Introducing Modern Hasbara Theory

Modern problems require modern solutions

Personally I am very fond of strawberries and cream, but I have found that for some strange reason, fish prefer worms. So when I went fishing, I didn’t think about what I wanted. I thought about what they wanted.-Dale Carnegie, How To Make Friends And Influence People

Over the last 15 years, we’ve seen the collapse of the PR efforts of Israel and the American Jewish establishment. Slowly at first and then rapidly, the half-century long strategy of presenting Israel and the Jews as a voice of progress, reason, moderation and modern values in a barbaric wilderness has ceased to work. In this essay, I argue that the main reasons behind this are not Israel’s actions (such as treatment of Gaza and the West Bank Palestinians,) but rather structural changes in the American and global audiences, the personnel driving and implementing messaging, and the channels by which the messaging is delivered to the audiences. With these changes in mind, I develop a new conceptual framework which I call Modern Hasbara theory.

Why Hasbara

Originally, until a century ago, Hasbara was openly called “propaganda.” As hackneyed propaganda efforts gave propaganda itself a bad name, the Zionists coined the term “Hasbara”, “explanation” in Hebrew. Propaganda is, roughly, state-driven narrative aimed at a wide audience with the conscious goal of influencing its perceptions and behavior to the benefit of the state. This is a basic state function and universal fact of life.

Propaganda is directed at friends to secure their continued friendship, at neutrals to secure at least their continued neutrality and possibly convert them to friends, and at enemies to confuse and demoralize them.

In our specific situation, we exist at a strategic junction of seas and continents, surrounded by hostile nations and at the nexus of struggles between maritime and continental empires. In the current iteration, the American empire is the maritime hegemon. Managing relations with it is a critical task, not just for us, but for other nations. If you analyze lobbying spend in the United States, the top 10 are all maritime nations sitting on continental fault lines. Most face serious enemies posing an existential threat on their borders.

The nature of American policy-making is that, being the function of a hybrid system, at equilibrium it combines the worst parts of mob rule democracy, corrupt populism and sclerotic eunuch bureaucracy (in polite conversation, this is referred to as “checks and balances” or “separation of powers.”) Occasionally, a dominant faction grabs the reins and implements something that looks like the vital, original form of these degenerate forms of government, like the monarchy, aristocracy and democracy of the kyklos. Usually, this happens at the hands of a president, by the very nature of power in an emergency, which is that it must be concentrated enough to be effective and cohesive. There have been times when the oligarchy has taken the reins successfully and used its distributed power to work through a crisis: most prominently, the American Deep State and academia’s successful efforts to win the Cold War in the 1970s-80s. Democracy’s only triumphs in American history were the successful Revolutionary War and the Gilded Age; in the first, the American people mustered enough cohesion and grit to spend half a decade fighting a continental conflict with the British Empire in a replay of the heroic Dutch struggle for independence from Spain in the 80 Years’ War of the previous century. In the second, the American people wrested power from the insane Yankee progressives who had launched a war which killed and maimed 5% of the population, and proceeded to loot and wreck the economy of the South while administering much of it through demented proxy local governments which can only be compared negatively to what you see in black-run cities in modern America.

Imagine you lose a war, and your adversaries put the extras from The Wire in charge of your local government.

Anyway, the American people didn’t stand for this shit and recovered power briefly during the Gilded Age (the greatest blossoming of American security, prosperity and quality of life in history,) to lose it to the Progressives.

The point of all this is that if you need to manage relations with America, you need to simultaneously worry about (usually mostly powerless) normie Americans, the (corrupt and frequently stupid) politicians they elect and the (creepy, opaque, bloodless) apparatchiks of the think tanks, civil service, intelligence community and military industrial complex. So, roughly, your lowest common denominators/caricatures are Larry the Cable Guy, that purple haired witch senator lady and General Buck Turgidson from Doctor Strangelove.

