Why Israel Must Fight for Reality Itself |
By the time Israel manages to refute a lie, the lie has often travelled the world, been translated into dozens of languages, cited by activists, repeated by journalists, adopted at the United Nations, absorbed into school curricula, embedded into Wikipedia entries, and fed into the large language models increasingly shaping how billions understand current events.
Israel is fighting a cognitive war alongside its wars against Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran. It may ultimately prove just as consequential.
For decades, Israel’s enemies understood something that many Israelis dismissed as secondary: victory is not achieved only on the battlefield. It is achieved in the realm of perception, and by determining which facts people encounter, whose voices are considered authoritative, and which narratives become accepted truth.
The objective is not simply to persuade, it is to construct an alternative reality.
In that reality, Zionism, the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, is no longer understood as the movement through which an indigenous people returned to its ancestral homeland after centuries of persecution and exile. Instead, it is recast as a uniquely illegitimate colonial enterprise.
In that reality, the world’s only Jewish state is transformed from a nation defending itself against organizations openly committed to its destruction into the primary source of instability in the Middle East.
In that reality, claims of “genocide” and deliberate “starvation” are treated not as contested allegations requiring rigorous evidentiary standards, but as established facts repeated with increasing certainty.
None of this happened by accident.
The old propaganda model depended........