Special Edition : Winning the Global Communication War

Tel Aviv Diary, April 28, 2024

Dear Readers,

As I mentioned a few days ago, today, Erev Chag, instead of the regular Tel Aviv Diary, I am sharing an article written by Mark Zlochin. I’ve been following Mark on Twitter for some time. He constantly posts detailed analyses of various statistics, such as the number of casualties in Gaza or the volume of truck entries, and he is very good at it. I found his latest article particularly insightful and wanted to share it with you. The next diary entry will be published Tuesday night unless significant news breaks before then.

One piece of news as we approach the Chag here in Israel — Both Ben-Gvir and Smotritch have now publicly warned Netanyahu that if he agrees to the current hostage negotiation plan presented to Hamas, they will bring down the government. Conversely, former Defense Minister Gantz has now issued an opposing threat, asserting that if Hamas accepts the deal and Israel does not, the government will have no further legitimacy.

Finally, a correction from last night. I mistakenly provided the wrong name and omitted the link for the article titled At Columbia, excuse the students, but not the faculty, written by Paul Berman.

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Winning the Global Communication War

Some thoughts on Gary Wexler's “Jewish communication army” network masterplan

by Mark Zlochin PhD

Last week we went on a short family vacation in Amsterdam, visiting our friends – an Israeli couple that moved to Holland twelve years ago. Inescapably, many of our conversations centered on the aftermath of October 7 and the intolerable incompetence of the Israeli government in countering the information war waged against Israel.

The husband, who's involved in several international Jewish educational projects, told me about an article published in November by Gary Wexler—a former professor at the USC Annenberg School of Communication & Journalism—that provided fascinating historical context for the highly coordinated and focused anti-Israeli communication campaign we are all witnessing now.

Wexler didn't stop at observing the fact that, unlike Israel, Palestinians really excel in their PR campaign, but went further and launched a campaign for organizing what he called a "Jewish communication army" needed to change the balance of power in this information war. The idea deeply resonated with me, and as we took a long walk, I started thinking about it out loud.

Once we got back home, I thought it might be useful to put some of those observations in writing and share them on this platform.

So here we go.

The first thing we need to do is to acknowledge that "information/communication wars" are not just colorful metaphors, but that we are, in fact, at war.

October 7 and its aftermath have made two things very clear:

1.    Israel's very right to exist is still disputed by a majority of Palestinians, as well as their countless supporters around the world.

2.    Antisemitism is alive and kicking – in particular, in the universities that many would like to think of as the bastions of liberalism and tolerance, and which are currently shaping the worldview of the future Western leadership.

Consequently, what is at stake here is the very existence of Israel as the Jewish national home and – eventually – the safety of Jews worldwide.

Which brings us to the core problem:

Israel, as a state, has completely failed in this war – both strategically and tactically.
Our government still hasn't realized that the information warfare is as important as, if not even more important than, the physical warfare, and, accordingly, it has neither created the required infrastructure, nor allocated any resources, for fighting this war. It's tempting to put the blame on Netanyahu and his clique, but I'm afraid the problem is much deeper than this – having a lot to do with Israeli political and organizational culture – and at this point, we must acknowledge the second critical fact:

We cannot count on Israeli government – any Israeli government – to lead the change that is urgently needed.

Notably, we already have multiple grass root initiatives and individual activists that try to fill the vacuum left by official organizations - here are just a few notable examples:

• UN Watch — who have been instrumental in exposing UNRWA's entanglement with Hamas.

• CAMERA, CAMERA UK and Honest Reporting — media watchdog organizations that try to hold major media outlets accountable for the way they cover Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

• Ella Kenan — who was responsible for launching the #HamasIsISIS campaign back in October and has been a major driving force in Israeli public diplomacy activity throughout this war.

Now, all those people and organizations – and many others not mentioned above due to space limitations — are doing an extremely valuable work, but so far each of them has been operating independently of one another, without any systematic coordination between them, which severely limits the real-world impact of the important work they are doing.

Which leads us to the third important observation:

Winning the war of narratives requires massive coordination between different "players" taking part in these information warfare efforts.

This brings up a critical question of how to achieve such coordination between independent actors that are not organized in a rigid hierarchical structure.

Without going into details, let me just point out that in the last couple of decades this has been a hot topic in organizational consulting field, with several important developments outlined, for example, in "Reinventing Organizations" by Frédéric Laloux. In other words, while the organizational challenge is real, it has been successfully addressed before, and there are some tried-and-true methodologies that we can use to achieve this goal.

But before we start exploring the "how", there is one important thing that needs to be said about the "who", and this will probably be the most controversial idea in this text.

Building an effective global "communication army" network requires a tectonic shift in the structure of relationships between the Israeli and the Diaspora Jews.

Until now, the relationship has been asymmetric and its underlying organizing metaphor has put Israel and Israelis at the center, and the Diaspora Jews – at the periphery (just think of the original Greek meaning of the word "Diaspora" or its Hebrew counterpart "Hatfusot" – "the dispersal/dispersed").

The asymmetry is also reflected in the language used to describe immigration to Israel ("Aliyah" – "Ascent") vs emigration from Israel to other countries ("Yeridah" – "Descent"), as well in the one-directional flow of support (Diaspora typically supporting Israel, very rarely – the other way around).

Now, the centrality of Israel in Jewish "mental cartography" is not likely to change, but setting up a decentralized "communication army", in which both the Israelis and the Diaspora Jews play an important role, requires a more balanced and egalitarian relationship between those two parts of the world Jewry.

In particular, the utilitarian perception, currently held by many Israelis, of Diaspora as a "tool" at the service of Israel, needs to give way to the opposite view – of Israel as a "tool" serving the needs of Jews worldwide – both inside and outside of Israel.

Moreover, since the communication war is mainly taking place outside of Israel, it means that the Diaspora Jews, who are "closer to the battlefield", would be better positioned to be the vanguard of the "communication army", while the Israelis should be, for most part, providing support to this vanguard.

This is very different from the current "Hasbara model", in which the Diaspora Jews are mostly perceived as a silent audience, at best, and Israelis are doing most of the talking.

Those are some very preliminary "broad-strokes" observations about the Gary Wexler's "communication army" initiative – I hope they will serve as conversation starter that will allow us to develop those ideas in more depth and eventually lead to some practical action steps that will help to turn this Big Idea into reality.

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Mark Zlochin PhD— systemic therapist, business trainer and organizational consultant. Former AI researcher and incorrigible data analysis geek.