Bill Gates was quoted as saying, “It’s fine to celebrate success, but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.”
Of course, it’s easier to say that when your net worth is more than $130 billion. But admitting failure is a challenge for anyone.
That is why it is impressive that according to former Jerusalem Post opinion editor Saul Singer’s book Start-Up Nation, one of the secrets of Israel’s success is a culture that embraces and facilitates admitting and learning from failures.
Such positive spin could provide a silver lining following a trend of gloomy reports in Hebrew media outlets that intensified over the past week, portraying Israeli hasbara (public diplomacy) in the current war as a complete failure.
A Channel 12 report by foreign news editor Arad Nir on the top-rated prime time newscast last Thursday stretched on for more than 12 minutes about the failures of Israeli hasbara without including a counter-narrative.
Last weekend’s Maariv, which prides itself as being the closest thing Israel has to a balanced Hebrew newspaper, featured no less than 10 articles and columns about Israel’s failing at public diplomacy and not one singling out any success.
Just in case the message did not get through, the paper also sponsored a poll, which found that 74% consider “Israel’s hasbara abroad about the events of Oct. 7 and the Swords of Iron War” a failure; only 15% called it a success, and 11% admitted that they don’t know.
Other questions asked in the same poll revealed very negative feelings about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which undoubtedly influenced the responses to the question about hasbara. Anyone who doesn’t like him is unlikely to praise his government’s PR. So the newspaper made a point of revealing that even among the voters of current coalition parties, 57% give Israeli hasbara a failing grade.
The poll bothered me because, after covering politics for this newspaper for nearly a quarter century, I know there are different ways of phrasing a question to get the results an editor wants to receive.
What if the question had singled out Israeli celebrities like popular IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari, former government mouthpiece Eylon Levy, and pro-Israel activists Noa Tishby and Yoseph Haddad?
Chances are, the results would have been very different.
So I contacted the pollster, Menachem Lazar of Panels Politics/Lazar Research, and asked him if his question differentiated between the hasbara of Netanyahu’s government and that of the IDF, pro-Israel organizations, civic movements, and activists.
“It was a general question on Israeli hasbara,” he said. “I agree with you that it should have been subdivided, but I think most of the public doesn’t understand what non-governmental hasbara is, except for maybe what Noa Tishby does.”This is what the public needs to understand: The anti-Israel movement is fighting a war for public opinion. It is successful precisely because they speak in one voice. They have a movement with one end goal and a vocabulary that guides them.Israel doesn’t have that luxury. It is fighting a battle for its existence.
The Israeli government needs to prioritize the military battlefield.
When it comes to messaging, Israel has three separate audiences: domestic to make the public feel safe; its enemies to deter them; and the international community. The messaging that is effective for audiences one and two repels audience three, causing constant damage.
Because of that prioritization, the fight for Israel in the public arena largely falls to independent influencers and organizations that do not align behind a single message. There must be effective organizations focusing solely on world public opinion.
Since Oct. 7, the media watchdog where I work, HonestReporting, has punched above its weight, getting five antisemitic journalists suspended, reassigned, or fired from The New York Times, CNN, Reuters, and AP, as well as an anti-Israel activist kicked off Instagram and Facebook. We have become an educational resource on social media, providing information that pro-Israel news consumers cannot get anywhere else, and we even influenced the Pulitzer Prize awards.
There have been surprising successes in this war that cannot be taken for granted. The other side has an infinite number of fighters and resources, and documents have proven that Hamas’s PR strategy for Oct. 7 was prepared well in advance, while the Israeli government was caught unprepared to fight for its image.
Netanyahu did not appoint an English-language spokesperson until after the war began, more than 10 months after he took office. Four government ministries handled hasbara, and confusion reigned over who did what.
But a team of spokesmen led by Eylon Levy was soon established, and while he is gone, there are still official briefings in English during which the foreign press can ask questions to government spokespeople four days a week.
As mentioned before in this column, the IDF has done far more to fight on the international media battlefield in this war than it has ever attempted before, learning many lessons from past mistakes. What a shame it would be to broadly pronounce the media battle a failure and wrongly taint Daniel Hagari, Peter Lerner, Jonathan Conricus, Richard Hecht, Nadav Shoshani, and their team of IDF spokesmen.
Celebrities like Tishby, Scarlett Johansson, Jerry Seinfeld, Michael Rapaport, Scooter Braun, and David Draiman deserve credit for using their good names to help Israeli public diplomacy. Tishby in particular tackles key issues and is ready to help provide simple answers to tough questions.
These non-governmental efforts have made a significant impact. It is safe to say that if such public diplomacy failed, the war would have ended long ago and would not have passed day 260. Other wars in Gaza were forced to stop by day three.
Those fighting for Israel’s international image cannot quit this uphill battle because they know that winning on the media battlefield is the key to winning on the military battlefield and that we cannot give up and allow more harm to the Jewish state and Jewish people around the world.
There have been plenty of mistakes in Israeli hasbara in this war, and the government, army, pro-Israel organizations, and activists have been learning from them to be more effective in inevitable future conflicts.
As Bill Gates said, the lessons of failure must be heeded. Only if that happens can there be true success to celebrate in the future.
The writer is the executive director and executive editor of the pro-Israel media watchdog HonestReporting. He served as chief political correspondent and analyst of The Jerusalem Post for 24 years.