The Moral Collapse of Hasbara

A Nation at War With Its Own Moral Clarity

Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim, Israeli embassy staff murdered in Washington, D.C., on May 21, 2025. Their deaths sparked renewed debate over Israel’s public diplomacy—this essay argues the debate is fundamentally misguided. (photo credit: ISRAELI EMBASSY IN WASHINGTON)

This morning in Israel, we woke up to the terrible news about last night's events in Washington, D.C.: An Israeli couple, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, who worked at the Israeli Embassy, were murdered as they left an event at the Jewish Museum. The attacker, who reportedly shouted "Free Palestine" during the shooting, later claimed he did it "for Gaza."

Let their deaths not be in vain.

In the aftermath, some public voices have once again turned to Israel's perceived failure in the realm of Hasbara: a Hebrew term loosely translated as “public diplomacy”, but better understood as the national obsession with explaining and justifying ourselves to the world. The suggestion, whether directly or simply implied, is that we are not doing enough to explain ourselves, that part of what enables these atrocities is the erosion of Israel's global standing and image.

This essay challenges that entire framework.

Not because there's no value in speaking clearly or countering lies, but because Hasbara has become a substitute for moral clarity and decisive action. We are fighting a war not only on the battlefield but within ourselves: a battle of hesitation, of trying to justify every move before making it, of shaping perception while abandoning purpose.

Hasbara is not failing because we're not creative enough. It's failing because the very things we are trying to "explain" our self-restraint, our drawn-out campaigns, and our moral confusion should not be happening in the first place.

II. The Battlefield Shapes the Narrative

In times of war, the battlefield is not just a military arena; it is the stage upon which moral judgment is formed. The world doesn't shape its opinion based on what Israel says but on what Israel does. And if what we do is uncertain, hesitant, or self-contradictory, then no amount of Hasbara can rescue the perception that follows.

When Israel acts with moral clarity and military decisiveness, it doesn't need to "explain" itself. The Six-Day War, Entebbe, and Opera: these actions carried their own logic and justice. There was no need to plaster social media with carefully worded talking points. The world understood.

But when a war drags on for months, when there is visible hesitation, when footage shows restraint that seems absurd in the face of ongoing barbarism, then we lose the moral high ground, not because we are right but misunderstood, but because our actions no longer reflect that we believe in our own rightness.

And the enemy sees it. Gaza, Hezbollah, Iran: they understand that Israel is obsessed with global perception. They exploit it ruthlessly. They stage humanitarian crises, they weaponise civilian suffering, and they produce content for Western consumption. They don't care about world opinion, they manipulate it. Because they know we care. And we've trained them to know it.

Hasbara, in this context, becomes an act of narrative management. But the reality is that you cannot manage a story that contradicts the facts on the ground. People are not stupid. They can sense confusion. They can smell fear. They can tell when a state is not sure of itself. And if we're not sure of ourselves, why should they take our side?

The battlefield always comes first. If our actions reflect justice, strength, and moral confidence, the world might not like it, but it will understand it. But if we fight with one hand tied behind our back while the other is tweeting apologetically, we lose twice: once on the field and once in the mind.

III. The Epistemological Collapse of the West

We keep trying to explain ourselves as if we're in a rational conversation. But we're not. The West today is not engaged in a truth-seeking dialogue. It is trapped in a postmodern fog where truth is no longer a standard, and morality has been flipped upside down.

In this world, it doesn't matter what happens. What matters is who appears to suffer. Who cries louder? Who posts first?

Israel tries to argue that we are defending ourselves, our civilians, and our right to exist. But these arguments fall on deaf ears; not because they're false, but because the audience has lost the tools to process truth.

Concepts have been reversed. Genocide is now defined by casualty counts without context. Resistance means the right to butcher civilians. Ceasefire doesn't mean peace, it means saving the enemy from defeat.

The West no longer asks, Is this true? It asks: Does this fit my narrative? And if it doesn't, it is rejected, censored, or "deconstructed".

Hasbara, in this climate, is hopeless. It's like bringing a legal brief to a witch trial.

