Israel keeps winning wars. So why are we losing?

The Arab world stopped trying to defeat Israel on the battlefield decades ago. Jews are only now realizing where the real war moved.

photo: IDF/X

Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.

---

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

---

Israel has spent decades becoming extraordinarily good at winning military battles, conflicts, and confrontations.

Its intelligence services penetrate enemy networks. Its military can strike targets thousands of miles away. Its technology sector produces tools that most countries cannot replicate. Its enemies routinely underestimate it and pay the price.

Yet something strange keeps happening: Israel wins on the battlefield and loses seemingly everywhere else.

This is not a new phenomenon. In many ways, it began the moment Israel achieved its most decisive military victory.

In 1967, Israel defeated multiple Arab armies in six days. Militarily, it was one of the most extraordinary victories in modern history. But the Arab world learned a valuable lesson from that war: If you cannot defeat Israel militarily, stop fighting where Israel is strongest —  and fight the Jewish state elsewhere.

Fight in traditional and modern media. Fight in education and academia. Fight in local and international organizations. Fight in culture. Fight in diplomacy. Fight through activists, celebrities, academics, journalists, influencers, and social media.

Over time, much of the Arab world’s strategy evolved accordingly. The objective became not necessarily to defeat Israel on the battlefield, but to shape how the battlefield itself was understood.

Israel, meanwhile, continued investing primarily in the tools that had delivered victory before: military superiority, intelligence superiority, technological superiority. Those investments were and still are necessary, but they are no longer sufficient in and of themselves.

It appears that wars are not won solely on battlefields anymore. They are won in the stories people tell about those battlefields. The recent Iran war demonstrated this reality more clearly than perhaps any conflict in recent memory.

From a military perspective, the campaign was remarkably straightforward. Iran had spent decades funding proxy armies across the Middle East that deliberately destabilize the region. It had threatened regional allies, global shipping routes, energy markets, and Western interests. It was pursuing capabilities that many policymakers believed would fundamentally alter the strategic balance of the region and beyond.

Whether one supported the military campaign or opposed it, the strategic rationale was easy to explain. Yet much of the public messaging surrounding the conflict felt disconnected from ordinary people.

The argument centered overwhelmingly on nuclear weapons. The problem is that nuclear weapons are an abstraction for most citizens. Most people do not wake up wondering about uranium enrichment levels. They wake up wondering why groceries cost more than they did last year. They wonder why gas prices rise. They wonder why supply chains break. They wonder why global instability makes everyday life more expensive and less predictable.

The real argument was never simply about nuclear weapons. It was about leverage.

A nuclear-armed Iran would possess greater ability to intimidate neighbors, threaten shipping lanes, influence energy markets, and extract concessions from governments and companies around the world. The consequences would not be limited to diplomats and generals. They would eventually reach consumers.

That is the language people understand — not centrifuges, not enrichment percentages, not technical briefings, but interests, costs, prices, security, and stability.

This is why many Americans looked at the operation against then-Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and saw an action tied, however imperfectly, to concrete American interests. Yet when it came to Iran, policymakers often spoke as if the public spent its evenings reading nuclear inspection reports rather than worrying about gas prices, inflation, and economic uncertainty.

The inability to consistently translate strategic realities into everyday language has become one of Israel’s greatest weaknesses. For years, Israel has often approached communications as an extension of diplomacy. Statements are crafted for policymakers, journalists, and experts. But the battlefield has changed. Today’s information environment rewards simplicity, emotion, repetition, and accessibility.

A 20-page policy paper loses to a 30-second video. A carefully worded government statement loses to a viral influencer. A factual explanation loses to a compelling story. Israel’s adversaries understand this. Increasingly, Israel’s allies understand it too. Israel often does not, or at least it does not execute according to this understanding.

This challenge cannot be solved by Israeli government ministries alone, nor by one or even a handful of NGOs or independent nonprofits. The scale of the problem is too large, and the speed of execution is too fast. Winning the next information war requires building a decentralized ecosystem long before the next military war begins. In other words: today, now, immediately, without delay.

That ecosystem should include Jewish organizations, Zionist organizations, academics, business leaders, creators, influencers, celebrities, policymakers, educators, and independent voices who can communicate to different audiences in different languages and through different platforms — not because they are taking orders from a government, but because narratives do not spread through governments anymore. They spread through decentralized networks.

The next conflict will not begin when the first attack is launched. It will begin years earlier: in classrooms, podcasts, documentaries, social media feeds, think tanks, entertainment, and public discourse. By the time a war starts, most people will already have decided how they interpret it. That is the uncomfortable reality that Israel and the Jewish People face.

The country’s military capabilities continue to improve. Its intelligence capabilities continue to improve. Its technological capabilities continue to improve. But power itself has changed. Military power remains essential. Intelligence power remains essential. And soft power increasingly determines whether military victories translate into strategic victories.

