‘Hasbara’ and the traitors among us
What good is public diplomacy when Israeli “elites” parrot, if not craft, the enemies’ talking points?
By Ruthie Blum
JNS
Aug 4, 2025
The release on Thursday and Friday of two hostage videos—the first by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad captors of Rom Braslavski and the second by the Hamas monsters holding Evyatar David—coincided with the global propaganda campaign claiming that Israel is purposely starving the population of Gaza.
To give credence to the bald-faced lie that spread around the world faster than the coronavirus, The New York Times devoted its front page on Friday to a photo of an emaciated child in the arms of his mother. The image rightly sent chills up everybody’s spines. Ditto for a picture, circulated simultaneously across every platform, of a different spindly child, this one lying in a hospital bed, with his mother nearby.
Viewers of the snapshots were so quick to believe that the condition of the kids was proof of Israeli war crimes that they ignored a crucial clue about there being more to the story than met the eye: Both mothers appeared well-fed.
As it turned out, the little boys in question were suffering from genetic diseases. One of them was even transported by Israel for treatment abroad, and his situation is now improving.
Called out, The New York Times issued a minuscule clarification barely noticed by readers. But the damage had been done. This included warnings by France, Britain and Canada that they would recognize Palestinian statehood come September, during the next session of the U.N. General Assembly.
The response of the international press to the truth behind the photos was to shrug. Heaven forbid facts should get in the way of the carefully constructed narrative, which is why detractors refuse to acknowledge the millions of meals distributed to non-combatants by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
Nor does the anti-Israel choir sing about the pernicious role of the United Nations in abetting Hamas to retain control of the food—so much so that the terrorists don’t need to steal it anymore. But they do appropriate any supplies entering on trucks—free of charge, of course—and sell them at prices no Gazan, or anyone else for that matter, could possibly afford.
This brings us to Israeli patriots at home as well as champions abroad. As they have done during every war waged against the Jewish state, these genuine well-wishers are wringing their hands about the country’s lack of effective public diplomacy, known in Hebrew as hasbara.
Their main complaint pertains to what they consider a void in the information space. And their favorite culprit is the government, as though such a bureaucracy is or should be the key source of data with which to refute the onslaught of falsehoods launched like missile barrages at Israel and the Jews.
What few seem to grasp is that the best defenders of Israel are those who aren’t on the government payroll. Such influencers are numerous and tireless. But as truth-tellers, they’re no match for their malicious counterparts, whose aim is to vilify, not verify.
This isn’t Israel’s only disadvantage. Another involves disagreements among the powers-that-be in Jerusalem—and their advisers—about which messages to emphasize.
Take the latest hostage videos, for example. It took more than three days for the Braslavski family to give the government permission to publicize two out of the full six minutes of the shocking clip, which the PIJ says it recorded days before losing contact with his captors.
The film shows 21-year-old Rom—kidnapped on Oct. 7, 2023, from the Nova music festival, where he worked as a security guard—so skinny and weak that he’s barely able to move. That his traumatized parents didn’t want the whole thing aired is understandable.
The David family agreed to have their son’s misery broadcast in full, but only 24 hours after Hamas released the gruesome footage. No one can pass judgment on their hesitation, since a skeletal Evyatar, 24, is seen in the video digging his own grave.
The unfathomable pain of the hostages’ families is one basis for the government’s previous demand that local media not broadcast any such clips. The other rationale was that Israel shouldn’t promote Hamas propaganda, the purpose of which is to heighten internecine Israeli strife and cause protesters to cry for an end to the war.
Both reasons were and still are perfectly legitimate; nevertheless, the policy hasn’t been helpful in terms of hasbara. The same applies to the argument early on in the war over whether to disseminate, as widely as possible, the 47-minute movie—a collection of Hamas’s boastful documentation of the brutal atrocities its members, as well as Gazan civilians, committed on that fateful Simchat Torah nearly two years ago.
