Key Points and Summary: The public opinion war against Israel is a blueprint for future information warfare against the U.S.
-It details how partisan actors are weaponizing academic associations, activist journalism, and international organizations to push delegitimizing narratives, citing recent, unsubstantiated claims of genocide and famine in Gaza.
-These efforts create a “second front” where narratives can overshadow facts.
-The U.S. must expect similar tactics in its next overseas engagement and should proactively develop a national counter-information strategy for this new era of hybrid conflict.
The Information War on Israel: America Must Pay Attention
When U.S. President Donald Trump commented that Israel is winning the war but losing world opinion, he touched on a complex element in the Clausewitzian equation of war and politics.
War may be politics by other means, but translating victory on the battlefield into political results is not simple.
In the context of hybrid war, especially, public opinion has become a second front. Warfare has long been accompanied by a propaganda dimension, but the significance of this aspect has grown in the age of social media and the post-modern preference for narratives over facts.
Countering Negative Framing and the Israel Case
The public-opinion war against Israel is a case in point.
It has been accelerating recently for at least two reasons. Israel’s detractors and Hamas’ supporters are trying to put a negative frame around the developing Israel Defense Forces campaign to take Gaza City, Hamas’ last stronghold.
In addition, political attention is beginning to shift rapidly toward the upcoming meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, where the high-level debate begins on Sept. 23. The Middle East conflict will be a key topic there, and not only because French President Emmanuel Macron has announced his intention to recognize a Palestinian state when he attends.
Amid these developments, efforts to sway public opinion against Israel have proliferated. No doubt, some of the effectiveness of these efforts relies on antisemitism, i.e., a predisposition in parts of the public to believe the worst of Israel and to dismiss counter-arguments, even when they are rooted in facts. Yet the extent to which public narratives can be instrumentalized has a broader relevance with important lessons for the United States. Israel has faced opposition from scholarly associations, journalists and UN-affiliated bodies.
In the event of a future U.S. military engagement, a similar opposition can be expected, and developing a counter-information strategy should be part of American security planning.
Scholarly Associations
On Aug. 31, the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) adopted a resolution declaring that Israel is carrying out genocide in Gaza. The public echo was prompt. The Guardian, for example, ran a headline announcing that, “The world’s top scholars on the crime” were in agreement that genocide was being carried out.
In fact, the article only cites one scholar, the IAGS President, Melanie O’Brien, an associate professor from Western Australia, whose sole comment is that the resolution was a “definitive statement.” The article avoids quoting any prominent academic expert on the conduct of the war itself. Surely one of the IAGS scholars might have been able to explain its determination.
In addition, while The Guardian initially reported that “an overwhelming majority of members” of the association supported the resolution, it had to amend that claim and concede the very low turn-out. While 86 percent of those who voted did indeed support the resolution, only 28 percent of members participated at all. At most, therefore, 24 precent of members cast votes in support of the genocide claim. What’s more, membership in the IAGS is not at all restricted to “top scholars.” According to the Association’s website, it also includes activists, artists, and policymakers, but there does not seem to be any process to screen applicants for genuine expertise.
It is therefore impossible to say that the resolution represents a scholarly judgment. This may explain why the IAGS could get basic facts wrong, such as the nature of the finding of the International Court of Justice. Nonetheless, the prestige associated with the name of a seemingly scholarly organization can be exploited successfully as a partisan tool.
This pattern is familiar from other scholarly associations that have passed anti-Israel resolutions. Activist minorities capture annual meetings or manipulate processes in order to force through extremist resolutions. Meanwhile, majorities of scholars are often unengaged in the political debate – or even repelled by it – and therefore do not participate. As a result, activist agendas are pushed through and appear to represent the organization. With some variations, the same playbook transpired at the meetings of the American Historical Association and the Modern Language Association – although in each, due to different bylaws, executive bodies were able to override convention votes. Nonetheless, the radicals in these cases achieve their public relations victory.
Activist Journalism
A similar initiative took place on different terrain early in September: a call for a “newsroom blackout” organized by Reports Without Borders and the international activist network Avaaz. Supposedly, more than 150 news outlets blacked out their front pages, ran banners, or otherwise signalled not only their grief over the death of journalists in Gaza, but also an unproven accusation that Israel is systematically targeting journalists.