And that's exactly what we did. We stood before the ICJ and the ICC, grovelling in fake tribunals that masquerade as courts of justice. We treated moral inversion as if it could be reasoned with and gave legitimacy to the absurd idea that we must defend ourselves for defending ourselves.

You cannot reason with people who reject the very concept of reason. You cannot explain justice to those who believe justice is a colonial construct. You cannot win a moral debate in a culture that denies moral objectivity.

Every second we spend explaining ourselves to this worldview is not only a waste of time, it's a strategic error. We validate their premises simply by engaging.

And while we craft careful statements, our enemies post a single image. They understand the game. They know there's no logic, proportion, or context: just accusation. And they play it better than we do because they are unburdened by truth.

IV. The Moral Collapse of the West

The erosion of reason might explain the confusion. But confusion alone does not explain celebration. What we are witnessing is not mere ignorance or bias; it is an open alignment with barbarism. It is a culture that has not simply lost its way but now cheers for evil.

On October 7th, before Israel responded significantly or a single tank had crossed into Gaza, Western voices were already justifying, and in some cases celebrating, the murder, rape, and kidnapping of Jews.

At elite universities, student groups put out statements praising the Gazan atrocities as "resistance." Professors rationalised the killings. Posters of kidnapped Israeli children were torn down. Palestinian flags were raised. Jewish students were attacked, threatened, harassed, spat on, and told they deserved it.

And what did the university presidents do? They mumbled about "free speech" and "complexity." When pressed under oath in Congress, they refused to say whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated their codes of conduct. The institutions supposedly tasked with educating the next generation had become morally illiterate.

But it's not just the radical left. The collapse cuts across the spectrum. On the reactionary right, populist influencers like Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Joe Rogan have either platformed open antisemites or played footsie with conspiracy theorists who treat October 7th as a false flag or Jewish provocation. Piers Morgan, masquerading as a centrist, has spent countless hours interrogating Israelis for defending themselves while giving soft interviews to the very people who justify Gaza's war.

X has become a sewer of ideological filth from all directions, where antisemitism cloaks itself in the language of "anti-colonialism" on the left and "anti-globalism" on the right. Everyone thinks they're fighting the establishment, and somehow, they all land on the same conclusion: the Jews are the problem.

This is what happens when a civilisation abandons moral clarity. When justice is rebranded as oppression, victimhood becomes a blank cheque for violence. When identity is everything and values are nothing.

And in this environment, Hasbara is not just ineffective, it is laughable. We are not in a debate. We are in a civilisational breakdown. You cannot explain anything to people who have already chosen sides against you.

V. When Hasbara Turns Against Israel Itself

There is something even worse than Hasbara's failure to persuade. It is the way Hasbara is now weaponised against Israel itself, not by our enemies but by our own so-called defenders.

Well-meaning and talented figures like Elon Levy are quick to tell the world how Israel is the only liberal democracy in the region, how we allow aid into Gaza, how we do everything by the book. But they are just as quick to scold Israeli ministers when they speak with clarity.

When Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said that Gaza must be destroyed, something morally obvious in the wake of October 7th, it was not just foreign journalists who panicked. It was the Israeli Hasbara class. They demanded we walk it back, apologise, and clarify. Why? Because his statement might "be used against us."

This is what Hasbara has become: a tool for censorship and self-policing. Not to protect the country, but to preserve the image of the country as imagined by people who want us to be nice, restrained, and perpetually sorry.

It teaches the enemy something significant: that we will not stand by our own leaders. We will disown our own moral clarity if it makes us uncomfortable with the BBC. That our spokespeople will run ahead of our soldiers, not to support them, but to apologise on their behalf.

What does this say about our posture as a nation? Why should the world respect us if we don't respect our own convictions? Why should our enemies fear us if we publicly shame anyone who speaks the truth about what must be done?

This is not diplomacy. It is weakness masquerading as communication:
a narcissistic obsession with appearing good, rather than a moral commitment to being good and doing what is right.

