From aggressors to victims: the transformation of Israel's media narrative

It's the summer of 1982. Israel wants to destroy the Palestine Liberation Organisation's (PLO) contingent in neighbouring Lebanon, and pummels the country by air, land and sea.

At that time, at least 17,000 people were killed in Lebanon, and 30,000 more injured, almost all civilians, propelling Western media to denounce Israel as the "aggressors" and the "neighbourhood bully." What followed was a barbaric military raids against Palestinian refugees and Lebanese civilians in the camps of Sabra and Shatila - where up to 3,500 people were slaughtered in two days. Here the press would rightly describe the carnage as a "massacre."

Scenes of bombed buildings and broken families unsteadily walking through rubble amid the deaths of loved ones are reminiscent of the carnage seen in the same country today.

But now, in 2024, Israel is no longer considered a tyrant when it launches brutal assaults against civilian populations.

Instead, it's transformed itself into a victim acting solely out of "self-defence".

How did it accomplish this? According to experts, Israel's rebranding can be credited to its over-the-top hasbara campaign, which can be translated either as public diplomacy or propaganda, depending on who is asked.

Politically aligned TV

The first thing Israel needed to do to win over Western countries, especially the United States.
In 1982, it wasn't in the West's interests for the war to escalate, said Nasser Najjar, a Vancouver-based author and media consultant.

Speaking to TRT World, he said "The US government at the time, under President Ronald Reagan, was keen to stop further conflict - so the Western media narrative fed into US political ambitions as has always been the case."

Recognising this, Israel started paying more attention to shaping US foreign policy by moulding American public opinion.

After its perceived media failure in 1982, officials realised the need to revive its Hasbara campaign to redeem itself.

Israel has long understood the importance of crafting a narrative where it is the victim, acting in self-defence, with the tools of propaganda in building statehood older than the State of Israel itself.

Theodor Herzl, the founding father of Zionism, told an audience at the third Zionist Congress in 1899 held in Basel, Switzerland, "The time has come to act, to engage in propaganda and to work."

Israel is also aware that image building helps shape public opinion and also geopolitical outcomes. Influencing the US, as its largest donor and biggest ally, was critical in order to tilt the country's foreign policy more favourably toward Israel.

In the 1980s, the American Jewish Congress, a lobby group, reported: ''No single event has brought home the need for a more effective hasbara, or information program, more persuasively than the 1982 war in Lebanon and the events that followed.”

It was this moment in history that spurred the Israeli lobby to focus its control of the narrative of its occupation of Palestine, explains Sut Jhally to TRT World.

The University of Massachusetts communications professor said the post-1982 campaign "has been the most successful public relations campaign in history to turn the perception of reality upside down - to present Israel as acting purely defensively against barbaric Muslim hordes.”

Jhally is also the founder and Executive Director of the 2015 film The Occupation of the American Mind, which focuses on pro-Israel public relations efforts within the United States and how the Israeli government, the US government and the pro-Israel lobby began working to influence American media coverage of Israel.

Rebranding Israel

That's where leading advertiser and brand executive Carl Speilvogel comes in. He'd already travelled to Israel in 1976 to advise on communication and PR strategies, keeping the focus on "Israel's right to self defence".

But after 1982, he upped the ante. Speilvogel advised establishing a cabinet post dedicated to presenting Israeli policy in an "attractive way." Add to this the need to demonise Palestinians as 'terrorists'.

Speilvogel would reframe the Israel - Palestine conflict, with the emphasis that Israel's violence is always legitimate because it is self defence. The aim was not only to create strategies to counter negative images, but to also direct and manage public image in advance.

Upon his advice, by 1984 the Hasbara Project was launched to train Israelis in communications and offer placements in American companies. Two years later, the American Jewish Congress would raise $200,000 to invest in the Israeli government's public relations skills.

Palestinian thinker and academic Edward Said described the details of this desperate PR drive, which included "lunches and free trips for influential journalists; seminars for Jewish university students… bombarding congressmen and women with invitations and visits… training commentators to make frequent references to the Holocaust and Israel's predicament today… advertisements in the newspapers attacking Arabs and praising Israel."

Shared enemy

Israel is aware of the importance of image-building and has always needed Western media to bolster its narrative. It understands the value of steering public sentiment with regards to the conflict, and viewing Palestinians through an Israeli lens - as the enemy, as 'terrorists'.

After 9/11 - at the time in-between his stints as prime minister - Benjamin Netanyahu described the attacks on the US as "good" for Israeli-American relations.