The Arab world recognized this decades ago and adjusted accordingly. Israel now faces a choice: It can continue fighting twentieth-century wars with 21st-century weapons and 21st-century communications challenges, or it can recognize that the battlefield has tremendously evolved.

photo: Yoav Aziz/Unsplash

Whenever this conversation comes up, there is always a predictable objection from within the Jewish community. It goes something like this: “What’s the point? The people who hate us will always hate us.”

There is truth in that statement. Some people will never change their minds. Some people hated Jews before Israel existed, hate Jews now, and will continue hating Jews regardless of what Israel says or does. No communications strategy can persuade someone who has made hatred part of their identity.

But that is the wrong standard.

The purpose of communication is not to convince everyone. No movement, country, religion, company, or political cause in history has ever persuaded everyone. The question is whether you can persuade enough people. I believe the answer is yes. In fact, I know it is yes.

The mistake many Jews make is assuming that because the loudest anti-Israel and anti-Jewish voices are unreachable, everyone is unreachable. They are not. Most people are not activists or ideologues. Most people are busy. They have jobs, goals, living expenses, and routines. They are not spending hours every day or even every week thinking about the Middle East. They are looking for quick, simple, and easy explanations from people they trust.

That audience matters far more than the extremists on either side.

The goal is not to win an argument with the most committed Jew-hater on social media. The goal is to reach the billions of people watching quietly from the sidelines who have not yet made up their minds, or whose minds are at least malleable. That audience is persuadable. It always has been.

And every successful movement in history understood something: You do not build influence by obsessing over the people you cannot reach. You build influence by investing in the people you can. The Arab world understood this decades ago. It invested heavily in shaping how outsiders understood its story. Israel and the Jewish world must learn to do the same — not because everyone can be convinced, but because enough people can.

Since October 7th, I have published many guest essays on Future of Jewish from people whose views changed. Some arrived skeptical of Israel. Others were indifferent to Jewish issues altogether. Many had absorbed simplistic narratives about Jews, Israel, and Zionism because those were the only narratives they had ever encountered.

Then something happened. They met Jews. They read more about Israel. They encountered realities they had never heard before. They experienced October 7th and the months that followed. They listened. They learned. They reconsidered.

Not all of them became Zionists overnight. Not all of them agree with every Israeli policy. Not all of them think Jews are God’s gift to our planet Earth. That was never the point. The point is that their minds changed. Their hearts changed. And once enough individual hearts and minds change, public opinion changes.

This is the lesson that much of Israel and the Jewish world still struggle to absorb. We continue to think in top-down terms. We have over-invested in government ministries, organizations, and institutional campaigns. Those things matter, but they are increasingly downstream of something more powerful: Culture is downstream of people, public opinion is downstream of relationships, and narratives are downstream of trust.

The modern information environment is not controlled from the top. It is built from the bottom, one conversation, one podcast, one article, one social media post, one friendship, one creator, one influencer, one converted skeptic at a time. It sounds cliché, and it is, but clichés tend to be true, and this case is no different.

photo: Anton Mislawsky/Unsplash

For decades, Israel and the Jewish world have communicated as if the only people who mattered sat in conference rooms. But influence no longer flows from the top down. It flows through networks. The audience is no longer just presidents, diplomats, and newspaper editors. The audience is everyone else: the student scrolling TikTok, the entrepreneur listening to a podcast, the celebrity with millions of followers, the journalist looking for a source, the professor teaching a class, and the voter who knows almost nothing about the Middle East but will form an opinion about it sooner or later.

Win enough of those people and the politicians follow. Lose them and the politicians eventually follow that too.

The future of Israel’s soft power (and, by extension, the Jewish world’s soft power) will not be decided primarily in ministries, embassies, conference rooms, or fundraising events. It will be decided by thousands of independent voices making a compelling case to hundreds of millions and eventually billions of ordinary people long before the next crisis arrives.

That is how opinions change. That is how culture changes. And ultimately, that is how history changes.

In a world where attention is scarce, narratives travel faster than facts, and self-interest shapes opinion, winning the war is no longer enough. We also have to win the story.

The good news is, we have plenty of stories to choose from — both past and present. Those stories remain extraordinary, and they remain essential, but they must be adapted to the modern age, at scale.

The challenge of our time is different from the challenge of previous generations. We cannot assume that military victories alone will secure Israel’s future. Nor can we assume that economic influence alone will do the job.

The reality is that there are countries with larger populations than ours, countries with larger armies than ours, countries with more territory than ours, countries with vastly more natural resources than ours, countries with sovereign wealth funds that dwarf the budgets of most Jewish organizations combined.

Trying to outspend them is a losing game. Trying to outnumber them is an impossible game. Fortunately, neither of those has ever been the Jewish strategy.

The Jewish People never became influential because we were the largest group in the room. We became influential because we learned how to build. We built institutions. We built communities. We built companies. We built schools. We built ideas. We built networks. We built a country from almost nothing and transformed it into one of the most innovative societies on earth.

That is our comparative advantage — and it happens to be exactly the advantage that matters most in the world we are entering.

For centuries, we have told stories powerful enough to survive empires. Now we must learn how to tell them again.

---