By placing that assertion on their front page, participating newspapers symbolically blur the distinction between reporting and editorial opinion. This erosion of journalistic objectivity has come in for harsh criticism for prioritizing activism over reportage.
It is noteworthy that major newspapers chose not to participate, including the New York Times, Washington Post, and CNN. For the Israeli Foreign Ministry, the event “is not journalism. It is politics.”
Whatever the effectiveness of the blackout in terms of promoting a narrative, it is clearly part of a larger pattern of the politicization of journalism. On the ground in Gaza, this includes Hamas members claiming to be journalists even as they promote attacks on Israel, including on Oct. 7, 2023.
In addition to this phenomenon of willing participants – jihadists who are also engaged in journalism – one should add the more general problem of journalists working under repressive regimes that force them to minimize or even avoid critical accounts. This is as relevant in Gaza as it is in Tehran. Even reporters with the best of intentions may tend to color their stories in order to keep their credentials.
There is however an even larger problem with journalism and its role in shaping public opinion. During the past decade, journalism has in many cases given up on the principle of objectivity. Newsrooms and editorial boards have moved toward embracing forms of activist agendas as part of the larger “woke” culture shift. A former executive editor of the Associated Press, Kathleen Carroll, reportedly abandoned the goal of objectivity long ago, stating that it “reflects the world view of white, educated, fairly wealthy guys.” Hence the tendency for some newsrooms to adopt an activist voice, promoting pre-established frames and avoiding uncomfortable facts.
This redefinition of journalism in terms of political utility has been particularly pronounced in college newspapers, where the journalists of the future are taking their first steps. We can therefore expect more slanted reporting in the future: all the news that fits the agenda. In a future moment of national crisis, journalists cannot necessarily be counted on to provide unbiased accounts, and certainly not positions firmly supportive of the U.S.
International Organizations
The third example of narrative promotion has to do with the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), an analytic tool used to measure food insecurity. It was developed by the UN Food and Agricultural Organization in 2004 .
While the IPC is formally independent, it remains very close to the UN and therefore reflects the biases one has come to expect. On August 22, the IPC’s Famine Review Committee announced its determination that there is a famine in Gaza, the first such announcement outside of Africa. Yet there have been significant criticisms of the IPC methodology, in particular its reliance on“mid-upper arm circumference data” (MUAC) rather than “weight for height” (WHZ), since the declaration of famine is lower for the former (15 percent) than the latter (30 percent). In other words, the IPC is claimed to have chosen the metric more likely to prove famine.
There is an additional dispute over the degree of uncertainty associated with the data used. In terms of public impact, however, the credibility of the assertion of famine was most damaged by newspapers, including the New York Times, that ran front-page photographs of children allegedly emaciated from malnutrition, but who in fact were suffering from severe preexisting conditions. Despite corrections, the combination of the IPC allegation and the falsely labelled photographs impacted public understanding of the war. The agenda of the international organization and the commitment of partisan journalism generate media-effective narratives.
Each of these examples contributed to a media campaign against Israel. How Israel responds is one question, but the challenge for the U.S. is to prepare for similar adversarial soft power in the future.
The war in Gaza, like the war in Ukraine, has been a testing ground for new technologies and strategies, including propaganda warfare. It is essential to understand that what Israel has faced in terms of efforts at public delegitimation will be used against the U.S. in the future.
When the next U.S. overseas engagement takes place – whether in Venezuela, in Taiwan, or elsewhere – it should come as no surprise when academic prestige, journalistic outreach, and international organizations support narratives counter to American interests. The U.S. will need a counter-strategy.
This is the culture war of the future.
About the Author: Dr. Russell A. Berman
Dr. Russell A. Berman, the Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University, is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a co-chair of The Working Group on the Middle East and the Islamic World. At Stanford, he is a member of both the Department of German Studies and the Department of Comparative Literature, with a specialization in European and Middle Eastern politics and culture. He has served in numerous administrative positions at Stanford, including as chair of the Senate of the Academic Council. He is a member of the National Humanities Council and, during the Trump administration, served as a Senior Advisor on the Policy Planning Staff of the State Department. The views expressed in this article are those of the author.
More Military
The Navy’s Ohio-Class Submarine Mistake Still Stings
America Bought a Fleet of Russian MiG-29 Fulcrum Fighters
The Virginia-Class Block III Submarine Is Almost Unstoppable
