For decades, Israel has waged a political, security, and hasbara struggle over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yet on one front, perhaps the most important of all, it has barely fought at all: the struggle over its own story, over the definition of its identity, and over the narrative through which the conflict itself would be judged.
Gradually, a simple story took hold around the world: a “Palestinian people” lived in its homeland and lost its independence as a result of Israeli colonialism; since 1967, it has lived under an apartheid regime, and the way to rectify this injustice is to end the occupation and establish a Palestinian state within borders based at least on the June 4, 1967 lines. In the worst-case version, as evident in the antisemitic anti-Israel protests following the October 7 massacre, Israel should cease to exist (“from the river to the sea”). Israel’s guilt is portrayed as so overwhelming that even justification for the horrific massacre has emerged, on the grounds that the oppressed are supposedly permitted to use any means against their oppressors.
This story is not merely a distorted historical account; it is a framework of consciousness. Once its basic assumptions are accepted, almost every discussion of the conflict leads to the same conclusion.
The price of avoiding the definition and internalization of the Israeli-Zionist story, both in national consciousness and internationally, is being paid by the State of Israel and the Jewish people on every front. The Palestinian narrative has become a powerful tool that has enabled the formation of a coalition of Arab states against us, constant condemnations of Israel in international institutions, boycotts and diplomatic sanctions, and hostile international public opinion. Israel’s military superiority and its achievements in every field are turned into a double-edged sword against it in the battle for consciousness, portraying it as a state exploiting its power against “the dispossessed and robbed.”
This failure of all Israeli governments is a failure that strikes at the very roots of our existence here. The Jewish people, with a documented connection of thousands of years to the Land of Israel, have failed to prove their ownership, in the face of a people that never existed. Israel continues to convey ambivalent messages and to use terminology borrowed from the Palestinian narrative. And it does so despite the historical evidence of the Jewish people’s millennia-old connection to their homeland and the international recognition accorded to the idea of a national home for the Jewish people throughout the Land of Israel, as early as the beginning of the previous century.
Not only are the messages coming from Israel to the world ambiguous and connected to the differing positions of public figures from across the political spectrum, but in many cases Israeli leaders and media organizations choose to support the Palestinian narrative and attribute to Israel various forms of oppressive policy, in its most extreme version reaching an industry of lies involving “apartheid,” “ethnic cleansing,” “genocide,” and more.
Unlike Israel, the Palestinian narrative, based largely on deliberate distortions of history, has been promoted, advanced, and presented with absolute conviction, until it became, in the eyes of many, a historical truth. There are no shades of gray. It is unequivocal.
The Palestinian narrative was not difficult to challenge. There is no documented history of a Palestinian people, or of a Palestinian national connection to the Land of Israel, because, naturally, no such connection existed. Between 1948 and 1967, there was no Palestinian state, nor was there even a demand for such a state in the West Bank or Gaza. Judea and Samaria and East Jerusalem were under Jordanian control, while the Gaza Strip was under Egyptian control, and the Arabs living there made no territorial claims of their own. The PLO itself was established only in 1964, as a “liberation organization,” three years before Israel took control of these territories. In other words, the liberation being discussed was the liberation of the small State of Israel within the 1948 borders.
Nevertheless, Israel gradually allowed concepts such as “the occupation,” “the Green Line,” “the occupied Palestinian territories,” and the “two-state solution” to become the starting point for international discussion, and at times for Israeli discussion as well.
The problem is not merely one of perception. When Israel tries to prove that it behaves more morally within a conceptual framework established by the other side, it is already on the defensive, most clearly expressed in the apologetic concept for which there is no equivalent in other languages: “hasbara.”
This article proposes a conceptual shift: from “hasbara” to a battle for consciousness and a struggle over the story and the framework of the conflict. Rather than merely refuting claims against Israel, it should act proactively and consistently to embed its true historical, legal, and political story in global consciousness, while simultaneously bringing practical alternatives to the established paradigm into the debate, a paradigm that supposedly necessitates the establishment of a “sovereign Palestinian state.”