There is something deeply tragic in this dynamic. It evokes not equivalence, but an echo of a much older pattern: the Jew who is faced with overwhelming hatred believes that if he just explains himself well enough, he might be spared. Not out of malice but out of fear, pride, or habit, he takes on the burden of defending the indefensible, of sanitising horror into something "understandable". In darker times, this instinct took the form of the Judenrat: Jewish councils under Nazi rule, trying to negotiate with evil.

Today, thankfully, we are not under Nazi occupation. We are a sovereign nation with a powerful army. And yet, some of us still behave as if we are pleading for our lives. As if the right turn of phrase could win mercy. As if the world is a tribunal, we must constantly persuade.

This is not survival. This is surrender in a suit and tie.

VI. The Jewish Obsession With Gentile Approval

At the root of the Hasbara phenomenon lies something older, deeper, and more psychological than any modern PR strategy. It is a centuries-old Jewish obsession with being liked by the Gentiles—by which I mean the non-Jewish world, whose approval we’ve chased for generations, often at the cost of our dignity and survival. This isn’t a political theory. It’s a cultural pathology. And it’s killing us.

For two thousand years, Jews lived under foreign rule, relying on the goodwill of kings, sultans, tsars, popes, and governors. We became adept at reading social cues, moderating our language, adapting to circumstances, apologising, and surviving. We learnt to explain ourselves repeatedly in hopes of gaining a little more tolerance. Yet, despite our efforts, it often didn't work.

We were always too rich, too poor, too powerful, too weak, too religious, too secular, too loud, too quiet. The result was always the same: suspicion, hatred, and violence.

Zionism was supposed to end that.

The whole point of the Jewish state was to stop asking for permission; to reclaim dignity through sovereignty, to no longer be guests in someone else's home, hoping to be treated well. Finally, say: We are not here to be liked. We are here to live.

But that instinct to please didn't vanish. It mutated. It re-emerged in our foreign ministry, our media, and our political discourse. It now lives in our obsession with how we're perceived. It is alive in every tweet that says, "We're doing everything we can to minimise casualties," as if apologising for existing. It is alive in every minister's walk-back of a truthful statement. It is alive in the very idea that being moral means being liked by the immoral.

And what do we expect in return? Will the world finally clap? Do we expect that the British or the Americans, who wouldn't even bomb the tracks to Auschwitz, will suddenly rise to our defence if only we word things just right? They didn't save us then. Why would they now?

This is why every time a major world leader visits Israel, we take them straight to Yad Vashem (The National Holocaust Museum). What was meant to be a place of memory and mourning has become a tool of persuasion. See what happened to us. See why we're allowed to exist. It is no longer history; it is Hasbara. And it is tragic. It means we still believe that if we show them just enough horror, they'll love us. They won't.

Contrast this with David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding Prime Minister, who, in 1955, when Israel was criticised by the United Nations for defending itself in Gaza, Ben-Gurion stood before the Knesset and famously quipped: "Oom, shmum." The UN? Shmun. It was the voice of a leader who understood that a sovereign nation does not beg for validation from a corrupt, compromised, and irrelevant world body. He had a sacred mission, not a PR strategy.

We are the only nation in history that fights a war and simultaneously runs a PR campaign to explain why we have the right to defend ourselves. No other people do this. Why? Because no other people are still trying to prove to the world that they deserve to exist.

And what do we get in return? Not understanding. Not respect. Just more contempt. Because the world doesn't hate us for being brutal, it hates us for being Jewish. For being proud. For defending ourselves without shame.

The tragic irony is that the more we try to be accepted, the less we are respected. The more we apologise, the more we are despised. And the more we compromise, the more we convince the world that we have something to apologise for.

If we have not yet learnt that no amount of Gentile approval will ever save us, then we have learnt nothing from our own history.

VII. The Blame Is Ours

It's easy to blame the media. The UN. The radical left. The populist right. The ICC, the ICJ, the influencers, the mobs in the street. But none of these things is the root cause of our current crisis. The uncomfortable truth is this:

We did this.

This is our government. These are our leaders. This is our war. And it is being poorly fought, not because the world won't let us win, but because we no longer believe we have the right to win.

