Near the end of his recent 60 Minutes interview, Benjamin Netanyahu picked up a smartphone and held it toward the camera. It was a telling gesture — half warning, half grievance. Anyone, he explained, could use this little instrument to say anything about anyone. You could paint Major Garrett (the interviewer) as a monster. Say it often enough and people would believe it. Israel, he argued, has been the victim of exactly this kind of machinery, besieged on the media front by enemies who lie relentlessly. His solution? Fight back with truth, and fight harder.

It was a revealing moment, not for what it said about Israel’s critics, but for what it revealed about how Netanyahu understands the problem. His diagnosis was from a Cold War mindset: the propaganda war is a contest between competing narratives, and the side with the better apparatus wins. By his account, Israel has simply been outgunned by more competent liars. What he does not seriously entertain is a more uncomfortable possibility — that the policies themselves, and the statements and actions of his own cabinet, are the core of the problem. When a product fails in the marketplace, the answer is rarely that the advertising wasn’t slick enough.

This is the fundamental confusion at the heart of Israel’s communications crisis: mistaking a product problem for a marketing problem.

Netanyahu is not entirely wrong that Israel faces genuine disinformation. Many of its loudest critics are ill-informed, some are nakedly antisemitic, and a significant portion of viral content about the conflict is factually distorted or decontextualized. These are real phenomena, and they deserve to be challenged. But Netanyahu’s framing — that Israel is a virtuous actor being buried under lies — leaves no room for accountability. When asked directly whether Israel has made mistakes in Gaza or the West Bank that might have contributed to its negative image, he conceded, almost in passing, that yes, mistakes happen in war. Then........

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