The Broken PR Machine

Did the machine break or the audience evaporate?

Observing the Gaza conflict, both sides are engaging in the standard, brutal tactics they have used for decades. Palestinians engage in terrorist tactics, guerrilla warfare and use human shields. Israel presses its technological advantage with collateral damage. Both sides share atrocity pictures and videos to play the propaganda game. What is noticeable is that Israel is not enjoying a groundswell of support and sympathy in this iteration of the conflict. The machine is appears broken. The more precise view should be that the audience no longer aligns with the machine.

There are a few opinion polls released that show support for Israel has softened. Despite the 10/7 Hamas raid, there was no spike. Polls a week after showed 50/50 splits for sending weapons to Israel, and showed solid support for sending aid to Gaza.

The normal pro-Israel PR figures spread the standard lines we have all heard for decades, but the needle is not moving. Another poll found that sympathy for Palestinians has gained numbers as time marches on. Some of this is the initiation of the ground war in Gaza with accompanying atrocity videos and pictures. War is brutal and civilians die. No one will stop and wonder why footage out of Ukraine was so restricted compared to the new conflict, but it is powerful.

What’s wrong? Is the great Wurlitzer broken? The buttons are pushed but the results are different. There are a few reasons for this, and Israel might want to adjust their global opinion management tactics.

First and foremost is a demographic change in the West. Nate Silver’s notes on the vanishing elastic voter is cover for the declining white share of the American electorate. Set aside the obvious Muslim immigration into the West. Third world immigrants do not care about the history of the Jewish community that justifies Israel’s current arrangement. Cambodians survived Pol Pot. Central Americans survived death squads. West Africans dealt with dueling Marxist militias killing indiscriminately. Their view of the Holocaust is just one of many brutal moments in history. These groups can view Israel as a colonial project, and they can identify the group designated white. This is why their proportion of pro-Palestinian rallies is so high.

The other piece is that decades of grievance studies messaging and its corresponding infiltration into non-grievance studies subjects in universities stamped on students the obvious oppressor/oppressed framework and where Israel/Palestine fits. Israel built a civilization in the desert with ethnic cleansing via warfare, segregation and hierarchal citizenship arrangements as a part of it. These are reactions to an opponent bent on destroying and killing Jews via any means necessary. No matter the tactics of the oppressed, Israel is the bad guy in these properly indoctrinated students’ minds. No messaging is going to work on them because of their priors. None. The rear guard action that the Israeli boosters have is to deny employment to outspoken pro-Palestinian figures, but anyone who stays silent will be hired and voila, the personnel changes with churn and that last tactic withers away.

No messaging is going to work and this is not just a function of schooling but of the contemporary left wing mind. The joke is once a person posts one simple left wing current year shibboleth, you know all their opinions on every hot button topic. It is true. The left has discipline and does not allow nuance or heterodox thinking. We all witnessed the leftward drift on issue after issue create the new conservatives or politically homeless whiners clogging up social media. No nuance allowed. No deviations from the suite of beliefs. The left does not care. They are importing new client voters to replace those nuanced whites libs anyway.

This is not just a left wing problem for Israel but a right wing problem. That poll shared above shows much lower support for supplying the IDF than one would expect from the GOP. It is generational. Most other polls show much softer support for Israel in younger age brackets. That might be shaped by watching the most pro-Israel president of recent memory get stymied (on critical national sovereignty issues) by many individuals and organizations now telling them to support Israel that engages in far more strict versions of Trump policies. The young American right knows there are far more pressing issues than sending $10 billion in military aid to a nation that has $200 billion in reserves.

There might be another nagging thing that the machine is screw up, hurting its efforts. The 10/7 Hamas raid was horrifying. Armed men gunning down families in cars, massacring ravers and hauling away women to rape/kill is bad. There is zero need to amplify the atrocity porn with the unverifiable babies in ovens or beheaded babies stories. That 10/7 raid justifies a response. Adding on the atrocities that end up unverified or worse, proven incorrect, sours persuadable groups on your PR campaign and calls into question all reporting during the conflict. The Cable News Dominance is gone. The Syrian War should have clued them to this change. The online game makes the half-life of anything shorter now. Competing narratives rely on virality and network effects. Community Notes will dent anything erroneous. Pushing the line of believability has a cost now to the rest of a propaganda campaign, so one must be nimbler and more careful. Missing Israeli posters in American cities serve what purpose? This is street level propaganda. Tearing them down is just as dumb. It’s street signaling that only angers those not heavily engaged in the newest flare up in Gaza by making it an American nuisance.

This conflict is not a month old and yet it informs so much about the future for the Israel Lobby. The machine is not working like it once did. The masses have changed. If the Democrats have locked down the presidency via immigration and ballot harvesting, Israel should be planning on some form of international back-up or a new allocation of dollars, media resources and support in American politics. Those mixed race rallies and those weak opinion polls for Democrats and Independents should chill AIPAC. It’s over, and no Third World Maoist coalition will accept Israel as it is now. They should pivot. A First Worldist alliance of sorts, but to quote a movie, “help me, help you”.