Is combating media bias Netanyahu’s mission impossible?
Frustration is mounting over a lost information war. Still, Israelis are right to think that persuading the world to stop believing blood libels circulated by Hamas cannot be their top priority.
By Jonathan S. Tobin
JNS
Aug 4, 2025
The contrast was glaring. One week after The New York Times put a horrifying yet completely misleading picture of a Palestinian Arab child on its front page to illustrate a story that lent weight to the false claim that Israel was deliberately starving people in the Gaza Strip, it had an opportunity to put an equally awful photo in the same spot. Hamas released a video depicting two of the remaining Israeli hostages they are still holding and who look as if they are actually starving, in addition to other mistreatment at the hands of their kidnappers.
But the Times chose not to highlight this atrocity on their front page, though it was front-page news in Israel as well as in the New York Post, one of the few pro-Israel daily newspapers in the United States. While it was shown in a Times piece about the emaciated men that was published online, that story was not considered significant enough to warrant inclusion in the print edition of the paper. Nor did it mention that the video showed one of the Israelis being forced to dig what was said to be his own grave. It also cited such criminal abuse of hostages solely as part of an argument claiming that most Israelis believe that their plight was somehow Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s fault, rather than that of Hamas.
The treatment of these two images is not an isolated example.
It not only demonstrates the editorial judgement that the Times employs when covering the conflict, but it is typical of most legacy print, broadcast and cable outlets in the United States and throughout the West. Such bias shows their determination to mimic Hamas talking points and to trash Israel and its government, even when the story’s main focus is the atrocious behavior of the Palestinians.
Does it matter?
But outside of the way such slanted reporting raises the blood pressure of supporters of Israel, does this sort of thing really matter?
To most Israelis who have long believed that it should be considered beneath their dignity as well as a waste of time to try to explain themselves to a hostile world, the answer seems to be “no.” Understandably, they think that winning the war against Hamas terrorists on the ground in Gaza—like the successful battles they have recently fought against Iran and its Hezbollah auxiliaries in Lebanon—should be their main focus.
There is a long tradition in Israeli culture of dismissing the opinions of an indifferent world and instead emphasizing the creation of Zionist facts on the ground. That dates back to founding Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, who famously dismissed the United Nations and its role in founding the Jewish state by saying: “Only the daring of the Jews established the state, not some decision by that Um-shmum.”
A long succession of Israeli leaders has not done much to improve the situation, despite the pleas of those who think this is vital to the country’s survival.
There have been different variations on indifference to the issue. Shimon Peres, who at various times was prime minister, foreign minister and president of Israel, did more than anyone to champion the peace process. He believed that Israel didn’t need better public relations (hasbara in Hebrew) or a sophisticated public information policy because he believed good policies—and by that, he meant trading “land for peace” to end the conflict—would solve the problem. Unfortunately for Israel, giving the Palestinians what they said they wanted didn’t work either. As the failure of his Oslo Accords proved, their goal was Israel’s destruction, not a Palestinian state living in peace beside it.
Netanyahu is personally the focus of much of the smears and attacks directed at Israel in the last generation, as well as getting a lot of the blame for failures in the information war. He may be Israel’s best spokesperson since he can speak to the world in intelligent and eloquent American English. But he appears at times to be insensitive to Diaspora concerns about the unpopularity of his policies and the need to create better hasbara. He often acts as if he has long since discarded any delusion that anyone not already predisposed to support the Jewish state will listen to what he has to say. The rest of his administration takes its cues from that attitude.
And that may also be reflected in the news that, while most of the world thinks the opprobrium directed at Jerusalem necessitates a retreat on its part, Netanyahu is considering ordering the Israel Defense Forces to completely occupy the Strip. That would include sending the IDF into areas such as Gaza City and the camps in central Gaza, which it has largely avoided during the 22 months of conflict.
With Hamas refusing to negotiate seriously for a ceasefire-hostage release deal and the world already having fallen for Hamas propaganda talking points, the rationale for holding back from a complete occupation of Gaza may be gone. That will likely generate another round of invective and attacks on Israel and may well heighten its isolation.
And it will be one more reminder that, regardless of whether anything that is published or posted online about the war in Gaza by Hamas, its sympathizers and enablers is true, they are dominating commentary about the war in the press and on social-media platforms. Israel is losing the information war, but that realization doesn’t elicit the same sense of urgency from Israelis that other threats generate.
Costs to the Jewish state
As Hamas savors its propaganda victory in convincing world opinion and mainstream media that the Jewish state really is deliberately starving innocent Palestinians and committing “genocide,” Netanyahu’s critics are asserting that this is no longer merely a matter of bad public relations. As Haviv Rettig Gur recently wrote in The Free Press, the global perception that Gaza is experiencing a famine is—regardless of whether the reports are dead wrong, merely exaggerated or primarily the result of biased reporting—costing Israel on the field of battle as well.
It’s the main reason why Israel was forced to adopt temporary ceasefires to allow more aid into Gaza—something that gives Hamas’s remaining forces in Gaza vital respites that enable them to keep fighting.
It’s also true that the shift in American public opinion against Israel can’t be denied.
As we saw last week, the majority of Senate Democrats, including some who heretofore identified as friends of Israel, are now willing to vote against aid to the Jewish state during wartime. That’s because they either believe the genocide and starvation smears, which their allies in the media have mainstreamed, or they think that it would be politically dangerous to refute them and defy their party’s increasingly anti-Israel and antisemitic left-wing base.
