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An aerial view from Sheikh Ridwan in Gaza City, Gaza, shows the heavy destruction left behind after the Israeli army withdraws following a ceasefire agreement, on October 25, 2025. [Mahmoud Abu Hamda – Anadolu Agency]
Israel is preparing to spend nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars on its propaganda apparatus, in a sign of growing alarm in Tel Aviv over its collapse in global standing following the genocide in Gaza and expanding wars across the region.
According to The Jerusalem Post, Israel’s public diplomacy budget, known in Hebrew as hasbara, has risen to $730 million, more than four times the $150 million allocated the previous year. That earlier sum was itself reportedly around 20 times higher than Israel’s pre-2023 spending on such efforts.
The vast increase was included in Israel’s national budget passed in March and will be directed through the national public diplomacy directorate, which oversees efforts to shape foreign public opinion.
The surge in propaganda spending comes as Israel is increasingly seen by critics and human rights organisations as a pariah state.
The budget increase appears to reflect Israeli fears that the country’s ability to rely on Western political cover may be weakening. This is particularly true in the US, Israel’s most important ally and arms supplier, where public support has fallen sharply.
A Pew Research Center poll published in April found that 60 per cent of US adults now hold an unfavourable view of Israel, up from 53 per cent last year and nearly 20 points higher than in 2022. Only 37 per cent view Israel favourably.
The shift cuts across important sections of US society. Pew found that 80 per cent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents now view Israel unfavourably, while 57 per cent of Republicans under 50 also hold a negative view.
Gallup has recorded a similar trend. Its February survey found that American sympathy is no longer clearly with Israel, with 41 per cent saying they sympathise more with Palestinians and 36 per cent with Israelis. Gallup said Israel’s favourable rating had fallen close to its historical low, while ratings of the Palestinian Territories had reached a new high.
The crisis has triggered open concern inside Israel’s own policy establishment. The Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv has warned of a “deepening crisis” in Israel’s standing in the US, pointing to declining support among younger Americans, Democrats, younger Republicans and parts of the Jewish community.
A separate report cited growing diplomatic and public opinion isolation and warned of a “creeping economic boycott”, as businesses, academic institutions and civil society organisations become more reluctant to maintain ties with Israel.
Israel’s foreign ministry has responded by expanding its messaging machinery. Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar has overseen the creation of a dedicated unit to shape international narratives, while funds have reportedly been channelled into digital campaigns, foreign delegations, influencer outreach and pro-Israel advocacy networks.
Reports have also pointed to a centralised “media war room” tracking coverage of Israel across hundreds of outlets and monitoring thousands of daily references. Additional spending has reportedly been directed towards evangelical networks, private public relations firms and campaigns aimed at universities, influencers and young audiences.
The scale of the spending suggests that Israel views its deteriorating image not merely as a public relations problem, but as a strategic threat. Israel’s military dominance has long depended on the political, diplomatic and military support of Western governments, especially Washington. If Western publics increasingly view Israel as a genocidal, apartheid and expansionist state, sustaining unconditional support becomes harder for elected leaders.
Keir Starmer explains that UK is actively supporting Israel’s genocidal expansion and repeats his previous quotation that he supports Zionism “without qualification”. Keir Starmer said “I said it loud and clear – and meant it – that I support Zionism without qualification.” here: https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/keir-starmer-interview-i-will-work-to-eradicate-antisemitism-from-day-one/Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an obviously insane, xenophobic Fascist.
Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.
IOF Spokesperson Daniel Hagari in the now infamous video where he attempts to show evidence of a “Hamas tunnel” underneath a hospital, as to justify the airstrikes against hospitals. Photo: Screenshot
For decades, the Zionist movement succeeded in depicting Israel as the victimized side in the Arab-Israeli conflict. However, the rise of alternative media and social media networks has exposed Israel’s crimes more than ever.
Since it emerged in the late 19th century, the Zionist movement has heavily relied on monopolizing the flow of information through its international power relations for promoting its ideology and related narrative, which contributed to making the establishment of its colonial state in Palestine, known as Israel today, a reality.
The term Hasbara, which has no equivalent in English and literally means “explanation”, was first introduced by Zionist journalist and political leader Nahum Sokolow in 1912. Sokolow was known for his endeavors in garnering international support for the Zionist project, particularly within European and Western circles through media influence.
The concept later became the cornerstone of the strategy of public diplomacy and public relations, which has been employed by Israel and its supporters to explain and promote the Israeli government’s actions, policies, and narrative worldwide.
