On April 6, Nicholas Kristof posted a picture from the West Bank posing with Munther Amira, a Palestinian he described as having endured “brutal abuse in Israeli prisons.” I forwarded it to a few well-connected people with a simple question: “Does someone in the Israeli government know he is here? If so, they should be reaching out.”
The tweet, I figured, had definitely been seen by officials in Israel’s public diplomacy apparatus, and they should have reached the same obvious conclusion – whatever Kristof was doing here was not going to end well. Someone needed to try to get ahead of it.
Nobody did.
After Kristof’s rape column was published earlier this month, the answer was what I expected: no one from the IDF Spokesperson’s Office had called the New York Times columnist. No one had sat across from him, heard his accusations, and tried to tell a different story. Not even an attempt.
Would it have made a difference? Maybe. Maybe not.
Maybe the column would have been more balanced. Maybe it would have been worse. That is always the uncertainty with public diplomacy – you never know what might have been until you try.
And that is the point. Israel didn’t try. It rarely does. And that, right now, is the story of Israeli public diplomacy in a single sentence: Israel is not even in the game.
The question is why. And to answer it, consider two things that happened recently that most people missed.
On May 7, a new IDF officer took up the role as the IDF’s International Media Spokesperson. Lt.-Col. Nadav Shoshani, a veteran spokesperson and media professional, was replaced by an officer whose career had been spent in the Air Force and is without media experience.
When asked to justify the appointment, the IDF Spokesperson’s Office explained that she has “diplomatic experience.” What that means, and why it is relevant to the job of managing international media during a war, was left unexplained.
This is not a small thing. Israel is fighting the greatest battle in its history for international legitimacy. Every military operation is under scrutiny, not just by journalists but by the ICJ and the ICC in The Hague.
The IDF’s storytelling has a direct, concrete impact on the country’s ability to fight and to preserve its diplomatic relationships. The person doing that job needs to know how to craft a story, push back on a misleading headline, and use a television interview as a tool of strategic influence.
Israel keeps losing
The problem starts at the top. IDF Spokesperson Brig.-Gen. Effie Defrin is a decorated tank commander who previously headed the IDF’s Foreign Relations Department. He may be an inspirational officer, but how many times in his career did he sit with a foreign journalist and try to turn a negative story? How many times did he work on a headline?
Before this job, the answer is almost never. When the chief of staff appoints someone without media experience to the top communications role in the Israeli military, it is hardly surprising that the people beneath him lack it too.
No one would appoint a Golani commander to lead an Air Force squadron. No one would send a submarine commander to direct tanks into battle. Media management is a profession. It is something you learn, master, and practice over the years, not a posting you give someone because they are accomplished in a different field.
I do not personally know the new international spokesperson, and people who do tell me she is accomplished, highly intelligent, articulate, and well respected. I genuinely hope she turns out to be the best the IDF has ever had. But all of that is beside the point. None of those qualities is a substitute for professional experience in media.
And it is not only the IDF. Last month, Tzipi Hotovely, the former ambassador to the United Kingdom, was appointed head of the National Information Directorate, the body created after the 2006 Second Lebanon War to coordinate government messaging during crises.
The appointment itself is welcome. What is not fine is what preceded it: for two full years, the position had sat vacant. Two years of war. Two years of crises. Two years of the worst public diplomacy environment Israel has ever faced, and during all of it, the directorate had no director.
Can anyone imagine the Air Force operating for two years without a commander? The Defense Ministry without a minister?
We can spend all the energy in the world accusing the world of antisemitism – and there is real antisemitism out there – but that is something of a deflection since it avoids taking responsibility.
Large parts of the world believe Israel committed genocide in Gaza because barely anyone is telling a compelling story to the contrary. If we were, would it change these people’s opinions? Again, maybe yes and maybe no. But shouldn’t the country try?
If the IDF Spokesperson’s Office or the National Information Directorate were run like serious institutions – imagine a publicly-traded company on the NYSE – Defrin would never have been appointed, the NID would never have gone two years without a director, and someone would have picked up the phone and called Kristof when he was still in the West Bank.
Instead, we run our public diplomacy like a junior varsity operation, and then act surprised when we keep losing.
Regular readers of this column know I have been writing about this for years. Part of me wonders why I keep trying. The situation doesn’t change, the lessons go unlearned, and the merry-go-round keeps spinning. But people who care cannot stay quiet.
Israel has an extraordinary story to tell. It has remarkable people who can tell it. What it consistently lacks is the institutional will to treat this as the national security issue it actually is.
Until that changes, Israel will keep fighting the information war the same way it fought the morning of October 7: unprepared, understaffed, and asleep.
The writer is co-founder of MEAD and a senior fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute. He is the former editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post. His newest book, While Israel Slept, is a national bestseller in the United States.