Rather than make it accessible to the general public in Israel and around the globe, the government decided to provide special screenings for politicians, ambassadors and journalists. Even then, some of the faces of victims were blurred to protect the feelings of their families, many of whom didn’t want the bloody, invasive visuals to be on display.
At the time, there was a serious debate about it. One side favored highlighting the events of Oct. 7—the worst attacks on Jews since the Holocaust—as a tool to further Israel’s public-diplomacy efforts. On the other side were those who feared the video would be doctored or turned into snuff. This camp opposed exploiting and thereby cheapening the horrors for publicity’s sake.
The controversy arose again with the fake-news blitz about Israel’s imposition of a famine in Gaza. On Monday, however, a number of families of Oct. 7 victims submitted a petition to the Tel Aviv District Court for approval of a 4-billion shekel ($1.2 billion) class-action lawsuit against Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, for enabling Hamas to use its platforms to show off their atrocities.
Just imagine the outcry, then, if the government had disregarded the will of the families in order to bolster hasbara, especially with swaths of the international community having zero sympathy for Israel specifically and Jews in general.
But this public-diplomacy challenge pales in comparison to that posed by the current left-wing Israeli “intelligentsia,” along with like-minded former heads of the political and military establishment. Indeed, countering antisemitic tropes is difficult enough without having homegrown “leaders” and “experts” provide fuel for Israel’s enemies.
Examples abound, but let’s begin with Channel 12 anchorwoman Yonit Levi, who concluded her nightly news show on July 27 by saying with a sigh, “Maybe it’s time to acknowledge that this isn’t a public-diplomacy failure, but a moral failure, and to start from there.”
Three days later, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told the German outlet Spiegel International, “There are a number of events that could be seen as war crimes. More than I can list. More than anything, though, it is the illegitimate war that is being waged out of the personal, political interests of [Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu]. As a consequence, Israeli soldiers are dying, additional hostages may be losing their lives and many innocent Palestinians are being killed. That is a crime.”
Then came award-winning novelist David Grossman’s Aug. 1 interview in the Italian daily La Repubblica. Expressing “immense pain and a broken heart,” he said, “For many years, I refused to use that term, ‘genocide.’ But now, after the images I have seen and after talking to people who were there [in Gaza], I can’t help but use it.”
This echoed the words of expat Israeli historian Omer Bartov, whose guest essay in The New York Times on July 15 was titled: “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.”
More recently, on Sunday, some 1,000 prominent Israeli performers signed a petition reading: “We, the people of culture and art in Israel, find ourselves—against our will and against our values—complicit, as Israeli citizens, in the horrifying events in the Gaza Strip, particularly the killing of children and uninvolved civilians, starvation, displacement of the population and the senseless destruction of Gaza’s cities. We call on all those involved in shaping and implementing this policy—stop! Do not issue illegal orders and do not follow them! Do not, God forbid, commit war crimes! Do not abandon the principles of human morality and the values of Judaism! End the war. Free the hostages.”
Meanwhile, a separate petition, signed by more than 1,400 designers, architects and visual artists states: “Before our eyes, a horror of historic proportions is taking place. We bear responsibility as human beings and as Israelis for the atrocities currently being committed in our name against a population located just a few kilometers away from us—living in an impossible reality and under immense suffering. We are deeply concerned for the fate of Gaza’s residents, the hostages, our sons and daughters and for the future of our society—both present and future.”
The icing on the cake appeared on Monday, with a short video of former chiefs of the Shin Bet, Mossad, Israel Defense Forces and Israel Police denigrating their country. “We’re hiding behind a lie,” asserted one participant. “We’re on the eve of defeat,” declared another. The rest proffered similarly inane—albeit dangerous—remarks.
Israeli hasbara may leave a lot to be desired. But what good is public diplomacy when the traitors among us parrot, if not craft, the enemies’ talking points? As Evyatar David’s father, Avishai, put it simply: “Whose side are they on?”
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