A People and an Instant People
International discussion of the conflict often begins in 1967, and sometimes in 1948. Choosing the starting point is not a technical matter. To a large extent, it determines the boundaries of the entire story and, in this case, helps construct the Palestinian narrative.
If history begins in June 1967, it is easy to portray the conflict as a confrontation between a sovereign Israeli state and a Palestinian population whose territory was occupied. If it begins in 1948, the picture expands into a war between the newly established Jewish state, surrounded by a hostile population, and the Arab states and the Arabs of the Land of Israel.
But the history of the dispute over the land is far older. Our story did not begin in 1967, but more than 3,000 years ago, when Joshua son of Nun led the Israelites into the Promised Land. Over the thousands of years that followed, the Jewish people took shape in the Land of Israel, established kingdoms there, made Jerusalem their political and spiritual center, and developed there a central part of their culture, religion, and national identity. Even after the loss of independence and the exiles, a Jewish presence remained in the land, and the connection to Zion and Jerusalem remained a central component of Jewish identity.
Jewish communities continued to exist in the land during the Roman, Byzantine, Muslim, Crusader, Mamluk, and Ottoman periods. Their size and location changed, and at times they were persecuted or diminished, but Jewish presence in the land never ceased. Jerusalem is not merely a holy site for Judaism. For thousands of years, it has been one of the formative elements of Jewish identity.
The Bible, Mishnah, Talmud, Jewish prayer and liturgy, the prayers, rituals, and customs of Judaism, are interwoven with references to Jerusalem and Zion. Jews prayed facing Jerusalem; mentioned it in the Grace After Meals and repeatedly vowed throughout the generations to remember and rebuild Jerusalem; Jews in Eastern Europe, Yemen, Morocco, Iraq, and throughout the Jewish diaspora concluded the Passover Seder and the Ne’ilah prayer on Yom Kippur for centuries with the hope, “Next year in Jerusalem”; and during the Jewish wedding ceremony, they broke a glass in memory of its destruction, while swearing, “If I forget you, Jerusalem…”
By contrast, the Quran does not mention Jerusalem by name even once, and the city’s centrality emerged retrospectively in the Palestinian campaign, as part of a deliberate effort to rewrite history. For Jews, the connection to Jerusalem was not merely an archaeological memory. It was preserved as an active cultural mechanism across generations.
Zionism did not have to invent Jerusalem and the Land of Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people. It transformed a thousands-year-old historical and religious longing into a modern political program, seeking to restore Jewish sovereignty in the Jewish people’s historic homeland.
This is not the only instance in history of a people restoring its independence after centuries of foreign rule. But there is no documented parallel to a people that preserved for nearly two thousand years, across a widespread diaspora and without sovereignty, a distinct national-religious identity and a connection to a particular homeland, and then returned to it in large numbers and reestablished a sovereign state there.
And the particularly interesting point in this context is that Jewish liturgy was in fact one of the mechanisms that preserved this connection. Jerusalem, Zion, the land, and the return to it do not appear merely as historical memories; they are woven again and again into prayer and ritual: “And to Jerusalem, Your city, may You return in mercy,” “And may our eyes behold Your return to Zion,” “Next year in Jerusalem”… In this sense, there is precise and unprecedented documentation of a people maintaining an active geographic memory across hundreds of generations, even while the overwhelming majority of its members lived far from that place. This remarkable memory, preserved in the hearts of hundreds of generations, is something the State of Israel is losing in the face of baseless claims and the absence of any historical memory among political groups that invented a claim to nationhood only a few decades ago.
Jews of Palestine
One of the roots of Israel’s failure to define the story concerns the origin of the name Palestine, or “Filastin” in Arabic pronunciation, a name that over the years, and particularly during the previous century, evolved from a territorial-administrative description of the Land of Israel and Judea into one appropriated by the Arabs of the Land of Israel as a group supposedly possessing distinct national characteristics.