Hasbara aims to shape public opinion by refuting and whitewashing counter-narratives that would expose Israel’s crimes and violations of human rights, providing misleading justifications.
The rise of Hasbara following Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982
It was not until 1982 that the Hasbara turned from being an oral tradition of the Zionist movement into a financed, supported, structured strategy, with a government office solely dedicated to achieving its goals.
This office, which is known as the national Hasbara headquarters within the office of the prime minister, has many arms in other Israeli governmental institutions and entities including the Foreign Ministry, the Ministry of Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs, the Ministry of Tourism, the Jewish Agency for Israel, and the IDF Spokesperson’s Division.
In 1982, Israel found itself for the first time in a position, where it had to deny its responsibility for one of the most horrendous massacres committed by the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) since the establishment of the colonial state.
This does not mean that Israel has not committed other massacres prior to that year. Israel has been responsible for numerous pogroms in occupied Palestine in the pre-estate era, through the creation of the state and beyond, but the difference in what Israel did in Sabra and Shatila, was the fact that the massacre was televised.
Two years after the Sabra and Shatila massacre, the American Jewish Congress sponsored a conference in Jerusalem to form Hasbara as an official public relations strategy.
Those involved in promoting Hasbara are public relations and advertising executives, media professionals, journalists and leaders of major Jewish groups.
The United States has been the main supporter of Israel since its founding in 1948, therefore, US public opinion has been a main target for Hasbara.
Nevertheless, Israel’s real face was unveiled after the Sabra and Shatila massacre, resulting in a shift not only in the narrative but also in the paradigm in terms of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
It was then, when the image of Israel turned from being the victim and the underdog, surrounded by hostile neighbors from all sides at all gates, to the aggressor that bullies neighboring countries.
As a result, Israel was forced to deny any responsibility for the heinous massacre and the aggression on Lebanon. The overused false pretense of “self-defense” was used as a pretext by Israel at that time, claiming that it was obliged to wage the assault to eliminate what it called as terrorists, referring to members of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
That pretext was, however, untenable by American media outlets, which unprecedentedly portrayed Israel as an imperial state that seeks to solve its problems in someone else’s country.
Ronald Reagan was the US President at the time. Although Reagan was known for his strong support for Israel, he upbraided Israel for jeopardizing US interests in the West Asia region and imperilling regional peace. He even allowed the United Nations to condemn Israel for its behavior.
“I was horrified to learn this morning of the killing of Palestinians which has taken place in Beirut. All people of decency must share our outrage and revulsion over the murders, which included women and children. I express my deepest regrets and condolences to the families of the victims and the broader Palestinian community.” Reagan said in a statement, on September 18, 1982.
Silencing the truth, a primary Hasbara tactic
In the decades that followed the appalling massacre in Lebanon, Israel’s crimes and violations in occupied Palestine continued unrelenting. Whenever its crimes were obvious, Israel did not seek to refute them, but rather to silence those exposing them.
Israel has resorted to banning media outlets, threatening journalists and media workers, arresting them and most horrifically assassinating them.
In its all-out multi-front war in the West Asia region between 2023 and 2025, Israel killed over 292 journalists, including 247 in the Gaza strip, 10 in Lebanon, 32 in Yemen, and three in Iran. It has also blocked foreign media workers from entering Gaza for two years, in order to prevent them from documenting and exposing the genocide.
Using the Holocaust and religious narratives to promote the image of Israel
The Holocaust has been the mainstay for the Zionist movement to justify the establishment of a “Jewish homeland in Palestine”, which reinforced “antisemitism” as a victimization tool to procure solidarity and sympathy with Israel along the way, especially with European and Western audiences.
Israel has always attempted to depict the conflict as a clash between nations affiliated with different religions; Judaism and Islam, which is not the case.
To that end, the Hasbara has mobilized not only the citizens of Israel, but diasporic Jews in public diplomacy, emphasizing the battle against delegitimization.
Israel has long organized “birthright trips” to occupied Palestine for young Jews in diaspora, giving them the opportunity to “discover” their Jewish heritage by connecting it to Israel as the only safe resort for “persecuted” Jewish people.
It has further made a significant effort to distort the image of Palestinian resistance groups, freedom fighters, and their supporters, describing them as antisemitic terrorists, who adhere to extremist Islamist or radical political ideologies.