“Hell of an AIPAC junket, I’ll tell you what”

When Hasbara was not enough

As an aside, an interesting example of the interplay between the three branches of American government as it relates to Israel can be found in Ike’s Gamble, a popular history of American Middle Eastern policy under Eisenhower. In very brief summary, Eisenhower started by helping the Egyptians squeeze the British out of the Middle East, due to the advice given him by the CIA and State Department imperial eunuchs. The latter intended to take over from war invalid Britain as the hegemon of the Middle East, ruling through nationalist Arab client states, with the Arab popular will driving events, manifesting itself through populist leaders backed by American support. Concessions would be required, primarily of Israel (the plan, codenamed Operation Alpha, originally required Israel to give up the Negev Desert, and eventually softened its demands to merely have Israel hand one triangle in the Negev to Egypt and another to Jordan, so that the two would have a common border at the apex (and also cut Israel in half.))

Oh, yeah

Direct aid to Egypt involved things like setting up its propaganda apparatus, from the radio infrastructure to the actual messaging (produced by Paul Linebarger, aka Cordwainer Smith, one of the great 20th century science fiction writers). Meanwhile, the Eisenhower administration, represented by the Dulles brothers who ran State and the CIA, refused to sell Israel arms and exerted continuous pressure on it to make concessions.

To Ben Gurion’s credit, he didn’t spit in Byroade’s face

The American strategy led to several rounds of being screwed over by Nasser and his fellow Egyptian Free Officers, whose goals were actually not to be an American proxy but rather to unite the Arab world in an empire, to which end Egypt maneuvered between the US and USSR, conducted a special operations and guerrilla campaign against Israel and subverted its fellow Arab countries through propaganda, intelligence and armed proxy sponsorship. In short, Nasser’s Egypt was in a similar stance to Iran during the Obama and Biden administrations.

This all culminated in the 1956 Suez Crisis, where Britain, France and Israel attacked Egypt for, respectively, nationalizing the Suez Canal, supporting the FLN Algerian rebellion, supporting the Fedayeen terrorist insurgents and blocking Israeli shipping routes. America reacted by crushing Britain and France politically, but had a harder time with Israel, which ended the war in control of the Sinai peninsula, and for the first time with strategic depth vs. its strongest enemy and biggest existential threat. Israel demanded guarantees from America in exchange for relinquishing this achievement, won with blood. America offered lukewarm ones (which turned out to be worthless,) and then used the threat of sanctions to force Israel to agree and withdraw.

From the perspective of 2026, this doesn’t seem like a big deal. From the perspective of late 1950s Israel, living under siege from without and rationing food, which had just beaten its biggest enemy back from its borders, it did. This outcome was driven by the fact that Israel had only limited influence with American elected politicians and people, in the form of support in the American press and Congress. Without that support, it is likely that Israel would have been pressured into concessions which would have been difficult for it to recover from. When that support showed signs of buckling, Israel was forced to fold its hand, which led to Egypt being able to pose an existential threat to it a decade later in the lead up to the Six Day War.

This is just one example of a series of events where Israel’s relationship with the three sides of America proved to be of existential importance. Therefore, historically, it has invested significant resources in maintaining this relationship, with hasbara directed at the wider public playing a major role in its efforts.

Historical Hasbara

Because of the provincial and unsophisticated nature of most of the people making up the Israeli state’s upper echelons, it is unlikely that anyone involved in leading the Hasbara apparatus over the last 50 years had ever read Adam Smith, or studied mass psychology in depth. Hasbara messaging has been very unsophisticated, running to emphasizing the dumb, dysfunctional and barbaric nature of our enemies (true,) and our nature as a progressive country (meh) which loves human rights (nah) and gay pride parades (ugh.) We appeal to Facts and Logic, and also pictures of hot IDF girls with questionable Jewish heritage and unquestionably un-Jewish clothing choices. It’s like you asked 1986 John Milius to craft your communications strategy, then sprayed some gay on it. In addition, for a few decades, hamfisted emotional blackmail leveraging the Holocaust was in fashion, mostly from American irreligious Jews (difficult to imagine normal frum Jews deluding themselves that gentiles should be profoundly affected by the Holocaust, any more than they should be emotionally affected by the Armenian Genocide, Rwanda, Cambodia or the millions killed in the Indian Partition).