October 7th was a moment of horrific clarity. The mask was off. The moral ground was ours. The world was stunned. Israel had every justification, strategic, moral, and historical, to respond with overwhelming, decisive force. To end the war within a week. To crush Gaza completely and rescue its hostages while the world still remembered why the war began.

But we didn't. We hesitated. We held back. We prioritised humanitarian optics over strategic necessity. We allowed aid to flow to our enemies. We waited for foreign permission. We announced what we wouldn't do instead of doing what we had to.

And then we turned to Hasbara. It was as if the problem was that people didn't understand us. But what is there to misunderstand? We are in a war, and not fighting it as a sovereign people should. We are dragging it out. We are bleeding our soldiers. We are sacrificing hostages to preserve the illusion of restraint.

We are broadcasting to the world that even in our own land, we are still apologising.

Antisemitism isn't rising because we fought too hard; it's rising because we fought like we don't know what we're fighting for. Because we looked ashamed. Because we signalled weakness. And weakness invites contempt.

And when Britain or Spain announces it will recognise a Palestinian state, Israelis act shocked, as if it came from nowhere. But every time I speak to a friend in America who tells me, "Can you believe this? Britain is recognising Palestine!", I say, Why shouldn't they? We were the first. We recognised them in Oslo. We shook their hand. We armed them. We gave them land. We let them build a flag and a diplomatic apparatus. We built the stage, and now we're surprised when the world applauds their performance.

The Oslo Accords were not just a strategic mistake. They were a moral betrayal. They signalled to the world that Israel itself was unsure of its right to the land, uncertain of its claim, unsure of its identity. And we have paid for it in blood, in treasure, in global legitimacy ever since.

Our enemies didn't create this vacuum. We did. And they moved in to fill it.

Hasbara didn't fail because it was poorly executed. It failed because we were trying to explain something we should never have done: the moral and strategic collapse of our response. The only thing worse than doing the wrong thing is trying to explain why it was right.

And the only real solution is not better messaging. It is better leadership. Stronger action. Moral clarity. Victory.

VIII. The New Face of Antisemitism: Ourselves

There is a grotesque irony unfolding before our eyes. Jews are being attacked, threatened, and murdered, and yet the reaction, even among ourselves, is not always anger or resolve. It is self-blame.

We ask: What did we do wrong? How could we have communicated better? Did our minister say the wrong thing? Did we post the wrong video? Did we not explain ourselves quickly or compassionately enough?

This is not morality. This is internalised antisemitism.

Every time we are attacked and respond by explaining ourselves to the world instead of holding our enemies accountable, we are not practising diplomacy; we are enacting a kind of spiritual self-negation. Without saying it outright, we are implying that our suffering must somehow be our fault.

We fear naming our enemies because we fear being disliked. We fear fighting back too hard because we fear being called what they already call us anyway. And so we accept their narrative. We speak their language. We blame our image, our words, our tone, never their hatred.

This is not new. But it is newly dangerous. Because today, we are a sovereign people. We have an army. We have a state. We are no longer guests in exile. And yet, we are still behaving like supplicants.

We are still pleading at the tribunal. We are still hoping for validation from nations that would not bomb Auschwitz, from institutions that fund our enemies, from intellectuals who cheered when Israeli children were slaughtered on October 7th.

And we are still afraid to say the obvious: We are hated not because of what we do but because of what we are, because we are a living, successful, proud, unapologetic Jewish state in a world that cannot stand that fact.

If we cannot name the enemy, we cannot fight him. If we cannot say we are right, we cannot act as if we are. And if we keep talking to the world as if we are on trial, we will be treated like criminals.

Antisemitism is not only rising in the world. It is rising within us, in the form of self-censorship, self-doubt, and the desperate attempt to make ourselves more palatable to those who already want us gone.

And perhaps the most disgraceful example of this self-negation is how we talk about humanitarian aid. Instead of saying the obvious, you started this war, you hold our hostages, and if you refuse to surrender, yes, you will suffer the consequences, we race to show the world how many trucks we've sent, how much food we've delivered, as if that's proof of our morality. It isn't. It's proof of our confusion.