The development of technology and media tools has led to the decline of Hasbara
Even though Israel has spared no effort to whitewash its crimes through its misleading Hasbara, the last several years, particularly the last two years, marked a regression in its ability to influence public opinion over the globe.
The more technological tools have developed, the greater have Israel’s losses been in media battles. From satellite, to internet, to cellphones, the exposure of the IOF’s crimes and violations of human rights has become stronger day by day.
One recent example is the success of such technological tools in revealing the identity of IOF commanders and soldiers, who are accused of killing Palestinian six-year-old girl Hind Rajab.
Thanks to satellite imagery, and the ability to analyze available audio recordings of victims, the circumstances of the crime were demystified remotely without the need for investigators to be on the ground to collect evidence from the crime scene in war-torn Gaza.
Additionally, satellites and the internet helped in transmitting footage of Israeli crimes to a larger-scale world wide, more than the traditional television did.
Social media networks, alternative media outlets and international solidarity popular movements have considerably contributed to spreading the truth about the nature of the conflict in West Asia, specifically in occupied Palestine, as well.
The International Peoples’ Assembly (IPA), its partners and media platforms represent an effective model for such international socialist and labor movements, whose objective is to unite the struggle of the peoples all over the world against imperialism, capitalism and fascism, with an immense focus on the struggle of the Palestinian people.
Moreover, anti-Zionist Jewish groups, like the Jewish Voice for Peace, have helped in highlighting the invalidity and incredibility of Israel’s religious based mythical narratives.
“Because we’re Jews, it’s being done in our name. We have to stand up and yell. It’s not antisemitism to be against Zionism,” Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss from Neturei Karta, an international ultra-Orthodox Jewish anti-Zionist group said.
The “Al-Aqsa Flood Operation” was a game changer
The two-year genocidal aggression on the besieged Gaza Strip, which followed the October 7 attacks, has played a key role in making the Israeli narrative fall apart.
Despite the arduous and costly efforts of Israeli media and corporate media to delineate the attacks as unprovoked assault against Israel, alternative media was able to clarify the underlying reasons that triggered the operation.
The “Al-Aqsa Flood Operation” drew the attention of the entire world to decades of obfuscated struggle of the Palestinian people, during which the international community has remained unmoved by Israel’s appalling crimes.
Although the attacks were condemned by the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, he insisted that “they did not happen in a vacuum”.
Israel’s perpetuation of a brutal genocide as a response to the attacks laid bare the brutality of the IOF, which mercilessly massacred over 68,280 Palestinians for allegedly rescuing dozens of Israeli captives held in Gaza.
This atrocity has not only been inflicted on Palestinians, but also on Israeli captives, whose rescue became the excuse of Israel to wage the aggression. Many of these captives were killed by the IOF based on the controversial “Hannibal directive” on the day of the attacks, or during the non-stop indiscriminate airstrikes across the besieged enclave.
Despite pouring billions of dollars into Hasbara, it is clear that Israel has completely lost control over the narrative. Millions of people have participated in protest actions, mobilizations, and social media campaigns in support of the Palestinian people and their struggle for liberation, and can see clearly, past the manipulation, what the zionist project truly is.
Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAKeir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.Orcas discuss Genocide-supporting and complicit Zionists. Donald Trump, Keith Starmer, David Lammy, Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting are acknowledged as evil genocide-complicit and supporting cnuts.
As Israel’s October 1 invasion of Lebanon unfolds, the media’s complicity in shaping public perception raises urgent questions, particularly when viewed through the lens of a controversial 1984 conference where influential advertising and media figures gathered to refine Israel’s narrative strategies. This conference laid the groundwork for a sophisticated propaganda campaign—Hasbara—that sought to sanitize Israel’s actions and cast its military operations in a favorable light. Today, as Western journalists whitewash, distort, and conceal [Israel’s ?] the realities of Israel’s deadly campaign of violence, the enduring legacy of this meeting becomes alarmingly clear, revealing how narratives crafted decades ago continue to shape the coverage of a conflict that claims countless lives.
In the first week of October, Israeli forces fired 355 bullets at a car containing a five-year-old, then shot at rescue workers who rushed to save her life. A horrific crime – yet, per many Western media headlines, she was simply a “girl killed in Gaza.” The circumstances and perpetrators of her death, if mentioned at all, were invariably buried at the bottom of reports, well hidden from the 80% of the news-consuming public who only read headlines, not accompanying articles.
