Israel and the West are facing cruel enemies—Iran and Islamist terrorism, to begin with—but there is another enemy just as dangerous, one that sneaks into our minds instead of blowing up our streets: the narrative that has taken the place of facts and truth. I have been a journalist covering the Middle East since the middle of the last century, and when I started, the rules were simple. You found the facts, you wrote them, you explained them, and you let the chips fall where they might. It didn’t matter whether the truth helped your friends or hurt your enemies; the truth was the story. Those days are gone. Today’s Western narrative tells us that Israel is a colonialist occupier, that Palestinians are helpless victims, and that the conflict between them is the only one that matters, because all-powerful, diabolical Jews are supposedly responsible for this and every other evil in the world. That narrative is so deeply woven into the culture that intelligent, well-meaning people march for causes that are the opposite of their own interests. You see young people with keffiyehs chanting “Queers for Palestine” even though homosexuality is illegal and often punished with death in Gaza and much of the Arab world. You see feminists defend regimes that would strip them of every right. Why? Because the story matters more than reality. As an old journalist, I still believe that facts dictate the story, but the world no longer agrees. A friend of mine once told me that after years of reading my articles, he still couldn’t tell whether I was left or right. I took that as the highest compliment a reporter can receive. These days, that kind of objectivity is not just hard to find; it’s considered suspicious. You are expected to start with the narrative you believe in and then gather up all the facts that support it, even if the “facts” are fabrications. That is how Israel, aided by its own missteps, has lost so much support in the Western world. That is what a narrative can do. And that is why I feel like a stranger in a profession I once loved.
Let me offer some well-documented facts that have become completely irrelevant because they don’t fit the narrative. There has never been an Israeli-led genocide in Gaza. There has never been mass starvation in Gaza. On the contrary, Israel facilitated the shipment of enough food to satisfy the requirements of every person in Gaza—an almost unheard-of humanitarian gesture during an active war, and one that Israel’s enemies cynically denounce as propaganda while helping their own people die of neglect. The ratio of combatant deaths to civilian deaths in the recent fighting in Gaza is remarkably close to one to one, which is an extraordinary standard in modern warfare. Compare that with the American-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the ratio was about eight civilian deaths for every combatant. Do these facts matter? Not in the narrative. They are buried because they contradict the picture of Israel as a bloodthirsty monster. I could go on. Homosexuality is illegal and immoral in much of the Arab world, and in Gaza, gay people have been thrown from apartment-building roofs. Women are crushed under authoritarian laws, journalists are murdered, minorities are persecuted, and no one marches. But protests rage for Gaza because Gaza has been transformed into a symbol, not a place with real people whose real suffering is often manufactured or exploited by their own leaders. The narrative tells us that the Israel-Palestinian conflict is the only conflict that matters, and that Jews are responsible for everything wrong in the world. That is not a new idea; it is the oldest anti-Semitic lie in history, recycled in progressive clothing. Facts are irrelevant because they don’t stir the blood or feed the ego. People don’t want to be confused by facts. They want to feel righteous. They want to be on the side of the oppressed, even if the “oppressed” are the ones throwing gay people off roofs and firing rockets from schools. I’m an old grouch, and I still follow the old rules, but I have learned that the old rules don’t win many arguments anymore.
The decline of the journalism profession has opened the door to this nightmare. Once-proud news outlets now openly advocate for their chosen narrative, pandering to their niche audiences and treating objectivity as an outdated myth. Politicians have always pandered, but now they have raised it to an art form. I will never forget the American presidential candidate who stood face to face with an Iranian exchange student accusing Israel of “ethnic genocide.” In a saner age, that candidate would have said, “You are a guest in my country. Just try saying that about Iran in Tehran and see what happens to you.” Instead, the candidate waffled and praised the student’s “voice” and “perspective” and “truth,” declaring that “your truth cannot be suppressed, and it must be heard.” “Your truth” is the perfect slogan for our era. It means narrative, not truth. It means experience is superior to evidence, and feeling is superior to fact. There is an old joke: “My mind is made up, don’t confuse me with facts.” It is no longer a joke; it is the operating system of public discourse. This explains why supposedly intelligent people can listen to a terrorist group’s propaganda and accept it as sacred, while dismissing the testimony of Israeli survivors and the documented history of Jewish suffering as lies. It explains why university campuses, which should be temples of critical thinking, have become echo chambers of indoctrination, where students are taught to see every global issue through the crude lens of oppressor and oppressed, with Israel as the ultimate oppressor. As a journalist, I was taught to follow the facts no matter where they led. I still do. But I have to acknowledge that in the culture war that now dominates our world, facts without a moving story are like a single candle in a hurricane. The narrative has won because it promises identity, purpose, and a feeling of moral superiority—and truth alone cannot compete with that.
