Mick Hartley

It's often suggested that Israel just needs to do a better job of presenting its case to the world. The problem, as Richard Hanania argues in Tablet, goes a lot deeper than that:

If one believes that Israel’s optics problems in the current war are the result of flawed public relations, consider how the nation was treated before it began. The U.N. General Assembly adopted 140 resolutions on Israel between 2015 and 2022, about twice as many as on the rest of the world combined. Since 2006, the U.N. Human Rights Council has likewise adopted more resolutions on Israel than on Syria, Iran, Russia, and Venezuela put together….

Left-wing academics, of course, consider Israel a settler-colonial outpost, as part of a larger narrative that centers an oppressed-oppressor framework for understanding practically all social and political issues. Religious conservatives in the Muslim world see Jews as their ancient enemies, while even secular ideologies like Nasserism and Baathism have found it psychologically and politically convenient to blame Israel for the backwardness of the Arab world and its inability to adapt to modernity. Similarly, demagogues across poor nations have always found it useful to scapegoat the West for their problems, and the history of antisemitism gives them a prepackaged narrative about one particular group having a uniquely pernicious influence on world history.

Those who think that the problems Israel is facing result from a flawed diplomatic approach should spend some time thinking about how Hamas presents itself and its ultimate aims. One reason that the atrocities of Oct. 7 are undeniable is that Hamas fighters wore GoPros as they slaughtered innocent women and children. Spokesmen for the organization have justified the entirety of its rule by pointing to the “success” of that day and admit that its ultimate goal remains the elimination of Israel. There is a great deal of evidence suggesting that Hamas’ hatred for Israel is intractable, and in this posture it has the support of most Palestinians. This means that Israel finds itself picking from a menu of tragic choices, yet all this is ignored because it does not fit into the anti-Western, Third Worldist, or antisemitic narratives most of the international community is committed to for one reason or another.

These are forces beyond the ability of any spokesman of the IDF to control or, I’d argue, significantly influence. The idea that Israel just needs better PR is adjacent to the argument that what matters is not so much spin but objective Israeli behavior. Here again, one must consider international opinion over the last several decades. Before this current war, Israel had killed fewer Palestinians in a half century of periodic hostilities than the number of civilians the United States and its allies killed during the war on ISIS alone. The number of deaths in the Syrian civil war has of course been several orders of magnitude higher than that. It would be superfluous to continue providing examples of a double standard at work, as anyone with the most basic historical understanding could go on for a very long time listing post-World War II atrocities the U.N. and the global community have all but ignored as they have sanctioned and lectured Israel.

All this leads to the question of what allies of Israel should be doing instead of demanding better public relations.

Well, for a start they can refuse to accept the false premise of moral equivalency between Israel and Hamas, as exemplified in the latest International Criminal Court arrest warrant applications for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas's leader Yahya Sinwar for war crimes.

A nation defending itself and inflicting collateral damage is not the same as a movement with exterminationist goals, which seeks to slaughter innocent people as an end in itself.