The name originates with the Philistines, the ancient people who lived primarily along the southern coastal plain, in the area of Gaza, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Gath, and Ekron. Of course, mainstream historical scholarship does not identify a continuous ethnic connection between the ancient Philistines and today’s Palestinian Arabs.
The name itself is far older than the Roman period. As early as the 5th century BCE, the Greek historian Herodotus used the form Palaistinē to describe an area in southern Syria/the Levant. The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica described Palestine as “a geographical name of uncertain extent,” derived from the name “Philistines” and gradually extended beyond the coastal area where the Philistines lived.
This historical name acquired a new meaning following the Bar Kokhba Revolt of 132–135 CE. Until then, the Roman province was called Judaea, Judea. After the revolt was suppressed, during the reign of Emperor Hadrian, the name of the province was changed to Syria Palaestina.
Some scholars view the move as an attempt to weaken the Jewish identification with the land following the revolt; others have also emphasized administrative considerations and the fact that the name Palestine was already familiar. In any case, the establishment of the name Palestine as a description of the territory previously known as Judea took place beginning in Hadrian’s era. In the centuries that followed, the land experienced numerous conquests, and under most of them the name Palestine continued to describe the territory of the historic Land of Israel.
During the British Mandate, Palestinian was both a territorial and a civic designation. In 1925, the British authorities officially established Palestinian citizenship for residents of the Mandate. Jews and Arabs alike could be citizens of Palestine. For this reason, Jewish institutions bearing the name Palestine also existed during this period. The best-known example is The Palestine Post, which became The Jerusalem Post after the establishment of the State of Israel.
The official Hebrew name also tells us much: the British used “Palestine (Eretz Israel),” with Eretz Israel abbreviated as א”י. For nearly two thousand years, the name Palestine referred to the territory of the Land of Israel, not to any particular people. Thus, Jews born in the land before the establishment of the state received birth certificates that explicitly identified them as “Jewish, native-born of Palestine,” just as the other official documents did.
The World Turns Its Back
Political Zionism took shape in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. It did not present the Land of Israel as an arbitrary territory where the plight of European Jews could be resolved, but asserted the historical right of the people to return to their homeland. This claim and the deep connection to the Land of Israel were expressed in the writings of all the leaders of Zionism.
In The Jewish State, published in 1896, Theodor Herzl wrote: “Palestine is our unforgettable historic home.” Ben-Gurion likewise emphasized the connection of the Jewish people to their historic homeland: “The state arose from the return to Zion, and it was not the inhabitants of one land or one continent who returned, but the inhabitants of all continents…” (Ben-Gurion Diaries, May 23, 1965).
Ze’ev Jabotinsky explained emphatically the meaning of the promise to establish a national home for the Jewish people in the Land of Israel: “…This is the meaning of our words to the peoples and governments; you said ‘a national home for the people of Israel in the Land of Israel,’ what do these words mean? They mean that you regard the people of Israel as a people longing and yearning to return to its land. You must therefore also say to this people: here, the ‘home’ is open, prepare it for your return! For without a ‘home’ there can be no return to the land, and there is no home without return…” (Plan for a Provisional Government in the Land of Israel, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, in: Volume IV: Speeches 1905–1926).
These demands by the leaders of the Zionist movement were explicitly reflected in international decisions by states and international bodies. In the Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917, the British government declared that it viewed with favor:
“…the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”
Britain explicitly declared that it viewed with favor the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in the Land of Israel, while undertaking not to prejudice the civil and religious rights of the non-Jewish communities in the land, without these communities, including the Arabs of Palestine, being designated to receive the status of an independent state.
This declaration by the British government was given further weight by the decision of the San Remo Conference in 1920, at which the Allied powers divided control of the territories of the Ottoman Empire among themselves. The San Remo Conference entrusted Britain with a mandate to administer Palestine for the purpose of implementing the principles of the Balfour Declaration.