All of this hokey horseshit actually worked for a long time due to the inherent hokeyness of pre-Internet media. It’s difficult to remember the world of mass broadcasting, but it was the state of the art from the 1930s to the 2000s. Radio, tv were the one-way communication pipe from power to the public. Boomer and Greatest Generation audiences were completely hypnotized by the frame. To them, on some level, the TV and radio were their electric companions, always there for them. The people living inside these magic boxes were their friends, neighbors and extended family; they often felt closer to the Brady Bunch than to their own kids and parents. The advertisements were there to inform them about valuable facts like that 9 out of 10 dentists recommend fluoride toothpaste.

This all framed the political discourse from FDR’s fireside chats onwards. There were no hecklers at his fireside chats, or any of their successors. Nobody would show up to shit-talk Larry King or Glenn Beck in the middle of their own show. All the public conversations were one-way and scripted, and all the important, real conversations were had way, way off-camera. There was no relation between the real conversations and the formal ones, except insofar as the formal ones were used to sell the outcomes of the real ones. Plato’s cave metaphor in real life, at planetary scale.

In this environment, Ben Shapiro’s Facts and Logic-based approach, hot IDF chicks with M-16s and Yasser Arafat’s dysgenic terrorist-looking face were a breath of fresh air, not a lame cringefest. Even Rabbi Kahane on Barbara Walters or Morton Downey Jr. was pretty cool. The hasbara establishment more or less was living on easy street, which meant that it could inflate headcount and budgets without worrying too much about innovation or competence. Eventually, the John Milius guys retired and Smadi with the gel fingernails moved up in ranks. End result:

Is this Goyslop or ZOGslop? It’s Schroedinger’s Slop, when you think about it.

The Audience Shift

Two big things have happened to the audience in the last 20 years. First, a generation has been raised on mobile phones and social media. I could pretend like I’ve read Baudrillard or some other French pedo here, and use French pedo words like hyperreality, but the upshot is that these people grew up in an environment which combines the most boring, sterile, mundane objective reality imaginable with a handheld device that blasts footage of every aspect of human life down to the two mysteries of sex and death in 1080p high definition right down your optic nerve wherever and whenever you want. As a corollary, the audience has chronic, terminal irony and dopamine poisoning, and your college-ass disco dorm-based propaganda gives it fits of cringe-induced hysterical laughter, especially as it’s juxtaposed with video of squashed Palestinian babies. The babies are nothing new-the last 100 years have involved countries turning millions of civilians into catfood on a casual basis, from the biggies of USAF strategic bombing to various backwaters like Egypt bullying their Yemenite neighbors for all they’re worth. The footage is nothing new either-these kids have seen Faces of Death, but crowdsourced, a million times. But the juxtaposition between your scripted mooing and gonzo reality is striking and alienating to your new audience.

The second audience shift has been its globalization. The same technology has meant that billions of people have been able to join the conversation. This sounds like a good thing, but consider this: most of the newcomers come from populations with average IQs in the 70s and 80s. This is plenty of brainpower to do things like plowing a field without slipping on water buffalo dung, or spin yarn by hand; it does not lend itself to incisive, multidimensional discourse about complex geopolitical issues. In addition, most of these populations have traditionally viewed the Jews in exactly the same way that the Nation of Islam views white people, and for the same reason: biomass ressentiment, the same that’s driven every decolonization pogrom over the last 70 years. Some idea of what I’m talking about can be gained from looking at the billion videos on Twitter of third worlders dying in idiotic ways as their friends and family look on, slackjawed. The lowest common denominator hit bedrock and started digging.

On top of this all, some more technologically oriented countries have begun to use the new public discourse landscape in a more sophisticated way than traditional lobbying and buying influence in American academia and traditional media. Sometimes their efforts are sophisticated, sometimes rudimentary, but they all promote and amplify messages which are accessible to the new audience by their simplicity and emotional load.

