In my 25 years living and serving in Israel, I have never once uttered the words, “Is Israel losing the war?” Even during the Yom Kippur War before I immigrated to Israel, when Syrian and Egyptian troops invaded across the border, Russia threatened to land paratroopers in Sinai and Egypt, and the head of the border kibbutz I was guarding said we’d be lucky to see the sunrise, I never once smelled a whiff of defeat.
Nowadays the situation is completely different.
On a sunny Sabbath morning, I went to synagogue and my cell phone vibrated. It was an alarm that eight Israeli Defense Force soldiers had been killed in an explosion in Gaza. The Israel Defense Forces announced that the damage was so great that it would be difficult to identify the dead or locate their bodies. It is a well-known fact that the death of a soldier in Israel brings deep grief, as if a family member had been lost.
Arrogance has let us down
But these eight brave young Israelis lost their lives searching for the monster responsible for the Hamas massacre of October 7th: 120 hostages hidden in Gaza by Hamas and its leaders in Qatar.
But today, will we hear the stories of brave IDF soldiers whose bodies were torn apart and see the fires caused by hundreds of Hezbollah rockets consuming northern Israel, or will we hear more about the fake massacre of 174 Palestinians caused by the IDF heroic rescue of Almog Meir Jan, Andrei Kozlov, Shlomi Ziv and Noa Al-Ghamani?
For decades, many of us have criticized Israel’s public relations efforts. As part of the government’s public relations (hasbara) infrastructure, I often said the reason was lack of funding, that it wasn’t a priority, that they needed money for the Iron Dome and fighter jets. I was wrong. Today, the lack of effective crisis communication is due to the same reason Israel suffered a massive Holocaust-style terror attack on October 7th: arrogance.
Lower levels of Israeli intelligence warned of the attack, but the middle ranks could not believe what they saw. They said Hamas was incapable of such coordinated attacks on Israeli homes. Information about a large-scale Hamas attack never reached the prime minister’s desk.
Recently, a close friend of mine who runs a PR firm in Israel asked me to stop uploading maps of Hezbollah rocket terror attacks. When I asked him why, he said it made us look weak and was offensive to many Israelis.
I quickly responded that the maps were for the international media, not the domestic one, that we are not war criminals, and that if these maps are causing anxiety and depression among Israeli publicists, they need to seek treatment for PTSD and withdraw from the information campaign.
Does Israel have a professional crisis communications system? The answer is yes, but it is extremely limited.
The IDF press office is doing its best, but it lacks experts with years of experience in crisis communications — experts who know how to communicate effectively with international news agencies. The same can be said for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
There is one public relations firm under contract with the Foreign Office that does a great job. I won’t name them because they don’t need to be a big target, but to be more effective, this private PR outfit needs to hire dozens of experienced public affairs crisis communications specialists in cities across the U.S., Canada and Europe. They need to match the number of hasbara experts employed by our adversaries, from Qatar, Russia, Syria and Iran to Indonesia, Turkey, Pakistan and India.
Does Israel have professional public relations personnel? This question can be easily answered with another question: Where is the Israel/Hamas/Hezbollah war media center in Jerusalem?
Israel has withdrawn from the north and south. If Iran launches a thousand missiles into this holy war, will we withdraw from the center? To win this war, we need native English speakers who can address a global audience.
In the past few months, the Prime Minister’s Office has fired two of our most English-speaking champions in the field of public diplomacy: Eilon Levy and Noah Tishby, we miss you. And it’s not just an Israeli problem. While we are accused of not controlling speech in Jerusalem, the anti-Semitism we have failed to neutralize in the media is spreading like a malignant cancer to universities and the streets of every city in the United States and Europe.
If you have 10+ years of experience in a global crisis communications professional organization, please contact me. We are seeking urgent donations and grants to form an Israeli non-governmental crisis communications rapid response team to combat global anti-Semitism.
There is no evacuation from the center of Israel.
The author is President of Leiden Communications Israel, a crisis communications, public affairs and digital PR organization with offices in New York and Ra’anana. He has served as an executive officer in the Israel Defense Forces Spokesperson’s Office and as a senior media/intercultural communications and social media consultant for the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