There’s also some evidence of slippage from the other end of the spectrum. President Donald Trump and most Republicans remain on Israel’s side. But the platforming of antisemitism by the likes of former Fox News host and current podcaster Tucker Carlson has encouraged others on the far right—like former Trump advisor Steve Bannon, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and former congressman Matt Gaetz—to turn on Jerusalem and begin mimicking the “genocide” smears of the left. Whether that influences Trump to change his stance, which remains the only one in the GOP that counts, and which Carlson and his allies failed to do when it came to backing Israel’s war on Iran, remains to be seen. If it did, that would be a catastrophe for Israel.
False narratives
What makes all of this so frustrating for friends of Israel is that they know the narratives about genocide and starvation are false. And they find it hard to accept that an Israel that is so good at fighting wars is so bad when it comes to winning the hearts and minds of the global community.
The truth is that the current conflict is between a beleaguered Israeli democracy whose army operates under strict ethical guidelines and a genocidal Palestinian national movement that seeks to destroy the one Jewish state on the planet, and is guilty of heinous atrocities against Jews and their own people. Yet, like the thousands of other examples of media bias, the Times’s dishonest bolstering of the starvation narrative demonstrates how public opinion in Europe and the United States is being persuaded to believe that Israel is intentionally committing genocide and the Palestinians are merely downtrodden victims only seeking to live in freedom.
Hamas, which has largely manufactured the food crisis in Gaza as a strategic initiative to smear Israel, is clearly winning the battle for international public opinion even as it has been routed in the actual fighting. And the more anger the talk of genocide and deliberate starvation generates against the Jewish state, the more Hamas digs in its heels and refuses to seriously negotiate a ceasefire and the hostage release deal that Israelis long for.
So, can the Israeli government do a better job of explaining its policies to the world?
Of course, it can. And at times it has. After the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab attacks on southern Israeli communities on Oct. 7, 2023, it appeared that Jerusalem had mobilized a group of people to do just that as well as doing more to respond quickly and effectively to answer Hamas’s lies.
That was illustrated by the rapid Israeli response to big lies, such as the claim in the opening weeks of the conflict and even before the IDF entered Gaza that it had bombed the Ah-Ahli Hospital and killed 500 persons, a story that was published by The New York Times and much of the mainstream media. It soon turned out that the rocket that hit the facility was fired by Palestinian Islamic Jihad; it landed in its parking lot and injured relatively few people. That demonstrated how establishment media, even in the immediate aftermath of Oct. 7, were acting as Hamas’s stenographers.
That’s an unfortunate abandonment of journalistic ethics that continues to this day, as the starving child picture hoax demonstrated. Many, if not most, outlets continue to use Hamas-supplied statistics on casualties and spin on the food shortage, and who deserves blame for it. And no Israeli spokesperson or communications policy—no matter how well-crafted, sophisticated or truthful—seems to be able to do anything about it.
Mission impossible?
Under these circumstances, it’s becoming increasingly obvious that any Israeli government, no matter who was leading it or how smart or articulate its spokespeople were, is facing a “mission impossible” with respect to winning the information war.
That doesn’t mean they should give up. Nor should the rest of the Jewish world. And an outlet like JNS, which provides news and opinion about the Middle East and the Jewish world without the anti-Israel biased filter of the corporate press, is now more important than ever.
But even those engaged in this daily struggle should not be laboring under the delusion that clever media strategies are the answer. An international press that is heavily influenced by the bizarre red-green alliance of European Marxists and Islamist immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa isn’t interested in honest journalism about Israel. That’s just as true of American outlets like the Times and other legacy media, whose staffs have been indoctrinated in toxic leftist ideas such as critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism that falsely label Jews and Israelis as “white” oppressors always in the wrong, and Palestinians as “people of color” always in the right.
The reason why they are so quick to buy Hamas’s lies is that they have already largely abandoned journalism for activism. No amount of devoted media monitoring is going to convince them to correct their mistakes or to acknowledge their bias and change their ways.
Those in charge of Israel’s information policy and Jewish organizations in the United States should forget about futile efforts to reform the Times, The Washington Post, CNN or MSNBC. It’s a wasted effort. What they should be concentrating on is getting their message to alternative media and going directly to the public on social media. More importantly, they should be direct and unapologetic about asserting Jewish rights, rather than talking only of security concerns when it comes to Israel. Nor should they shy away from labeling their Palestinian opponents as adherents of an eliminationist form of Jew-hatred that has a great deal in common with the Nazis out of fear that this will turn off those who think them helpless victims with no agency for their atrocious conduct and repeated rejections of peace.
Victory matters most
That won’t win Israel many friends at the United Nations or among those on the editorial boards of liberal news organizations. But it will have the ring of truth and be readily understood by those who understand the same outlets slant the news about other issues.
Whatever they do, they need to stop laboring under the delusion that there is some magical strategy that will sell the cause of the survival of the Jewish state to a world audience already predisposed by antisemitism and ideology to be swayed by even the cleverest appeal.
As Netanyahu has demonstrated while leading Israel since Oct. 7, what still matters the most is defeating Israel’s enemies, not sweet-talking the media or holding back from taking decisive military action in the hope of currying favor abroad. Hamas terrorists are holding on because they believe that Western public opinion will save them. The only way to thwart that heretofore successful strategy is to eliminate Hamas in Gaza, even as much of the world tells Jerusalem it can’t be done. Accomplishing that would make sympathy for the terrorists a lot less important. And it’s the only way to prevent future massacres and keep Israel secure.
It’s also the best way of firming up the alliance with those Americans and Europeans who haven’t succumbed to the woke swindle. A victorious Israel will still be largely isolated on the international stage and assailed by the leftist press, but it will be in a stronger position to protect its interests and its people. Those who care about the Jewish state need to stop whining about smarter hasbara or how unfair the smears against Israel have been, and instead, unabashedly and loudly support its efforts to rid the world of anti-Western Islamists. And they should do so even if that makes them unpopular, too.
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