Israel is Losing the Propaganda War

Deacon Dave Havard said, “I do not know why you waste so much time arguing about words.  It would be better to change the actions which are prompting such words.  The reason Israel is losing the propaganda war is that they think it can be won by choosing the right words to describe their actions.  The rest of the world is judging the actions, not the words.”

That observation was made in 2019.  The data since then has done nothing but confirm it, repeatedly, at a scale that should alarm anyone still betting on messaging as the fix.  A Pew Research Centre survey of 24 countries conducted in spring 2025 found that in 20 of those countries, roughly half or more of adults held an unfavourable view of Israel, with the figure exceeding three-quarters in Australia, Greece, Indonesia, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Turkey.  In the United States specifically, the share of adults with a negative view of Israel rose eleven percentage points between March 2022 and March 2025.  By early 2026, a further Pew survey spanning 36 countries and over 44,000 respondents found that figure had climbed to 67% holding an unfavourable view globally, against just 25% favourable, with none of the 36 countries surveyed recording a majority favourable opinion.  Gallup separately reported that Americans, for the first time since the organisation began tracking the question in 2001, no longer sympathise more with Israelis than with Palestinians.  This is not a public relations dip.  This is a structural collapse in international standing, tracked across multiple independent pollsters over consecutive years.

Israeli spokespeople have spent years refining vocabulary: “targeted operations” rather than strikes on residential blocks, “mowing the lawn” as an internal military phrase for recurring Gaza campaigns, “human shields” to explain civilian casualty figures, “self-defence” as the blanket justification for the scale of each response.  Every one of these phrases was chosen deliberately, tested, workshopped, and deployed by professional communications teams.  None of it has moved the polling in Israel’s favour.  It has, if anything, correlated with the opposite.  The International Court of Justice's January 2024 provisional measures ruling, finding Israel’s conduct in Gaza falls within the scope of the Genocide Convention, did not turn on a single press release Israel issued.  It turned on documented conduct: strike patterns, displacement orders, casualty figures, and the treatment of aid corridors, submitted as evidence and assessed against a legal standard, not a messaging standard.

The rest of the world, per Deacon Havard’s framing, was never in the room arguing about vocabulary.  It was watching footage, reading casualty tolls, and tracking humanitarian access figures, then forming a judgement based on what those data points showed.  A government convinced its problem is rhetorical will keep hiring better copywriters while the actual metric moving public opinion, documented civilian harm, keeps moving in the opposite direction regardless of the phrasing wrapped around it.