And in the Mandate for Palestine, approved by the League of Nations in 1922, the wording was even more explicit. The preamble to the Mandate stated that recognition had been given:
“to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine”, as well as to: “Reconstituting their national home in that country.”
The League of Nations did not merely frame the task as creating a new connection between the Jews and the land. It recognized an existing historical connection and the basis for reconstituting the Jewish national home there. The Jewish national home, with no mention of a political right for any other people or minority.
Two Banks of the Jordan?
The mandate granted by the League of Nations to Britain referred to the entire territory of Palestine, defined as extending from Syria and Lebanon in the north to Egypt in the south, the Mediterranean Sea in the west, and the eastern border, which originally also included Transjordan.
Article 25 of the Mandate allowed Britain, with the approval of the League of Nations, not to apply some of the provisions of the Mandate in the territory east of the Jordan. In September 1922, the League of Nations approved the arrangement whereby the provisions relating to the Jewish national home would not apply in Transjordan. From this developed the political entity of Transjordan under the Hashemite dynasty, and later the Kingdom of Jordan.
In other words, the original partition of the land was not the one identified in public and historical consciousness with UN General Assembly Resolution 181 of November 1947. The land had already been divided much earlier, through the exclusion of Transjordan, which was itself originally supposed to be part of the territory to be given to the Jewish people for the establishment of a national home.
The Change in British Policy
Following the Arab Revolt, there was a fundamental change in British policy, and the British Mandate began adopting a restrictive policy toward Jewish immigration to the Land of Israel and seeking to reduce the territory of the prospective Jewish state, in direct contradiction to the Mandate granted to Britain by the League of Nations.
The Peel Commission, which formulated its conclusions in 1937, determined that the Mandate in its existing form was unworkable and proposed ending it. In its place, it proposed two states: a Jewish state consisting mainly of the Galilee and the coastal plain, and an Arab state to be united with Transjordan; Jerusalem and a corridor to the sea would remain under British control. In other words, Jewish sovereignty was explicitly proposed for the first time, but only in a small part of Palestine, which had itself already been reduced to the territory west of the Jordan.
After the Peel Commission’s recommendations were not implemented, Britain transferred the issue to the United Nations. Subsequently, the UNSCOP committee recommended by majority vote partition into a Jewish state and an Arab state.
The Partition Plan
On November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 181. According to the resolution, the British Mandate over Palestine was to end, and a Jewish state and an Arab state were to be established in the territory west of the Jordan, while Jerusalem and its surroundings would be placed under a special international regime. Even in the mid-twentieth century, the proposal was not framed as a Jewish state and a Palestinian state, because even then it was by no means clear that there was a “Palestinian” people.
The Partition Plan was a recommendation by the General Assembly to establish two states within the borders set out in the plan. The Jewish leadership accepted the plan, while the Arab leadership and the Arab states rejected it. This is a particularly important historical milestone, pointing to the Arabs’ rejection of the very existence of a Jewish state, regardless of its limited borders. The war that followed prevented the implementation of the Partition Plan, and in 1949 different armistice lines were established from the borders proposed by the UN. These lines, known as the Green Line, were also explicitly defined as armistice lines between Israel and Jordan, rather than as permanent political borders.
The Partition Plan was never implemented and, nearly eight decades later, cannot serve as the basis for a political settlement today, or as a source of political claims.
How Was the “Palestinian State” Narrative Born?
The establishment of the State of Israel brought about a major linguistic and national shift. The Jews of the land and its Arab residents became Israeli citizens. The Mandate territory of Palestine ceased to exist, and its residents subsequently acquired different statuses depending on where they found themselves: Israel, Jordan, the West Bank, or Gaza. From this point onward, the term “Palestinian” became increasingly associated with the Arabs of the Land of Israel rather than with all the inhabitants of the land. But here too, the process did not happen overnight.