What we should be saying is, You kidnapped our civilians. You slaughtered our children. You refused to return the living or the dead. This is war. And in war, there are consequences. You do not get to butcher thousands, hold our people underground, and then demand food. If you want to eat, surrender. If you wish to drink, release the hostages. You brought this on yourselves. And you will pay until it ends. That is justice. And that is the only moral message a sovereign state should be sending.

Even to our so-called greatest allies, this must be the tone. Just last night, Prime Minister Netanyahu said on television that even Israel's strongest supporters in the U.S. Senate, people considered lifelong friends, tell him: Do what you must, but don't let there be a humanitarian crisis.

He should have told them: Take your support and stuff it.

Our soldiers will not die in vain so that you can feel good about yourselves. We will not prolong this war to appease your Christian guilt. Our boys will not bleed, so you can maintain the illusion that you're on the "right side of history".

If this is what friendship looks like, conditional, patronising, self-serving, then we don't need it. We need victory. We need sovereignty. We need moral clarity. And if we don't assert it, no one else will.

IX. Weakness Creates the Circus

People think the global wave of anti-Israel protest, outrage, and obsession is just a natural reaction to war. But it's not. It's a reaction to our failure to end it.

Had Israel won the war in one week, decisively, unapologetically, with total moral clarity, there would be no international outcry to this degree. The world would still be processing the horror of October 7th. The shock would have framed everything. The moral context would have been fixed: a nation defending itself.

Instead, because we dragged it out, because we hesitated, apologised, and fed our enemy while negotiating with them, we gave the world time. Time to forget. It's time to invert the narrative.

Campus uprisings, UN resolutions, global protests, "intifada" chants in Western cities, these didn't appear out of nowhere. They appeared because a moral and strategic vacuum was created, and that vacuum was filled.

Because we were slow, the enemy was fast. Because we were unsure, they were confident. Because we were obsessed with optics, they controlled the optics. We gave them the stage, and they used it well.

This is not a new media phenomenon. It's not a TikTok glitch. It's what happens when a war is fought without will, without speed, without clarity. It becomes noise. It becomes confusing. And in that confusion, the enemy thrives.

And the worst part? It didn't have to be this way. Had we done what was necessary, finished the war when the moral clarity was at its peak, there would be no circus. The world would have moved on. Because despite all their slogans and protests, the world forgets very quickly.

But we wouldn't have needed them to forget because we would have won. Because we would ensure that no Israeli boy ever again has to watch his parents being slaughtered before his eyes, only to be dragged into Gaza.

That is what we exist for, not for the appeasement of others but for ourselves.

X. Burn the Hasbara Playbook

We've tried explaining ourselves. We've tried feeding our enemies. We've tried apologising for existing. We've tried softening our words, dressing up our wars, and rationing our justice so the world would keep inviting us to its dinner tables.

And we've tried giving them what they said they wanted. We gave them land. We gave them recognition. We gave them legitimacy. We gave them a state, thinking that would end the hatred. It only fed it. It only made it worse.

And what did it get us?

Dead civilians. Starving hostages. Condemnations at The Hague. Riot mobs in the capitals of the West. Antisemitism is normalised on every screen. And the slow, daily erosion of our national soul.

This is not a PR failure. It is a moral collapse.

Hasbara has become a religion, a ritual we perform to prove to the world that we are "the good Jew." But the good Jew always dies in the end. He dies explaining, rationalising, and submitting, while his enemies make no apologies or compromises.

Israel does not exist to be understood. It exists to protect Jewish life. To defend Jewish dignity. To ensure that what happened on October 7th can never happen again. That is our standard, not TikTok trends, not New York Times headlines, and not the squeamish conscience of a European foreign minister.

So stop explaining. Stop apologising. Stop pleading. Burn the Hasbara playbook.

Speak the truth. Name the enemy. Defend your people. And win.

In the end, no one will thank us for the restraint. No one will remember how politely we bled. But they will remember if we stood up for ourselves, by ourselves, and ended it.

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