If you doubt what I’m saying, look at the last decade’s crop of influencers who’ve been vocal on the Israel-Palestine conflict, and the Jewish Question at large. Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, Ian Carroll, Dan Bilzerian, Myron Gaines, Sneako, Andrew Tate, Candace Owens, Stew Peters, Jake Shields, Lucas Gage are several cuts beneath their predecessors. Say what you will about Francis Yockey, at least he could make arguments more complex than “it’s the Jews.” Most of the influencers are not actually suffering from brain damage (Jake Shields is an exception.) Rather, they’re addressing a much larger and dumber audience, whose basic mental and emotional functioning have been attrited by technology to the point that any nuance or complexity are non-starters.

This environment is not that of a political debate curated by William Buckley, but the Real Housewives of New Jersey. In this context, normal Hasbara is a non-starter. The neutrals are unimpressed with Israeli explanations of cherry tomatoes, startup exits and gay pride parades; they see both sides as bad, far away and unlikely to benefit themselves personally. Israel’s opponents do not care about startup exits either and the explanations about Israel working to minimize damage to its enemies’ civilian populations are worse than useless: “preventing one Israeli death is worth killing 134 Gazans, killing 3500 Gazans causes a 1% drop in Israel’s popularity, compounding interest, blah blah blah.” Actually, Israel’s opponents do not think like this at all. There is no number of Gazans they would find it reasonable for Israel to kill to save one Israeli; not even a fractional number (killing ten Gazans to save one Israeli,) or a negative one (saving Gazans’ lives.) Before October 7th, as the IAF knocked on roofs to make sure Hamas members had time to evacuate, and leftists in Beeri spent their Shabbatot driving Gazans to Israeli hospitals for health care, Gaza was declared an open air concentration camp, with Israelis cast in the role of Allegemeine SS guards and executioners. No amount of Hasbara efforts to explain that Gazans had the highest rates of obesity in the world moved the needle in the slightest. If anything, the message these efforts sent was counterproductive, demonstrating to our enemies Israeli moral weakness, lack of will and the willingness to bend over backwards and turn out our pockets at the slightest accusation of unkindness.

Needless to say, Facts and Logic don’t work well when your audience is HitlerGroyperTND1488. Neither do accusations of antisemitism or mentions of the Holocaust. HitlerGroyper might be a Pakistani; he might be a 15 year old from Oxycontinville. He might even be a fashion nigga, and be of the opinion that Hugo Boss was the greatest post-Tudor designer. “Your universe has no meaning to them. They will not try to understand. They will be tired, they will be cold, they will make a fire with your beautiful oak door.”

To summarize, Hasbara is dead. It stinks. It’s worse than useless. Any money thrown at it is wasted. And yet the need to engage the wider world remains. You could argue that the mission statement of the Jews implies such a need: “ye shall be unto Me a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation,” “for this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the peoples, that, when they hear all these statutes, shall say: 'Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.’” Notably, the Torah doesn’t mention cherry tomatoes or startup exits, though it promises financial security to us if we keep it, and it definitely takes a dim view of pride parades and everything associated with them. Religion aside, geopolitics requires that the Jews maintain an effective presence in the global political discourse.

The Discourse Dialectic

Everything births its opposite, and clashes with it. Weariness of the old Hasbara discourse helped produce the Groypers, who have overplayed their hand and sunk down into endless grift and infighting.

You can only increase the playback speed 2x, which still leaves a very low information transmission rate

Old Hasbara made the Groypers look good in comparison. The Groypers make Rabbi Yossi Mizrachi look appealing. That’s why you see the Groypers’ target audience approvingly quoting him (mostly trashing goyim), in that ironic-not ironic Zoomer way. All of this adds up to a way forward.

Modern Hasbara Theory

Unlike a densely reasoned court brief, online discourse is heavily weighted towards rhetoric and style. Mogging your opponent in 280 characters or less is worth infinitely more than a wall of text which is only convincing to those who are already convinced. This is not a good way to approach the platonic truth, or lay out a strategy, but the public discourse has never been useful for this and never will be. Trying to turn today’s public discourse into a debating society, LARPing as though you were some 19th century British parliamentarian, is lame, irresponsible and fundamentally dumb, like trying to pound in nails with a microscope, or examine paramecia with a hammer.

