There is a temptation to believe that the way Israel is discussed globally is the result of confusion, ignorance, or emotional overreaction. That explanation is comforting. It suggests that if only people had better information, the conversation would eventually correct itself.
That explanation can no longer be accepted.
What we are witnessing is not simply a misunderstanding. It is the outcome of sustained narrative pressure applied over time. A mix of targeted campaigns, ideological incentives, and a media environment that rewards moral certainty over accuracy.
Israel has not just been criticized. It has been positioned.
In modern conflicts, perception often precedes events. Long before facts are established, the moral frame is already in place. Once that frame hardens, reality is expected to conform to it.
Israel has been assigned a role in this story, and it is not a sympathetic one.
October 7 massacre activated anti-Zionist narrative
This did not begin on October 7. That day did not create the narrative. It activated one that had been carefully cultivated. Within hours of mass murder, rape, and abduction of Israeli civilians, the language was already in circulation. Israel was not encountered as a society in shock and grief. It was treated as an obstacle to a conclusion already reached.
That speed matters. It reflects preparation.
For years, organized networks have invested in shaping how Israel is understood, particularly in activist spaces, academic environments, and online ecosystems. Language has been refined; symbols standardized; emotional triggers tested and reused. Terms like genocide and apartheid are deployed not as analytical descriptions, but as narrative shortcuts. Their function is not to clarify reality, but to collapse it.
At the same time, the broader information environment does much of the work on its own. Outrage is rewarded.
Certainty travels faster than doubt. Those who reinforce the dominant framing are amplified. Those who complicate it are treated as suspects. Over time, this produces a discourse in which Israel is no longer debated. It is presumed guilty.
Once that presumption takes hold, everything else becomes easier. Initiating violence fades into the background. The deliberate targeting of Israeli civilians is contextualized or explained away. Terrorist groups embedding themselves within civilian populations are treated as unfortunate but irrelevant. Israeli fear is dismissed as exaggerated or undeserving of empathy.
The moral standard shifts. Israel is expected to defend itself without force, absorb violence without protest, and mourn quietly in order not to disrupt the story. No other democracy is held to this standard, yet it is presented as self-evident.
Israel has struggled to respond effectively. Too often, its instinct has been to explain rather than to confront the narrative itself. Facts are offered where frames must be challenged. But facts do not survive long in an environment designed to neutralize them. Silence is interpreted as guilt. Caution is read as evasion. Technical language collapses in the face of moral theater.
Over time, Israel has been flattened into a symbol rather than seen as a society. Internal debates, political failures, and genuine security dilemmas disappear. Israeli lives become abstract. Israeli suffering becomes negotiable.
None of this requires denying Palestinian suffering. Civilian pain is real and devastating. But an honest conversation must also acknowledge a difficult truth: Palestinian leadership has repeatedly demonstrated that it cares more about dead Israelis than for living Palestinians. Again and again, choices have been made that prioritize violence and spectacle over governance and life. Resources that could have built institutions and opportunities were diverted into weapons and tunnels.
Civilian casualties are not merely tolerated. They are instrumentalized.
Ignoring this reality does not advance compassion. It guarantees more suffering.
What is lost in the dominant narrative is human reality: Israelis raising children under constant threat. Families shattered by terror attacks and abductions. Communities living with the knowledge that the next siren may not be a drill. These are not abstractions. They are lives.
Public diplomacy is not about spin. It is about refusing erasure.
Israel does not need to claim perfection. It needs to insist on being seen as real. That means speaking clearly about the choices forced upon a democracy facing adversaries who glorify civilian death and embed themselves among their own population.
Narratives shape perception long before policy is debated. Once a story hardens, changing it becomes difficult, but not impossible.
Israel still has agency. It still has a voice. But using it requires confidence, moral clarity, and a willingness to challenge false simplicity rather than accommodate it. The goal is not universal approval. It is honest engagement.
Stories can be rewritten, but only by those willing to tell them with patience and resolve.
Israel cannot afford to remain a passive character in someone else’s script. It must take responsibility for its own story, not as a symbol, but as a society.
And that work, difficult as it is, remains not only necessary, but possible.
The writer is a strategic project manager focusing on public diplomacy, strategic narrative building, and contemporary Jewish issues. He holds an MA in International Relations and a BA in Government and Strategy. His articles have been published in The Hill, The Jerusalem Post, and the Algemeiner, and he is a contributing author to Young Zionist Voices: A New Generation Speaks Out.