How did they achieve the condemnation of Israel in the public eye while remaining out of the spotlight? I'm surprised that they are rarely mentioned in the university and street protests (which might be financed by bad actors though). How is the "information war" being conducted? The new risk of the social media in the future geopolitics game is evident but the success of the pro-Hamas PR campaign is undeniable. I'd like to really understand how this happened, how is pro-Hamas propaganda machine operating (if there is such articulated effort)and beyond the underdog sympathy and "it's a Gen-z/millennials thing" assumption, and if you guys can recommend me insightful literature.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/the-online-information-war-over-fake-content-linked-to-israel-hamas-conflict
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Information war won’t get them a country.
Internationally there are a lot of anti-semetic countries in general. The UN is notoriously so. That’s pretty much enough.
Other than the obvious (Jews make headlines because people will click; 2 billion Muslims; double standards; susceptibility to confirmation bias), there is something fundamental going on here when it comes to the international PR. Machiavelli wrote:
> Some may wonder how it can happen that Agathocles, and his like, after infinite treacheries and cruelties, should live for long secure in his country, and defend himself from external enemies, and never be conspired against by his own citizens; seeing that many others, by means of cruelty, have never been able even in peaceful times to hold the state, still less in the doubtful times of war. I believe that this follows from severities[2] being badly or properly used. Those may be called properly used, if of evil it is possible to speak well, that are applied at one blow and are necessary to one’s security, and that are not persisted in afterwards unless they can be turned to the advantage of the subjects. The badly employed are those which, notwithstanding they may be few in the commencement, multiply with time rather than decrease. Those who practise the first system are able, by aid of God or man, to mitigate in some degree their rule, as Agathocles did. It is impossible for those who follow the other to maintain themselves.
> Hence it is to be remarked that, in seizing a state, the usurper ought to examine closely into all those injuries which it is necessary for him to inflict, and to do them all at one stroke so as not to have to repeat them daily; and thus by not unsettling men he will be able to reassure them, and win them to himself by benefits. He who does otherwise, either from timidity or evil advice, is always compelled to keep the knife in his hand; neither can he rely on his subjects, nor can they attach themselves to him, owing to their continued and repeated wrongs. For injuries ought to be done all at one time, so that, being tasted less, they offend less; benefits ought to be given little by little, so that the flavour of them may last longer.
(“severities” is usually translated to “cruelty”, there’s a translator’s note where I copy/pasted from)
Hamas performed acts of unimaginable cruelty over 2 days, then took hostages and left. This follows closely Machiavelli’s advice to do all your cruelty in one stroke. It’s horrible and effective. If you try meticulously to apply the least cruelty possible at the cost of dragging your operation for a long time, as Israel has been doing, then you suffer the consequences every day anew. Hamas is to blame for the war beginning and for the war not ending, but news naturally takes the form “Israel did this and this” because Israel is the active side. That is why Hamas is winning the PR war, because its own (most visible) cruelty has ended months ago.
there is zero pro hamas information campaigns.
there are a lot of pro Palestinian content across all media
it is a far right fallacy to say that those who support palestine are supporting hamas’ terrorism. its a false equivalence.
24.1% of the world’s population is Muslim, with an estimated total of approximately 1.9 billion. As of 2023, the world’s core Jewish population (those identifying as Jews above all else) was estimated at 15.7 million , which is approximately 0.2% of the 8 billion worldwide population.
There is the reason. Nothing less, nothing more.
I wouldn’t say there’s a “master plan” behind the “Palestinian win” in the information war.
Palestinians have just failed *less* at getting their side of the story out and engaging western audiences, compared to other places where similar death and destruction takes place.
Even that though is not due to some Palestinian master plan, but more due to the fact that the Israel-Palestinian conflict has been on the global (and especially western) spotlight for more than 60 years. To bring up an anecdotal example, there’s a colloquial expression in my native language (Greek), when someone is chattering incessantly about something, or tries to tackle an issue too complicated for them, and you want to suggest that they drop it: it translates to “You’re not gonna solve the middle eastern conflict”. This conflict has been **that ingrained in the collective mindset of the west**. And thus, any crumbs of information coming from there, is gonna be **picked up, engaged with, and amplified**.
That said, we need to *quantify* what it means to be “winning” the information war. IMO, this has to be considered under the prism of **what facts you have to work with, and how much you managed to proportionately amplify your message* given its starting point, *not* just the *absolute value* of how much mindshare you end up with.
To elaborate further, say party A and party B have a 70:30 mindshare split. Say an action by party A against party B, without any propaganda, causes party B to garner sympathy and increase its mindshare from 30% to 80%, while the mindshare of A drops from 70% to 20%.
Now apply both parties’ propaganda efforts. With the propaganda applied for both, party A manages to limit the drop from 70% to 45% (instead of 20%), while party B only raises its mindshare to 55% (instead of 80%).
Who won the propaganda war? Indeed party B has greater mindshare than party A, but at the same time, party B started from a *much better factual position*, and **proportionately** managed to raise its mindshare *much less* than party A.
In my view, party A won the propaganda war, as in *their propaganda was more effective*. Maybe it was not so extraordinarily effective to turn black into white and come on top overall, but still it was a much more successful propaganda effort than party B’s.
Under that prism, Israeli propaganda has been much more effective. And I have 2 reasons to believe so:
1. We’re talking about the “information war” battle (ie end result of mindshare) being a close match, some people give the edge to one side some to the other, despite the fact that **Gaza suffered immeasurably more death and destruction** (to the point of **25x**), both in total numbers, and especially so per capita.
2. We have *western leaders repeating verbatim unsubstantiated Israeli propaganda points* as facts. Most notably, you have the “leader of the free world”, Biden, repeating the now debunked “beheaded babies” atrocity propaganda. He also repeated the “Hamas weaponised mass rapes” propaganda, after the infamous and now discredited piece by NYT. Many similar examples across European leaders too, not to mention the whole UNWRA debacle, where countries rushed to cut funding based on “evidence” they were given by Israel about Hamas collusion, yet no such evidence had been given at that point, only the *promise* of evidence “soon”.
Objectively, there hasn’t been anything remotely close in terms of numbers of leaders and their calibre, repeating Hamas propaganda as it has been the case with Israeli propaganda.
If this is not winning the propaganda war, then what is?
Yes, Palestinian mindshare is indeed higher in many places across Europe. But the fact that it’s even close to the Israeli one, given the facts (casualties etc.), is still a massive win for the Israeli propaganda machine.
Something about videos of blown up children might be responsible.
The Israeli information campaigns mostly just seek to silence critique, misdirect conversations to give them cover, and police language and phrases that Palestinians use. Throw in some October 7th imagery and bot farms that more or less say the same couple of points and there you have the Israeli propaganda machine. When months of conflict happen and people are seeing the damage you are doing then all of these attempts become pointless, they will never appeal to the young, socially conscious, left leaning university demographics. All those crowds see is states banning boycotts or criticisms of Israel, the power AIPAC/Israeli Lobbies have over their politicians, and the deaths of Palestinian children on twitter and tiktok.
Meanwhile the Palestinians just have to play into being the scrappy underdogs fighting injustice for their own independence. In a land they were removed from less than 100 years ago. Israel’s always going to struggle being the cool side to support for young people. Pro-Israelis in the west are either evangelical Christian’s or Jewish. And everyone who doesn’t care about the Palestinians won’t care enough to support the Israelis, they’ll likely just stay out of it. Add in a lot more Muslims around the world who are capable of speaking English and have access to the internet (and they all grew up on stories of injustice against Pallys) and you can see why the Palestinians are winning the propoganda battle.