By contrast, on October 15, Sky News was very keen that its viewers know the names and faces of four “teenage” IDF soldiers “killed” in a “Hezbollah drone attack,” humanizing and infantilizing individuals who, by mere token of their service in Israel’s military, are by definition, guilty of genocide. In passing, the same report briskly noted: “‘23 die’ in Gaza school strike.” Their identities, ages, and photos, let alone clarity on who or what murdered them, weren’t provided.
Moreover, the inverted commas incongruously hovering around the number of Palestinians killed subtly undermined that claim’s credibility while reducing the child victims to an afterthought compared to the considerably more important quartet of deceased IDF genocidaires. MintPress News senior staff writer Alan MacLeod put it succinctly when he Tweeted, “In years to come, students in university departments around the world will be studying the propaganda embedded in this headline. It’s truly incredible how much propaganda has been packed into 16 words.”
The mainstream media’s systematic use of distancing and evasive language, omission and other duplicitous chicanery to downplay or outright justify Israel’s murder of innocent civilians while simultaneously dehumanizing their victims and delegitimizing Palestinian resistance against brutal, illegal IDF occupation is as unconscionable as it is well-documented. Amazingly though, ‘twasn’t ever thus. Once upon a time, mainstream news networks exposed Israel’s war crimes without qualification, and anchors and pundits openly condemned these actions on live TV to audiences of millions.
The story of how Western media was transformed into Israel’s doting, servile propaganda appendage is not only a fascinating and sordid hidden chronicle. It is a deeply educational lesson in how imperial power can easily subordinate supposed arbiters of truth to its will. Comprehending how we got to this point equips us with the tools to assess, identify, and deconstruct lies large and small – and effectively challenge and counter not only Israel’s falsehoods but the entire settler colonial endeavor.
‘NEIGHBORHOOD BULLY’
On June 6, 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon. The effort was ostensibly intended to drive Palestinian Liberation Organization freedom fighters away from their positions on Israel’s northern border. But, as the IDF savagely pushed ever-deeper into the country, including Beirut, it became clear that ethnic cleansing, massacres, and land theft were – as in Palestine – the true goal. Throughout the Lebanese capital, news crews from major networks and reporters from the West’s biggest newspapers were waiting.
Israel’s rapacious bloodlust and casual contempt for Arab lives had hitherto been, by and large, successfully concealed from the outside world. Suddenly, though, scenes of deliberate IDF airstrikes on residential housing blocks, Tel Aviv’s trigger-happy soldiers running amok in Beirut’s streets, and hospitals overflowing with civilians suffering from grave injuries, including chemical burns due to Israel’s use of phosphorus shells, were broadcast the world over, to nigh-universal outcry. As veteran NBC news anchor John Chancellor contemporarily explained to Western viewers:
What in the world is going on? Israel’s security problem, on its border, is 50 miles to the south. What’s an Israeli army doing here in Beirut? The answer is we are now dealing with an imperial Israel, which is solving its problems in someone else’s country, world opinion be damned.”
From: “Hasbara: Israel’s Public Image: Problems and Remedies”
Global shock and repulsion at Israel’s conduct would only ratchet during the IDF’s resultant illegal military occupation of swaths of Lebanon. In September 1982, an Israel-backed armed Christian militia, Phalange, entered Sabra, a Beirut neighborhood home to many Palestinians displaced by the 1948 Nakba. Over a two-day span, they slaughtered up to 3,500 people while mutilating and raping countless others. Again, unfortunately for Tel Aviv, mainstream journalists were on hand to document these heinous crimes first-hand.
To say the least, Israel had an international PR disaster of historic proportions on its blood-soaked hands. The risk that further exposure of its genocidal nature might decisively and permanently shift global opinion in favor of the Palestinians and the Arab world more generally was significant. The attack on Lebanon had already spurred Western news outlets to critically reassess other illegal annexations and occupations in which Israel was and remains engaged. As ABC News reporter Richard Threlkeld commented at the time:
Israel was always that gallant little underdog democracy fighting for survival against all the odds. Now, the Israelis have annexed East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, settled down more or less permanently on the West Bank, and occupied close to half of Lebanon. In the interests of self-defense, that gallant little underdog, Israel, has suddenly started behaving like the neighborhood bully.”
