applause—it is fulfilling the Torah’s injunction not to stand idly by the blood of your neighbor (Leviticus 19:16). Those who hate Israel will not be persuaded by these acts. But the Jewish people will be defined by them. And in the long arc of our history, that is the audience that matters most.