At the end of the War of Independence, Jordan annexed Judea and Samaria and East Jerusalem, an annexation that received limited international recognition. Egypt did not similarly annex the Gaza Strip, but controlled it through a military administration.
In 1964, the “Palestine Liberation Organization” was established under pressure from the Arab states. The Palestinian Charter drafted at the organization’s founding tells the entire story and completely contradicts the “Green Line” narrative and the idea of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders. The Charter, which was published approximately three years before the Six-Day War, called for the “liberation of Palestine” and declared a struggle for the “liberation of the homeland and the part that was usurped from it.”
To illustrate just how far the original Palestinian demand was from the one that became established in global public opinion, one need only read Article 24 of the original 1964 Palestinian Charter, which stated:
“This Organization does not exercise any territorial sovereignty over the West Bank in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, [or] the Gaza Strip…”
In other words, the PLO stated that it neither demanded nor exercised territorial sovereignty over the West Bank, which was under Jordanian rule, or over the Gaza Strip, which was under Egyptian military rule. Naturally, the “Palestine Liberation Organization” had no interest in entering into conflict with these regimes.
The original demand in the 1964 Palestinian Charter was therefore to liberate all the territories of “Palestine” other than Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, or in other words, to gain sovereignty over all the remaining territory of the State of Israel.
It is interesting to note that this article, which excluded the West Bank and Gaza from the PLO’s sovereignty claims, was removed from the Palestinian Charter in 1968. This gave rise to the demand that subsequently became established in international consciousness for recognition of “Palestinian sovereignty” in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. As noted, this demand was added deliberately after the Six-Day War and after Israel captured these territories from Jordan and Egypt, territories that were originally intended to be an integral part of the Jewish national home, as determined by the League of Nations in 1922.
The Palestinian demand succeeded through a sophisticated maneuver in turning the armistice line between Israel, Jordan, and Egypt into a border between the State of Israel and the territory that the Palestinians began claiming as their state from 1968 onward.
The Palestinians, who began by demanding the liberation of the entire territory of the State of Israel, excluding Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, ended up demanding the establishment of a state only in Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza Strip, while concealing their original intentions to establish a state on the ruins of the State of Israel throughout its territory, rather than alongside it.
The Local Invention That Captured the World
The success of the Palestinian narrative did not occur solely because of the Palestinians. Its mobilization in the struggle against the State of Israel was deliberately pursued by numerous interested parties, and it became integrated into much broader struggles: the Arab world against Israel, the Cold War and the interests of the Soviet Union, the Non-Aligned Movement, and the consolidation of an automatic majority against Israel in some UN institutions.
One of the high points was the 1975 General Assembly resolution declaring that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” The resolution was revoked in 1991, but it demonstrated how a political struggle could successfully be transformed into a struggle over the very legitimacy of the Zionist idea.
The most extreme example of how the Palestinian narrative became entrenched in global public opinion concerns the issue of “refugees.” The use of the refugee issue is a clear example of the creation of an effective weapon of perception, which became a convention in global public opinion and cemented the portrayal of Israel as an occupying and dispossessing state.
Although the UN recognizes approximately 42 million refugees around the world, and of these grants at least 6 million “Palestinians” refugee status, the UN established the UN Refugee Agency for refugees worldwide, while Palestinian refugees have a dedicated agency of their own, UNRWA. This unique structure, which grants Palestinians a status of “perpetual refugeehood,” illustrates the UN’s inherent bias, but no less importantly, the success of the Palestinian battle for consciousness.
To illustrate the power of the Palestinian refugee narrative, one can examine UN General Assembly resolutions between 2015 and 2024. Of the 253 resolutions adopted by the Assembly in total, 173 were adopted against Israel on issues related to the Palestinian narrative (!). Only 80 resolutions during this period concerned other countries, including just 11 against North Korea.