The point of hasbara is to demoralize enemies, encourage friends and convert neutrals. The message needs to be rebuilt with this in mind. Our enemies are not subject to demoralization by appeals to superior Israeli compliance with Western morality; they never shared this morality in the first place, and view Israeli pontifications about it as hypocritical from the start. Rather, as Osama Bin Laden said, their heart lies with the strong horse, and they hate the weak horse. Demoralizing them involves emphasizing the weak horse nature of the Palestinians, their utter humiliation and destruction, the pointlessness of their struggle and the apathy of the Ummah.

No link because it’s exactly what you think

With regards to normie European and American audiences, who are tired of woke messaging promoting victim worshipping and sexual degeneracy juxtaposed with having their countries flooded with predatory third world biomass, which is subsidized at their expense even as it preys on them, Modern Hasbara Theory says that you must speak to them on their own terms. For instance, English guys watching their towns turn into Pakistani rapescapes, or the French whose cities Muslims are burning might appreciate some Israeli moral support, tips from right wing performance artists like Mordechai David on how to harass their shitlib politicians, Ben Gvir flexing on leftist protesters and Arab terrorist prisoners, etcetera.

Worth a follow

To summarize, the message to our enemies: “opposing us is a path to destruction and humiliation.” The message to neutrals: “with Jews, you win.” The message to our friends: “we support you and can help you solve your biggest problems (the collapse of your cultures, civilizations and genetic lines.)”

In the long term, rebuilding the message requires figuring out what Israel actually stands for. Cherry tomatoes, pride parades and “never again” aren’t a cohesive reason for national existence, and certainly not for non-Jews to support us. Neither is flexing on the goyim. The only imaginable stable Schelling Point is a rebuilt Temple, a Torah-observant state and all that good stuff. Fortunately, to the extent that the median Israeli desires something beyond Netflix, he desires a more Jewish Israel (this is why all attempts to move in this direction have been blocked by the judiciary-it is the branch most immune to the popular will.) In the meantime, he desires to stop subsidizing our enemies and treating them as though they are smol beans who “just want to grill, for God’s sake!” He desires to see some action taken which may look like the Salvadorean solution, or may look like the Nakba Redux, but certainly not the status quo. This may be enough of a national message for the short term; certainly it beats Hamas Voldemort and “never again” in coherence and a starting point for mass discourse.

Rebuilding The Messengers

One key failing of classical Hasbara is that it was delivered either by bourgeois-presenting Israeli officials with polished English, or by anonymous functionaries running official accounts. Imagine the reaction of the typical Pakistani or Afghan to, I dunno, Hillel Neuer or Caroline Glick.

Modern Hasbara Theory says that messaging has to be granular (tailored to its audience) and authentic. You can’t grow authentic voices, and you can’t control their messaging in detail while maintaining their authenticity. The result of attempts to do so comes across as hokey and bizarre:

“Now, make a confused face for Daddy”

What you can do is to take authentic voices which already have an audience and amplify them. Of course, these voices will often say things which would be unacceptable or have diplomatic consequences if they were to be said by people in official positions, facing the demands of respectability. This is not only inevitable but desirable; the price of authenticity is not that your voices go off script, but that there is no script for them to go off of. Respectable people say respectable things, which are predictable, which means that there’s no need to pay attention to them, you can just fill in the blanks. Entertainment is the currency of attention, it follows a log normal distribution, and one good troll is worth 100,000 stuffed suits.

Adraee’s popularity is not an example of what I’m talking about, but a sign in its direction.

The reason that Rabbi Yossi Mizrachi is a hit among the goyim is his authenticity, and his humor. You can’t grow that in a test tube in a lab under Glilot Junction, but you can find it in nature, encourage and promote it. There’s a reason that the most beneficial drugs like ivermectin and penicillin were not designed from first principles, but discovered in nature.

Moving Forward

To summarize: the old discourse is dead. Old Hasbara has died with it. The need for Hasbara remains. There is a vast, legible new public discourse, acting as a huge laboratory testing messaging, rewarding authentic and entertaining voices. Many of these voices are on our side and have an appreciative audience. To adapt, we need to rebuild the entire messaging strategy and ecosystem from the ground up, to eliminate the current top-down paradigm and infrastructure, to focus on curating and amplifying rather than designing and producing.