So it was that in the summer of 1984, the American Jewish Congress – a major Zionist lobby organization – convened a conference in Jerusalem, Israel’s Public Image: Problems and Remedies. It was chaired by U.S. advertising supremo Carl Spielgovel, who a decade earlier provided pro bono advice to the Israeli government on strategies for publicly communicating why Tel Aviv refused to adhere to the terms of the Henry Kissinger-brokered 1973 Sinai Accords. Spielgovel later recalled:
It occurred to me then that the Israelis were doing a good job at training their military people, and they were doing a relatively good job at training their diplomatic corps. But they weren’t spending any time training information officers, people who could present Israel’s case to embassies and TV anchormen around the world. Over the years, I made this a personal cause celebre.”
The 1984 Jerusalem conference offered Spielgovel and a welter of Western advertising and public relations executives, media specialists, editors, journalists, and leaders of major Zionist advocacy groups an opportunity to achieve that malign objective. Together, they hammered out a dedicated strategy for ensuring the “crisis” caused by news reporting on the invasion of Lebanon two years earlier would never be repeated. Their antidote? Ceaseless, methodical, and wide-ranging “Hasbara” – Hebrew for propaganda – for “changing people’s minds [and] making them think differently.”
‘BIG SCOOP’
The AJC subsequently published records of the conference. They offer extraordinarily candid insight into how multiple Hasbara strategies, which have been in perpetual operation ever since were birthed. For example, basic propaganda messages were agreed upon. This included messages that are echoed by Israel’s supporters to this day, emphasizing Israel’s regional importance to the U.S. and Europe, Western cultural and political values, geographic vulnerability, and supposed striving for peace in the face of implacable Palestinian belligerence and intransigence.
As Judith Elizur, an expert in “communications” from Tel Aviv’s Hebrew University, explained:
Because the ‘power dimension’ of Israel’s image is so problematic, it seems to me that Hasbara must concentrate on reinforcing other aspects of Israel that have a positive appeal – medicine, agriculture, science, archaeology…We have been too preoccupied with extinguishing political brush fires. We need to devote more of our resources to long-range image-making. We must recreate a multi-dimensional image of Israel which will assure us the basic support we require in times of crisis.”
There was extensive discussion of how to present “unpalatable policies” to Western populations, and counter the perception of Israel as “Goliath steamrolling” across West Asia, against adversaries “outgunned, outclassed and outmanned” with “no capacity to resist.” The necessity of training the Jewish diaspora in countering criticism of Israel was considered paramount.
AJC’s president lamented that “many American Jews” had condemned the invasion of Lebanon and “did us a terrible disservice.” Any such future “disagreement” would make it “very difficult for us to conduct Hasbara effectively.”
From: “Hasbara: Israel’s Public Image: Problems and Remedies”
Joseph Block, Pepsi’s former vice president of public relations, stressed the need for a dedicated, 24/7 Israel press operation “equipped to offer foreign journalists an occasional exclusive or scoop” and engage in other media outreach to balance critical coverage and get reporters and newsrooms ‘on side.’ Block lamented that had Israeli officials not “briefed NBC and other networks appropriately” and given them “a big scoop” during Lebanon’s invasion, “a different story would have reached America’s 90 million TV households”:
News doesn’t just jump into a camera. It’s directed. It’s managed. It’s made accessible. Public relations is a process that makes news available in a particular form. In the US, PR is as important as accounting, the law and the military…As a corporate spokesman for two of America’s top 50 corporations, I wish I had a shekel for every time I said, ‘no comment’ to a reporter. I was always careful, however, not to antagonize or intimidate the reporter. I knew I had to live with him or her.”
Yoram Ettinger, media analysis chief at the Israel Information Center, concurred, declaring that media framing on Israel’s actions needed to be determined in advance. “Actions” such as “blowing up houses,” which were “difficult to explain,” could be preemptively justified or at least relativized by placing them “in context” while “[drawing] analogies that others will understand.” This would “help others to interpret their meaning,” per Tel Aviv’s perspectives.
The Conference hoped such efforts would mean “our American friends will be able to take a more activist posture as amplifiers of our policy” and assist them in “tucking away the house problems in a back room.” It was also suggested that on an individual and organizational level, Zionist activists serve as a rapid reaction force, deluging news outlets with complaints en masse should their coverage of Israel be at all critical. One attendee boasted of their personal success in this regard:
One day CBS News Radio reported that an American soldier had been hurt by stepping on an Israeli cluster bomb at the Beirut airport. I called CBS to point out that no one had established the bomb was an Israeli one. One hour later CBS reported that an American soldier had stepped on a bomb; this time the report omitted any reference to Israel.”