The Palestinian refugee narrative also introduced into international discourse the Palestinian demand for a “right of return,” which is de facto a euphemistic definition for defeating the State of Israel through demographic means and with international backing.
The “Palestinian issue” has become the central condition for normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia and other countries, as well as grounds for sanctions imposed by European countries against Israel in general and “settlers” in particular.
The Palestinian narrative has become one of the central tools in Qatar’s dramatic influence operations in the Western world. This effort, based fundamentally on a Muslim Brotherhood agenda for embedding Islamic ideas in the world, particularly in Europe and the United States, uses the Palestinian issue as a tool for inflaming the masses, under a worldview of an oppressed minority confronting a colonialist state, a perception that is prevalent in the Western world with the backing of progressive currents.
The chants of “Palestine will be free from the river to the sea,” heard in squares and on campuses across Europe and America by crowds who have no idea what the Green Line is, where Palestine is located, which sea is meant, or which river is being referred to, are an example of the importance of the story in shaping consciousness and of the importance of the battle for consciousness in the international arena.
The Israeli Failure: From Debating the Narrative to Adopting It
Up to this point, one could argue that this was a Palestinian success. But the second part of the story is the Israeli failure. The change did not happen overnight. It came through a lengthy political process: Camp David, the autonomy plans, the Madrid Conference, the Oslo Accords, the disengagement from Gaza, the political negotiations, and the willingness of Israeli prime ministers to discuss the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Over the years, Israel itself began using an increasing portion of the vocabulary of the framework it had initially sought to reject. For many Israelis, the “Green Line” became the line of the state’s legitimacy, and on the other side live “settlers” who, in their view, have no right to be there.
The historical facts indicate that this line was an armistice line between Israel and Jordan. The Mandate granted to Britain was intended to establish a national home for the Jewish people throughout the Land of Israel. The original Palestinian demand was for a state within the territory of the “Green Line.” None of these facts were ever presented by Israel, and as a result, many Israelis are not even aware of them.
As if that were not enough, Israel’s official use of expressions such as the “settlement enterprise” only further cemented in the national and international consciousness the distinct status of Israeli citizens living in Judea and Samaria.
The Oslo Accords were perhaps the culmination of the incorporation of the Palestinian narrative into official Israeli discourse. The fact that Israel was prepared to relinquish most of the territory of Judea and Samaria and create a quasi-political entity in the form of the Palestinian Authority provided the world with proof that the foundations of the Palestinian narrative were justified. The question was no longer whether a Palestinian state was the solution, but under what conditions it would be established. This was perhaps the greatest achievement in the battle for consciousness on the Palestinian side: the solution it sought to advance became the starting point of its opponents.
Two States for Two Peoples?
“Two states for two peoples” is a political proposal intended to undermine the legitimacy of a sovereign Jewish state. It is an idea that fixes in the public consciousness the notion that the Palestinians are a “people” entitled to a state, positioning them as competitors with the sovereign State of Israel over the division of the land.
Nevertheless, over the past three decades, this slogan has become established across a substantial part of the international system as the only legitimate solution to the conflict. As a result, a binary framework has emerged: those who support peace are expected to support a Palestinian state; those who oppose a Palestinian state are required to explain what alternative solution they propose.
Here too, Israel has done almost nothing to thwart the campaign against it. Israel has refrained from telling its own story, asserting its rights and the historical justice of its position, and has confined its opposition to the establishment of a Palestinian state largely to security considerations, explaining why the solution is dangerous without offering the world a detailed alternative model for discussion. And when one side presents a solution while the other mainly presents objections, the first solution gradually becomes the default option.
There Is an Alternative
Challenging the two-state paradigm requires more than pointing to its flaws. It requires an alternative. One option worthy of consideration is a shift from the concept of a centralized, sovereign Palestinian entity to a decentralized model of local Palestinian autonomies. The model could be based on existing urban centers, such as Ramallah, Nablus, Hebron, Jericho, and Jenin, as well as on local, familial, and economic structures that already exist within Palestinian society. Within such a framework, Palestinians would manage a substantial part of their civilian lives through local self-government, while security and strategic matters would be addressed through a different structure that would not require the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state with an army and the capacity to threaten Israel’s population centers.
