Israel’s Failure at Hasbara

Israel has been brilliant at fighting in Gaza, and at preserving the lives of Gazan civilians, but it has not done enough to defend its conduct of the war. More on this singular lapsus, as set out by Yaakov Klein and Peter Lerner, can be found here.

Since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas War in October 2023, few issues have been as contentious or as professionally corrosive for those tasked with defending Israel’s case internationally as the casualty toll in the Gaza Strip.

For over two years, Israel has faced relentless accusations of genocide, disproportionate force, and war crimes, driven largely by a single claim: the number of people reportedly killed in Gaza.

That figure, issued by the Hamas-led health ministry, has been cited repeatedly by governments, international organizations, and global media outlets, often without qualification or scrutiny.

The two authors of this article have spent much of the past two-and-a-half years trying to explain Israel’s war on television panels, in closed door briefings, and in lectures halls – often undergoing hostile questioning, ticking studio clocks, and the quiet knowledge that a single unchallenged statistic can undo an entire argument.

We have had to convey how modern urban warfare is conducted, why casualty figures in active conflict zones are unreliable, and how, even if Hamas’s numbers had been accurate, they still failed to tell the real story of the war.

That story is about Hamas’s deliberate embedding of its military infrastructure within civilian areas; about its systematic use of human shields; and about a terrorist organization that benefits strategically from civilian deaths.

What Israel has done in Gaza, we often argued, is not unique. It is what any military does when fighting a barbaric terrorist enemy entrenched inside a civilian population.

What is unique, however, is the tremendous effort the IDF put into warning civilians to move away from areas about to be targeted, by dropping millions of leaflets, sending millions of text messages, and making millions of robocalls. As John Spencer, West Point professor of urban warfare, has noted, “Israel has done more and implemented more measures to prevent civilian harm than any military in the history of urban warfare.” Why did the IDF spokesmen never mention all the ways it has warned civilians away from harm? Why did they never quote Professor Spencer as part of their presentations to the media in Israel? Only at Jihad Watch and the Geller Report have you heard repeatedly about those millions of warnings — leaflets, on-line messaging, phone calls — that have been used by the IDF to minimize civilian casualties.

Every time a figure on casualty figures was released by what the world’s media called the Gaza Ministry of Health (in reality, a puppet of Hamas), the Israelis should have said, immediately and repeatedly and loudly, that “all such figures come from the terrorist group Hamas, with a long record of lies and we urge the media to remind their audiences of this fact.”

It took months before Israel ever put out its estimate of the number of Hamas combatants had been killed. The figures put out by Hamas itself, through its mouthpiece the Gaza Health Ministry, were reported as if all of those killed in Gaza were civilians: “The Gaza Health Ministry says that 24,000 [34,000, 55,000, 70,000] people have now been killed in Gaza.” And the media carrying this story did not ask themselves how many of those killed were Hamas combatants. It was up to the IDF spokesmen to make that point, and very few of them did.

Between 50,000 and 70,000 articles were published worldwide on the war in Gaza in the first nine months of that war. Compare that to the 1,000 articles published about the first nine months of the American campaign in Mosul to defeat the Islamic State (ISIS). Look also at how the New York Times published 6,656 articles about the Gaza War in its first nine months. Compare that figure to the 80 articles the Times published over nine months about the American-led battle to free Mosul from ISIS over nine months in 2016-2017, its 198 articles about the Tigray War in Ethiopia, which killed 600,000 in a year, and the 5,434 articles it published during the first 13 years of Syria’s civil war.

The world media has been giving its obsessive attention to Israel in Gaza, its supposed “crimes against humanity,” and the exaggerated and stage-managed suffering of the Gazan civilians. There needs to be aggressive pushback from Israel and its supporters.