{"id":136112,"date":"2026-05-29T11:07:33","date_gmt":"2026-05-29T11:07:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/136112\/"},"modified":"2026-05-29T11:07:33","modified_gmt":"2026-05-29T11:07:33","slug":"israel-is-losing-the-information-war-because-of-poor-appointments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/136112\/","title":{"rendered":"Israel is losing the information war because of poor appointments"},"content":{"rendered":"

On April 6, Nicholas Kristof<\/a> posted a picture from the West Bank posing with Munther Amira, a Palestinian he described as having endured \u201cbrutal abuse in Israeli prisons.\u201d I forwarded it to a few well-connected people with a simple question: \u201cDoes someone in the Israeli government know he is here? If so, they should be reaching out.\u201d<\/p>\n

The tweet, I figured, had definitely been seen by officials in Israel\u2019s public diplomacy apparatus, and they should have reached the same obvious conclusion \u2013 whatever Kristof was doing here was not going to end well. Someone needed to try to get ahead of it.<\/p>\n

Nobody did.<\/p>\n

After Kristof\u2019s rape column was published earlier this month, the answer was what I expected: no one from the IDF Spokesperson\u2019s Office had called the New York Times<\/a> columnist. No one had sat across from him, heard his accusations, and tried to tell a different story. Not even an attempt.<\/p>\n

Would it have made a difference? Maybe. Maybe not.<\/p>\n

\"NicholasNicholas Kristof at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. (credit: WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM\/WIKIPEDIA)<\/p>\n

Maybe the column would have been more balanced. Maybe it would have been worse. That is always the uncertainty with public diplomacy \u2013 you never know what might have been until you try.<\/p>\n

And that is the point. Israel didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

The question is why. And to answer it, consider two things that happened recently that most people missed.<\/p>\n

On May 7, a new IDF officer took up the role as the IDF\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

When asked to justify the appointment, the IDF Spokesperson\u2019s Office explained that she has \u201cdiplomatic experience.\u201d What that means, and why it is relevant to the job of managing international media during a war, was left unexplained.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The IDF\u2019s storytelling has a direct, concrete impact on the country\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Israel keeps losing<\/p>\n

The problem starts at the top. IDF Spokesperson Brig.-Gen. Effie Defrin<\/a> is a decorated tank commander who previously headed the IDF\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

And it is not only the IDF. Last month, Tzipi Hotovely<\/a>, 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Can anyone imagine the Air Force operating for two years without a commander? The Defense Ministry<\/a> without a minister?<\/p>\n

We can spend all the energy in the world accusing the world of antisemitism \u2013 and there is real antisemitism out there \u2013 but that is something of a deflection since it avoids taking responsibility.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s opinions? Again, maybe yes and maybe no. But shouldn\u2019t the country try?<\/p>\n

If the IDF Spokesperson\u2019s Office or the National Information Directorate were run like serious institutions \u2013 imagine a publicly-traded company on the NYSE \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

Instead, we run our public diplomacy like a junior varsity operation, and then act surprised when we keep losing.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t change, the lessons go unlearned, and the merry-go-round keeps spinning. But people who care cannot stay quiet.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Until that changes, Israel will keep fighting the information war the same way it fought the morning of October 7: unprepared, understaffed, and asleep.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On April 6, Nicholas Kristof posted a picture from the West Bank posing with Munther Amira, a Palestinian…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":136113,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[33],"tags":[40440,8772,9105,423,10507,37,5878],"class_list":["post-136112","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-israel","tag-hague","tag-icc","tag-icj","tag-idf","tag-idf-spokesperson-headline","tag-israel","tag-israel-defense-news"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/116657549758039432","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136112","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=136112"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136112\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/136113"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=136112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=136112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=136112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}