Such a model should not be presented as a magic solution. It would have to address difficult questions concerning personal status, citizenship, freedom of movement, territorial contiguity, the economy, foreign relations, security, and political rights. The choice need not be limited to two options established three decades ago. An Israeli political initiative of this kind would not necessarily be accepted. It is likely that when first presented, it would be categorically rejected by the Palestinians, Arab states, and most countries around the world. At the same time, the proposal itself would compel a debate. The debate itself would shift the discourse toward recognizing additional alternatives to the two-state paradigm.
No More “Hasbara”
The Israeli term “hasbara” exposes part of the problem. Hasbara is a reactive action: someone accuses Israel and Israel explains. An image is published, and Israel provides the context. A decision is made, and Israel responds.
In the media environment, when social networks tell a story in real time and fix its context in the public consciousness, reactive actions are almost meaningless. Israel has learned this lesson the hard way many times, as in the case of the child Muhammad al-Dura, who became a symbol of the Second Intifada after Israel hastily and mistakenly acknowledged responsibility for his death.
The Palestinian struggle is conducted on a much broader plane. It takes place in the media, on campuses, in international organizations, civil society organizations, social networks, the cultural sphere, and political systems. It concerns not only events but also the words through which the public interprets them: occupation, settlements, apartheid, indigenous, refugees, resistance.
Framing the Solution
Israel has invested substantial resources in defending its actions. It has invested far less in creating the framework within which those actions are judged. Israel needs a different approach. To do so, it must first and foremost define the story it wants to establish in the public consciousness. To this end, we should become familiar with our own history. Once the story has been defined, we must create a comprehensive framework for proactively embedding it.
The proposed framework could be called AMAT, the Directorate for Intelligence and Consciousness. Such a directorate should be equal in status to bodies such as the Mossad and Shin Bet and include legal, economic, intelligence, and media tools that would operate against our enemies around the world.
For example, just as the Hind Rajab Foundation pursues Israeli soldiers around the world and seeks to have them arrested and prosecuted, the State of Israel should legally pursue Hamas and Fatah terrorists, as well as individuals connected to and financing terrorism anywhere in the world, putting the other side on the defensive. Israel should, for example, expose and publicize ties between leaders, public figures, media professionals, and university administrators and terrorist organizations and states that support terrorism.
Israel needs to create a network of supporters and opinion leaders on social media who will promote the same narrative that we have so far refrained from defining. The State of Israel must forge effective alliances and partnerships with pro-Israel actors such as the evangelical community, as well as with groups that share common interests, such as opponents of large-scale Islamic immigration to Europe.
Similar to the activities of the Qatari government, Israel must create influence mechanisms at leading universities around the world and within international media organizations. The Directorate for Intelligence and Consciousness must be funded in the billions in order to achieve genuine effectiveness. The goal is not to make the world “love Israel.” The goal is to change the questions through which the world examines the conflict.
Instead of asking only when Israel will end the occupation, other questions should be brought into the debate: What was the status of the territory before 1967? Why was no Palestinian state established when the territory was under Arab control? How did the armistice lines become political borders in the international consciousness? Why should a political solution formulated in the previous century be the only option in the 21st century? And is it possible to grant Palestinians self-government and meaningful political rights without creating a state entity that would endanger Israel’s security?
In addition, Israel must expose the falsehoods underlying Palestinian influence operations, the ties between Palestinian terrorist organizations and the Muslim Brotherhood network, and the tangible threat to the security of the West resulting from the adoption of the Palestinian narrative. This is a fundamental change that Israel needs to make. For years, Israel has tried to provide better answers to questions formulated by others on its behalf. It is time for Israel to start formulating the questions.