‘FREQUENT VIOLATIONS’
Another significant recommendation came from Carl Spielgovel: creating a “training program” to bring carefully selected Israeli information specialists into U.S. advertising, PR agencies, and major news outlets. The initiative aimed to equip them with industry insights, ensure Hasbara efforts were maximized, and establish close relationships between Israeli officials and the organizations to which they were assigned.
These “specialists” would operate under the guidance of a U.S.-Israeli council described as “wise persons who can project different scenarios and how to cope with them” on complex issues like “annexation and Jerusalem.” Spielgovel was careful to clarify that he was “not suggesting that we make policy” but rather that “we should make the best minds available to help elucidate the consequences of certain policies.” The goal, he suggested, was to reinforce to the American public that Tel Aviv remains Washington’s “staunch political and military ally.”
Spielgovel further proposed that future AJC conferences should incorporate input from “young people” and people of color to better promote Tel Aviv’s image among diverse “constituencies.” He argued that “Hasbara needs to implant in the consciousness of the world the day-to-day existence” of Israeli citizens, requiring a steady stream of “stories in the arts, business, and cooking sections of U.S. newspapers.” Since then, a dedicated Hasbara program aimed at cultivating skilled Zionist advocates in the U.S. has operated continuously.
Buoyed by its success, the operation soon expanded to include school and university students worldwide, training them to act as vigorous advocates for Israel in classrooms and on campuses. Graduates of these Israeli-funded programs frequently enter influential fields, including journalism, where they continue to promote Hasbara narratives and defend Israel’s actions. The impact on Western media coverage of Palestine has been profound.
To a significant degree, the portrayal of Tel Aviv as “the gallant little underdog democracy fighting for survival against all the odds” has been firmly reestablished. Despite the ongoing crisis in Gaza, mainstream outlets seldom provide context for Palestinian resistance to Israel’s policies of annexation, occupation, and military actions. Coverage nearly always frames Israel’s actions as “self-defense” against “terrorist” threats, with Western journalists keenly aware of potential repercussions for diverging from this narrative.
From: “Hasbara: Israel’s Public Image: Problems and Remedies”
The rapid reaction force proposed at the 1984 AJC conference remains highly active. An extensive network of Hasbara-trained individuals and Israel lobby organizations is always on standby, ready to pressure and intimidate news outlets if coverage diverges from favorable framing or casts Israel in a critical light. As a senior BBC producer once confided to veteran media critic Greg Philo:
We wait in fear for the telephone call from the Israelis. The only issue we face then is how high up it’s come from them. Has it come from a monitoring group? Has it come from the Israeli embassy? And how high has it gone up our organization? Has it reached the editor or director general? I have had journalists on the phone to me before a major news report, asking which words can I use – ‘is it alright I say this’?”
An October exposé by Al Jazeera, citing testimony from BBC and CNN whistleblowers, detailed “pro-Israel bias in coverage, systematic double standards, and frequent violations of journalistic principles” at both networks. According to insiders, much of this was driven by concerns over how Israeli officials might perceive and react to certain coverage. Independent activists and journalists, however, are not bound by such institutional pressures—and since October 7, 2023, they have mounted a formidable challenge to Hasbara narratives.
Were it not for the persistent investigations by outlets like MintPress News, The Grayzone, and Electronic Intifada, unfounded allegations promoted by Israel since the outset of the Gaza conflict—such as claims of Hamas committing mass rape or beheading infants—might never have been thoroughly debunked and might still shape the “context” for Israel’s actions against Palestinians. Meanwhile, countless concerned citizens have actively challenged Western narratives on the conflict in real-time across social media, a groundswell of critique that may be fueling pushback within some mainstream newsrooms.
It is a poetic irony that the same information warfare techniques once honed under Hasbara are now being directed at Israel and its defenders. For decades, these methods allowed Israel to proceed with its gradual displacement of the Palestinian people, often with tacit approval from Western audiences. But those times seem to be fading. Today, critics and former targets of Israeli policy are effectively using these strategies, wielding what they see as their most potent tools—truth and justice.
Feature image | Sol Goldstein, spokesman for a group of Jewish organizations, holds up a German language newspaper with headlines questioning the validity of the Holocaust, at a news conference in Chicago, June 14, 1978. Photo | AP
Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist and MintPress News contributor exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions. His work has previously appeared in The Cradle, Declassified UK, and Grayzone. Follow him on Twitter @KitKlarenberg.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect MintPress News editorial policy.