Social media, or as I call it, antisocial media, has made everything immeasurably worse. It allows, even encourages, people to latch onto a narrative and then build a closed circle of like-minded followers, where every lie is echoed and every fact is mocked. It has created a world where “influencers” replace experts, where popularity is the only credential, and where an eight-year-old can become famous overnight if one video goes viral. Remember when the word “viral” was associated with disease and danger? It turns out it still is, just in a different form. Professional tennis players have complained about influencers disrupting tournaments by making noise and flashing cameras while trying to get photographed instead of watching the matches. But why should anyone be surprised? In a culture that worships attention, attention is the only currency that matters. I once saw a certified immunologist with a PhD and twenty-five years of experience explaining carefully that vaccines save lives. A random reader replied with a single word: “Bullsh*t.” That is the state of public discourse. The experts are ignored, the ignorant are celebrated, and the narrative rules. In this environment, Israel and the Jews of the world are vastly outnumbered and outspent by the forces promoting the current lies, even though the narrative claims Jews control everything with unlimited resources. We all know the truth is the opposite: the anti-Israel narrative machine has billions of dollars behind it, with Qatar alone running an enormous and successful campaign to influence American opinion, and with legions of online commentators, activists, and even university professors working around the clock to demonize the Jewish state. A generation may already be lost. But I refuse to believe we cannot win the next one. The answer is not to keep shouting facts at people who are emotionally invested in lies. The answer is to learn how they do what they do, and to do it better—to steal their techniques, their passion, their ability to tell stories that move hearts, and use them for something true.
That means constructing narratives to counter the slander, not just with facts, but with stories that make people feel something. There are so many true stories that never get told. Consider Oded Lifshitz, an 84-year-old Israeli who lived in a village next to Gaza and spent years volunteering to drive sick Palestinians from the border to Israeli hospitals. He believed in peace until the end. On October 7, 2023, Palestinian terrorists kidnapped him from his home and dragged him into Gaza, where he died. Where is the worldwide march for Oded? Where are the campus protests for the peace activist murdered by those he tried to help? They are nowhere, because his story doesn’t fit the narrative. Then consider the Israeli researchers who, just in the past year, have come up with promising possible cures for several forms of cancer. Those discoveries could save lives of people all over the world, including in countries that hate Israel. They are not reported. And when natural disasters strike anywhere on Earth, Israel is often among the first to send rescue teams, even to nations that refuse to recognize its existence. These are stories that could inspire, that could change minds, that could break through the noise. But how do we turn them into narratives? That is above, or below, my pay grade. I am a journalist, not a social media genius. But I know this much: we need to make the decision to try. We need to stop wasting all our time and money responding to lies with facts, and start investing in creative, emotional, compelling storytelling that competes with the lies on their own turf. In a post-fact era, defense is not enough. You need offense. You need stories that people share, stories that make them cry or cheer or stand up and say “I knew it.”
So what is the difference between Israel’s potential narratives and the current crop of pro-Islamist ones? It is simple and profound: Israel’s are true. That is a massive advantage, but it is not enough if we don’t know how to tell them. The narrative that Israel is a colonialist occupier is false; the narrative that Palestinians are helpless victims is selective; the narrative that Jews are a diabolical force controlling the world is ancient anti-Semitism disguised as modern activism. In the end, lies are fragile because they cannot survive scrutiny, while truth endures. It may take longer. It may require smarter strategies, more persuasive voices, and a willingness to embrace new media instead of despising it. But the battle of narratives is the defining battle of our age. If we lose it, more than Israel will be lost; the West will lose its own grip on reality, its own commitment to facts, and its own ability to defend the values it claims to hold dear. I may be an old man with a long white beard who wishes the world would just get off my lawn. But I am not ready to surrender. We need to learn how the storytellers work, and then we need to tell our story with the same passion, the same urgency, the same emotion—because our story happens to be true. We have heroes like Oded Lifshitz, science that saves lives, soldiers who fight harder and more humanely than any army in the history of warfare, and a people who have returned to their ancient homeland after two thousand years. That is a narrative more powerful than any lie, if only we can learn to tell it. The mainstream media will not do it for us. The universities will not do it for us. The politicians will not do it for us. We must do it ourselves, with every tool we have, from TikTok to television, from poetry to protest. And we must do it now, before the next generation is lost to a story that has already been told too many times. The truth will not win automatically; it will win only if we fight for it. But we can win. And we should.