He stated: "It will generate immediate sympathy (and) strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we've experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive haemorrhaging of terror."

In broadcasting the message that the world had a shared enemy - 'Muslim terrorists' - Netanyahu successfully forged alliances, and went on to scupper any peace talks between Israel and Palestine.

"Conflating Palestinian resistance with the spectre of terrorism confers a legitimacy on Israeli military operations that short-circuits diplomatic efforts," wrote Palestinian-American journalist Ali Abunimah in a 2011 essay about Israeli accountability.

Hasbara no more

But the past few decades of Israel's propaganda campaign are now being challenged.

Palestinians who were once either erased from the narrative or seen as 'terrorists', are now able to show what humanity looks like over social media.

It took the bitter pain of the Gaza war to set fire to the hasbara playbook, with Gaza journalists on the ground using the tools set up by Western media tycoons to tell their own unedited stories.

Meanwhile, the Western press has regurgitated the Israeli script, that Israel is destroying Gaza to "eliminate Hamas."

In wanting to understand both sides of the story, "young people, young activists, bloggers, journalists took to social media to share what is actually happening on the ground in Gaza," explained Sahar Khamis from the University of Maryland to TRT World.

It's through this alternative narrative that a "pro-Palestine coverage started to emerge, and especially among young people from Palestine, but not only from Palestine, so that is the paradigm shift and the transition I'm talking about. And I think it's a very important one,” added Khamis, an associate professor in communication, who has also authored a paper on the role of social media vs. mainstream media in Gaza war coverage.

When peaceful pro-Palestine, anti-apartheid marches filled the streets of cities across the world calling for a ceasefire, politicians aligned with Israel declared them to be "hate marches."

However, these attempts to equate anti-Zionism with anti-Semistism did not stop the protests from continuing to take place.

In March, Netanyahu admitted that his propaganda wheels were broken, placing the blame on a lack of articulate English speakers on the government's team.

"There simply are no people, you are surrounded by people who can't put two words together (in English). We need to find them."

Even presidential hopeful Donald Trump jumped in to comment on Israel's media strategy, saying in April: "They're losing the PR war. They're losing it big."

Losing war

Following the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on October 7, Western media reported almost exclusively from Israel's point of view, according to some analysts.

At CNN for example, all journalists reporting on Israel and Palestine are required to submit their work for review by the network's bureau in West Jerusalem before it can be published, according to a longstanding policy.

While CNN states that this policy aims to ensure accurate reporting on a divisive issue, it has resulted in much of the network's recent coverage of the war on Gaza—and its global repercussions—being influenced by journalists who operate under the oversight of Israel's military censor.

It became obvious that there was also a lack of contextualisation of the coverage across mainstream media. "In American media and Western media at large, and you know some of the aspects were missing, the coverage was not deep enough and it was not balanced enough," Khamis said.

As the war progressed, social media censorship failed to quell a burst of citizen journalism across Palestine. The world was now able to witness Israel's destructive approach, high civilian casualties and the demolition of Gaza's infrastructure in real time. And finally mainstream media slowly started to realise Israel's role in the unfolding genocide.

Both a sentiment shift in the public's response to the war and United Nations reports stating Israel's actions as war crimes, added even more pressure on the press to not characterise Israel as the victim.

Friends of Israel

In the United Kingdom, whether watching the BBC or ITN, it's clear that considering Israel as a perpetrator of war on occupied land would never be acceptable to Israel's allies.

Funding the media cogs to spread Israeli propaganda remains an important weapon in propping up the State of Israel. In 2022, the Israeli Cabinet approved a $30 million campaign led by Yair Lapid, the then-foreign minister, named "Concert" to covertly fund Israeli government propaganda in the United States and other Western countries. And in 2023, just weeks into the war, the government released more funds for its hasbara campaign.

There are journalists and some mainstream media networks who are working "overtime to make sure that the Israeli narrative shows up and that was obvious, of course, with the (debunked) New York Times piece on rape as a weapon," Najjar said.

Israeli lobby groups like AIPAC, which is known to heavily finance pro-Israel media narratives, continue to pressure both politicians and networks to follow course.

But it's an account that's no longer acceptable in the 21st century, with the world awakening to the realities of war and occupation.

In recent years, reports by media analysts show people have left the vacuum of mainstream media and are now choosing to either get their news from social media or through international competitors.

"Hasbara was indeed once a strong effective tool, but with more and more reliable sources now available, the mainstream media has to either sacrifice their credibility or their donors," Najjar added. "In America, they've chosen to sacrifice both credibility and logic."