Almost two years of bearing witness to Palestinians’ genocide raises the moral question that lies at the heart of any solidarity movement: What is our collective responsibility to each other?
The backdrop of a genocide
As we speak, Israel continues its man-made famine in Gaza. Over 240 organizations have been sounding the alarm about mass starvation for months, including UNICEF, CARE, Oxfam, Christian Aid, Amnesty International, Save the Children, and Doctors Without Borders who’ve been on the frontlines of these crises for decades across the globe.
Worse yet, instead of being galvanized, we’re being fed the shameful and criminal Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. I won’t call this a “humanitarian” effort because it’s been called out by every credible NGO as a diplomatic tool to placate the growing opposition to Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people.
Many of us return to the same question over and over: How did we get here?
A brief history of propaganda
Propaganda as we know it was pioneered by Edward Bernays, an Austrian-American man who is referred to in his obituary as “the father of public relations.” In 1917, President Woodrow Wilson appointed Bernays to the “Committee on Public Information” to use propaganda and public relations to build support for the war effort. The lessons from that campaign, articulated in Bernays’ 1928 book, Propaganda, are still being applied today as a tool of diplomatic influence by the state of Israel.
In an era of well-documented misinformation and disinformation, this isn’t a revelation. What may be is the daily display of journalistic malpractice that still goes on in mainstream U.S. media.
Public opinion tells a different story
We know what the majority of Americans want. Public support is at a record low for most, with almost 70% of us disapproving of Israel’s military action. These numbers aren’t only fueled by Democrats and Independents. Views on the right are also shifting: in March, the Pew Research Center found that Republicans and Republican-leaning Independents were more negative toward Israel than in 2022. Most of the shift came from Republicans under age 50. In 2022, 63 percent of Republicans under the age of 50 had a positive view of Israel; today, they are roughly split, with 48 percent positive and 50 percent negative.
Instead of humanitarian aid, which our government still blocks and refuses to fund, on July 9, Israel announced its 1014th shipment of weapons from the US. This amounted to a weapons delivery every 15 hours for 20 months of a genocide. That latest weapons shipment: Caterpillar D9 bulldozers, which are used by the Israeli military to demolish Palestinian homes and level entire cities in Gaza.
The global movement to support Palestine has also been crystal clear.
In the soccer world, the banner unfurled by fans of the Champions’ League winners Paris Saint-Germain, calling for an end to the genocide, never made it to the CBS broadcast. For months, celebrities across generations, from Roger Waters and Kneecap to Pedro Pascal, Susan Sarandon, Mark Ruffalo, Dua Lipa, Ariana Grande, Dave Matthews, Billie Eilish, and Florence Pugh have expressed solidarity without becoming TMZ clickbait.
Hundreds of thousands of people from Pamplona, Spain, to the Sydney Harbor Bridge, to The Hague have shown support for Palestine. But unless your algorithm is fine-tuned to seek out the latest information on Palestine, these moments of global solidarity simply don’t crack US newsfeeds.
This glimpse into worldwide sentiment on the topic makes it evident that America is an outlier: in December 2024, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution affirming the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination by an overwhelming majority of 92%, 172 to 15.
That vote was simply for the basic recognition of Palestinians’ right to self-determination. On the vote of United Nations member states recognizing a Palestinian State, 76% did– three quarters of member states.
The culpable role of information warfare
Back to the previous question: is propaganda really the reason America uses its power to stand isolated on the international scene with its unilateral, unquestioned policies favoring Israel?
The answer boils down to a simple enough equation:
ZionismHasbara x U.S. Media = Occupation + Apartheid + Starvation + Genocide
On one side of the equation, you’ve got two variables: Israel’s foundational political ideology of “Zionism” powered by its tool, “hasbara,” using the multiplier of U.S. media. On the other side of the equation, you’ve got the result of that: the occupation, apartheid and now starvation and genocide of the Palestinian people.
The briefest history of Zionism
It’s made abundantly clear in the foundational pieces of Theodor Herzl (the spiritual father of the Jewish State who summoned the First Zionist Congress) and Ze’ev Jabotinsky (the leader of the right-wing Zionists, the “revisionists,” famous for developing his “Iron Wall” essay), that Zionist ideology was inherently and unequivocally ethnocentric and expansionist in its conception. It’s important to begin with an accurate historical context of Zionism because hasbara wants us to conflate Zionism with an instinctive response: that any criticism of Zionist ideology is antisemitic.
That’s how, today, we’ve been able to reach a point where the federal administration is following the blueprint laid out by the architects of Project 2025, the anti-Palestinian Project Esther.
The problem is that this cry of antisemitism isn’t about protecting Jewish people (despite what the Anti-Defamation League wants you to believe): it’s about protecting the government of Israel against its own stated ethnocentric and expansionist mission, by criminalizing any criticism of those policies. This is especially acute today despite Israel’s escalation of war beyond Gaza and the West Bank, into Lebanon, Syria, Iran and Yemen.
Hasbara and U.S. media
“Hasbara” is the Hebrew word for “explanation.” It’s a public diplomacy technique that melds information warfare with the official strategic objectives of the Israeli state.
