Why Israel Needs A Strategy To Shape The Narrative

One reason for this failure is the West’s monumental arrogance. Believing it is the center of the universe, it is unable to grasp that other cultures may have a totally different mindset from its own. It assumes instead that every other culture is also governed by rationality and self-interest. It assumes that there is no conflict that can’t be resolved by compromise, for which the parties must have their heads cracked together by the superior intellects of the West until they achieve it. This attitude has governed the West’s lamentable interference in the Arab war against Israel. America, Britain and Europe implacably believe in the “two-state solution” of a Palestine state alongside Israel.

Yet this is a solution to the wrong problem.

For the issue in this century-old war is not, as the West tells itself, the equitable distribution of land between two sides with a reasonable claim to that land. It is instead about the aim by the “Palestinian” side, which has no legal, historical or moral claim to the land, to destroy the claim by the Jewish people that is the only one grounded in legality and history.

The West continues to get this wrong because it cannot understand that at the core of Palestinian rejectionism lie anti-Semitism and Islamic extremism. And the reason for that is the West’s inability to grasp that anti-Semitism isn’t just a form of racism but a psychotic derangement; and as an increasingly secular culture, the West doesn’t understand the grip that religious zealotry can have on the mind.

Britain, where the security service is all but overwhelmed by thousands of radicalized British Muslims, remains mystified by Islamist extremism. While vainly trying to “de-radicalize” such extremists, it persists in downplaying or explaining away the Islamist factor. It doesn’t realize the key point—that those Muslims who turn themselves into human bombs believe they are doing God’s work and are therefore wholly resistant to reason.

In a similar vein, Western liberals fail to acknowledge that the Iranian regime is dominated by religious fanatics who are eager to provoke an apocalypse that they believe will bring the Shia messiah to earth.

Yet Israel, the country that could do so much to awaken the West to these errors, remains remarkably unwilling to do so even to help itself. Its enemies have succeeded in framing it as demonic in order to delegitimize and destroy it. They have done this through a six-decade strategy of seeding public discourse with lies and blood libels. This has not only falsely reframed the Palestinian war of extermination against Israel as the oppression by Israel of the Palestinians; it has also toxified anyone who supports Israel as tainted by association.