"...In the case of Israel’s war, my experiences, academic knowledge, and military training lead me to believe that the IDF has fought this war, particularly in Gaza, in a manner that adheres to the laws of armed conflict...
The vast majority of those criticizing Israel, globally, have not seen firsthand evidence. Most people in the world have only seen a carefully curated leviathan of Hamas propaganda, filtered through complicit media organizations working with Hamas on the ground in Gaza, amplified and repeated unwittingly by other news outlets, and turbocharged by social media.
This propaganda campaign works as do all propaganda campaigns: on emotion. Israel’s enemies understand the Western psyche and have weaponized the power of empathy. They have taken the images of war and have portrayed them as something unique. In doing so, they spin the world’s only Jewish state, and the only democracy in the Middle East, as something uniquely evil.
Soft, comfortable Westerners do not understand war. We have spent decades fighting only counterinsurgency wars of choice on other sides of the world. People do not understand the true depth of the horror of October 7, nor do they understand what a war looks like when fought against a terrorist state on your own border.
They do not understand that war is a terrible thing, in which civilians and children always suffer the most, especially when forced into harm’s way by their own [terrorist] leaders’ policy of human sacrifice for PR gains.
This near-total lack of understanding has made it very easy for Hamas and their allies to take the usual appalling imagery of war and spin it into something it is not.
Amplifying propaganda
Social media has amplified this lack of understanding. Images can reach people’s pockets even as the dust on the ground still settles from an airstrike; and people reach emotional conclusions based on mere seconds of uncorroborated, curated propaganda..."