In other words, hasbara is another word for propaganda. At a time when the budget for this state-sanctioned propaganda is increasing, it logically follows that, when it comes to the coverage of Gaza in U.S. legacy and mainstream media, we need to critically question how outlets source their stories.
In the 22 months, investigations by The New Republic and The Intercept revealed that reporters from CNN, ABC, and NBC are embedded with the Israeli military, and that these networks run their coverage of what’s going on in Gaza through a Jerusalem team. That Jerusalem team operates under the umbrella of the Israeli military censor.
The point here is that the Israeli military, the IDF, controls the stories that all major U.S. outlets can cover — the direct definition of propaganda. A leaked editorial memo from the NYT brass notwithstanding, that information is enough for us to question the journalistic integrity standards of most mainstream U.S. media outlets.
Before, though, I want to come back to the problem with the quality control of CNN, WaPo, and NYT stories. Since it began its war in Gaza, we know that Israel has prevented all foreign media from physically accessing the Gaza Strip. As I mentioned above, our mainstream U.S. outlets run almost all of their stories through the IDF. So who are CNN and others’ sources, if they themselves can’t physically be there on the ground?
I find this particularly important to raise, since in 2024 Israel was one of the three worst countries in the world for imprisoning journalists, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, sandwiched between China and Myanmar. And that’s journalists in prison: in the last 22 months, over 240 journalists have been killed in Gaza, “the worst ever conflict for reporters.’
So, again, who’s reporting the stories we’re reading?
Even if we grant major U.S. media outlets the benefit of doubt for not having their own direct people on the ground, they aren’t partnering with the plethora of other media companies who are on the ground and covering the news firsthand. From a journalism standpoint, Al Jazeera, Middle East Monitor, and Middle East Eye, to name just a couple, do research and editorial fact-checking that’s just as rigorous.
A final point: Israel’s decades-long hasbara campaign against the United Nations agency serving Palestine refugees is well documented. Its goal: to strip Palestinians of their refugee status, and therefore their “right of return,” as mandated by UN Resolution 194. This Israeli foreign policy goal is a relevant piece of context that media outlets claiming neutrality invariably fail to reference.
A punch and a clap back
In the Spring of 2023, Mixte Communications’ client UNRWA USA National Committee (UNRWA USA) made the strategic decision to undertake a long-term narrative transformation campaign. This is when our relationship began.
UNRWA USA, is a separate nonprofit organization that provides support for the humanitarian work of the United Nations agency on the ground (UNRWA). As a domestic nonprofit, UNRWA USA lifts up the voices, experiences, and humanity of Palestine refugees to secure American support for resources essential to every human being for the promise of a better life.
We took all the right steps as we kicked things off for our version of “engineering consent” to humanize Palestinians to Americans:
- Built a power map that painted the landscape to build support for Palestine in North America
- Identified the main audiences we wanted to reach
- Developed messaging that could be used to move these audiences to action
- Worked with a polling firm to help us test that messaging “in the wild.”
With our client in the eye of the storm following Israel’s aggressive response to Hamas’ October 7 attack, its small-but-mighty team was raising record numbers of funds to support the top United Nations aid partner on the ground in the unfolding humanitarian crisis. We collectively agreed to focus on the moment at hand instead of the long-term narrative transformation goal.
In December 2024, the government of Israel purchased billboard space around the United Nations headquarters in New York and other major U.S. cities, with disinformation ads accusing the agency of supporting terrorism. This wasn’t a surprise, as Wired had previously reported about the Israeli government buying Google ads to discredit and defund UNRWA.
The ads featured damaging claims about UNRWA without evidence. But under Google’s policy, as Wired reporter Paresh Dave explained to NPR, misinformation is generally allowed unless it undermines participation or trust in an electoral or democratic process.
This prompted the need for a swift clap-back to unequivocally remind people that UNRWA is the only humanitarian organization that can deliver over 60% of the aid in Gaza. UNRWA is, in one word, irreplaceable.
We partnered with the fiery team at Design Action Collective, which fights for collective liberation in all its projects, to turn around a rapid response campaign, with the creative assets pushed across eight different advertising channels from digital streaming platforms and podcasts to social media and Google.
Our goal was to shift the narrative about UNRWA for people who are more ideologically right of center (not our original audience, by the way), countering the spurious representations from the Israeli propaganda with powerful images of humanitarians in action. While we didn’t measure sentiment change in that 30-day window, users collectively viewed and interacted with the ads more than 20 million times, and we reached over 5.3 million individuals.
Entering the ring
While ours was a drop in the bucket compared to a government campaign that could ramp up its propaganda investments at a rate that no nonprofit can keep up with, the point was to meet them in the arena. In our work with social justice advocates, we know the cost of some fights. Sometimes we enter the ring accepting we might be beaten to a pulp but that, if we can put up an inspiring effort and land a few good hits, we can win over the crowd and become the “people’s champ” in the process.
In the end, that’s what this campaign was all about; finding ways to keep building the sea change in America for Palestinian safety, self-determination and freedom in the midst of a maddening genocidal campaign.
And if indeed solidarity is a spiritual practice, then I hope you take away a single point from this piece:
Believe Palestinians.
