It was a bold move, but Israel was correct to cancel meetings in Washington after the Biden administration chose to abstain from – rather than veto – a UN Security Council resolution that did not link a ceasefire to release of all hostages.
Israel now must launch an all-out public relations offensive with a single overriding message: “Return all of our hostages and there will be a ceasefire.” It must insist on an explicit, unbreakable linkage between the two, and drive this message forward with the Biden administration and the entire world, again and again.
Israel cannot afford to wait because Hamas and its apologists and supporters are winning the PR war. The Palestinians are unparalleled masters of propaganda who have succeeded in painting Israel as a rogue nation disproportionately employing devastating force against defenseless civilians and seeking the genocide of the Palestinian people.
The IDF, in this telling, is a remorseless engine of destruction driven by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right coalition of political leaders who oppose Palestinian statehood and are unwilling to compromise to achieve a two-state solution.
To see the success of the Hamas PR strategy, just look at the protests occurring throughout the world. The narratives are wrong-headed but pervasive: Israel murders babies, the Jewish nation has devolved into an apartheid state, the world should support a “free” Palestine “from the river to the sea.”
Hamas's absurdities must not go unchallenged
While spinning their false narratives, Hamas propagandists focus on lopsided body counts comparing the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza and the number of Israelis killed on October 7. What’s missing, of course, are context and reality. Hamas targets and murders civilians, including women and children, even mutilating bodies and employing mass rape to oppose so-called “occupation.”
Hamas-controlled institutions intentionally conflate numbers of dead fighters killed in combat with Palestinian civilians used by them as human shields.
These absurdities cannot go unchallenged with Israel smeared by legions on social media parroting Hamas talking points. It should be Hamas which is correctly labeled as genocidal, with the onus upon them to immediately end the war.
For months, “ceasefire” has been the demand of pro-Palestinian demonstrators. Israel should undercut them by expressing willingness to implement an immediate ceasefire, but if and only if Hamas immediately releases all hostages.
This positioning would signal that Israel will no longer play Hamas’s cynical game of facilitating protracted bloodshed and suffering by haggling over the number of jailed Palestinian offenders to be released per innocent Israeli hostage.
Israel possesses the moral high ground in this conflict but is failing to effectively convey that fact. Who in their right mind can justify the Palestinian abduction and detention of innocent civilians, who are being held in inhumane conditions, raped, and subjected to unrelenting physical and psychological torture?
No legitimate case can be made for any of this, so Israel must force the pro-Hamas side to make it. Force Palestinian supporters to defend Hamas holding Israeli children hostage and blocking attempts for a ceasefire.
It is in Hamas’s interest to keep the hostages indefinitely because they are the most important bargaining chip they possess. That is why Hamas and its Qatari backers – not to mention the UN – have tried to decouple the implementation of a ceasefire from the release of the hostages. The matter of the hostages amply demonstrates the moral imbalance between the two sides and shows that this entire war, and the horrible loss of life and destruction that it has engendered, is the fault of Hamas.
It was Hamas, lest we forget, that violated a ceasefire on October 7 by killing, raping, and kidnapping everyone they could get their hands on. That is how we got here and that is why there is no ceasefire.
The hostages are not an abstraction, which the collective word can sometimes unintentionally convey. Each captive is an innocent human being, and Israel must make it a priority to humanize victims including baby Kfir Bibas, who just turned one on January 18th, and the girls and women raped in Hamas captivity.
Israel should continue facilitating humanitarian aid into Gaza, while also pursuing its military campaign and engaging in diplomatic talks. But while these steps go on in the background, in the foreground Israel must express a single-minded demand: release all hostages to secure a ceasefire. Every Israeli representative and supporter should unrelentingly drive home this message at every opportunity.
This most recent anti-Israel UN resolution highlights the need for a major revamp when it comes to Israel’s PR strategy. A course correction is better late than never.
The writer is founder and CEO of the crisis communications firm Red Banyan and author of Amazon bestsellers Crisis Averted and The Cancel Culture Curse: From Rage to Redemption in a World Gone Mad.