The Stunning, Dystopian Strategy Behind Hamas' Media Machine
The terror group has had great success controlling the West's narratives about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, despite most of it being outright lies. It is worth analyzing how they achieved this.
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This is a guest essay written by Nachum Kaplan of Moral Clarity.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
As someone who has held senior leadership positions in some of the world’s most prestigious newsrooms, and who works as a media strategist for global Fortune 500 companies, I am in awe of how successful the Hamas PR campaign has been.
Hamas’ PR strategy has been highly effective because it has turned mainstream media, policymakers, and corrupt United Nations officials into spokespeople and campaigners for an Islamist terror agenda.
Here is how they have achieved it.
They built on 1,500 years of antisemitism.
Hamas correctly identified that antisemitism was only dormant in the West, and that they just needed to wake the sleeping monster. They knew this because there were clear tells, such as the international media’s fixation on Israel, the over-reporting of the country, and that the Pavlovian way the conflict becomes newsworthy only when Israel responds to an attack.
Hamas stuck to what has worked throughout history. The blood libel trope was modernized into accusations of genocide and deliberate starvation, while the trope of Jews being responsible for their persecution was updated with the notion that Israel had turned Gaza into an open-air prison.
They leveraged their numerical advantage.
With more than a billion Muslims globally, Hamas knew it had a huge virtual army it could activate on social media to reach a global audience.
Hamas flooded social media with lies to exploit the Repetition Bias, a heuristic (mental shortcut) in which repeated information feels more true than new or unrepeated information. Social media repeated these lies exponentially, aided by extensive use of AI-generated “photographs.”
The Palestinians also exploited another numerical advantage, the number of Muslim states, which is 48. This has given them weight in forums such as the United Nations and its various committees and bodies, creating a suited army of bureaucrats with credible titles to tell lies to the international press.
Almost comically, Iran has just assumed the presidency of the UN Conference on Disarmament. That is the same Islamic Republic that funds, arms, and trains Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen — and ships arms to Russia to use in its invasion of Ukraine.
They controlled the information flow.
Hamas and the Palestinian Authority have used traditional authoritarian tactics to control the information flow from areas they govern. Reporters cannot report freely or unfavorably from Palestinian-controlled territories if they want to retain access. Threats of violence keep the few unsympathetic local reporters in check.
Exploiting the inability of most media to report from Gaza directly, Hamas has used local Gazan “journalists” to feed lies, distorting images, and fabricated data to the credulous international media. Time and again, the foreign press has swallowed them, including claimed civilian death toll numbers that are demonstrably untrue (and presume every person killed was a civilian).
Hamas has only needed the media to report its numbers, knowing that if repeated enough, they be treated as true and that no one will pay attention to the fine print stating they are unverified. Hamas at one point even had the media complaining that Israel was simultaneously not allowing reporters access to Gaza and targeting journalists there.
They mastered the 24-hour news cycle.
The internet has blurred the traditional lines between print and television news, turning all news media into digital services beholden to the 24-hour news cycle.
Hamas has understood that as long as it keeps manufacturing outrages, the news cycle will move on quickly, and they will never be held to account. The Qatar-funded Al Jazeera, which has the veneer of a real news organization, has played a key role in this.
They have exploited a ‘post-truth’ world.
Hamas recognized that the post-Modernist rot has resonated in much of the West, including across its media and universities. The belief that people cannot only have their own opinions, but their own facts, sounds laughable, but it has become worryingly normal.
Political tribes express opinions mainly as identity signals, and tribal loyalty is more important to these people than truth, or even reality. Hamas has understood that this liberates it from any need to have a fact-based narrative.
They use simple slogans.
“From the river to the sea,” “by any means necessary” and “no peace on stolen land” are controversial (they call for and justify genocide), grab headlines, make for good visuals, and have strong memetic qualities.
They poisoned the West’s intellectual well.
Western universities are not antisemitic and anti-Israel by chance. This has been part of a long, concerted, and well-funded campaign. Qatar, which helps fund Hamas and allows its leaders to enjoy luxurious lifestyles in its capital, Doha, has invested billions of dollars in U.S. universities going back to 2001.
Qatar is now getting a return on its investment.
Say what you like about Islamists, but they do not suffer the from the short-term thinking that plagues the modern West. They have a multi-generational plan to bring down the West, and they have systematically mal-educated a generation of intellectuals, journalists, and policymakers.
They have used extremist tactics at rallies and demonstrations.
Aggressive mob behavior at rallies globally has ensured domination of the news cycle, whereas peaceful Jewish rallies do not stand a chance in the digital age, in which footage of angry, threatening, and violent mobs are irresistible.
From lighting flares and attacking Jews to defacing statues and picketing Holocaust museums, the campaign to grab the headlines has been relentless and effective.
Hamas has exploited the rise of activist journalists.
The days of journalists reporting nothing but the facts are long gone, as the number of journalists who have signed pro-Palestinian petitions in newsrooms around the world shows.
It is odd that journalists should want to advertise their partiality, but the social status gained from such performative grandstanding has proved too alluring.
These petitions provide information that helps Hamas’ propaganda arms know who to target, and where they will get sympathetic coverage.
They have used a pure inversion strategy.
This involves telling lies that are the precise opposite of what is true, allowing Hamas to claim that Israel and (those shifty) Jews are lying about everything. Consider these examples:
Hamas Lie: Israel is a colonialist state.
The reality: Israel’s re-creation was decolonization. The Jews are the indigenous people of Israel. It was Jewish insurgents who drove the British out of Palestine. The British were the last in a long line of colonizers that includes the Arabs.
Hamas Lie: Israel is imperialist.
The reality: Israel is small. It is only 470 kilometers (290 miles) north to south, and 135 kilometers (85 miles) east to west. It is surrounded in all directions by large Arab and non-Arab Muslim states. The tiny spec on the map is not an empire. That is absurd.
Hamas Lie: Israel is engaged in ethnic cleansing.
The reality: The Jews are the victims of ethnic cleansing, from Europe and the Arab world. About 21 percent of Israelis are Arabs, and another five million Palestinians live in what was British Mandatory Palestine. By contrast, there are no Jews in Palestinian territories because they were ethically cleansed.
Hamas Lie: Israel is committing genocide.
The reality: The Jews were the victims of the worst genocide in history in the Holocaust, and on October 7th were the victim of a genocidal attack from Hamas.
Furthermore, the U.S. Census Bureau International Database shows that the Palestinian population of Gaza was 265,800 in 1960; 342,700 in 1970; 431,600 in 1980; 645,100 in 1990; 1.1 million in 2000; 1.5 million in 2010; and 2.1 million in 2023.
This is the opposite of what would happen if there was genocide.
Hamas Lie: Israel is bombing Gaza indiscriminately.
The reality: Israel is targeting Hamas terrorists who are using civilians as human shields. Despite this, it has achieved the lowest civilian-to-combatant ratio in the history of warfare.1 It has achieved this by warning of attacks, creating civilian passages and safe zones, and by using precision-guided weaponry. Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7th, by contrast, intentionally targeted civilians.
Hamas Lie: Israel is using starvation as a weapon.
The reality: Israel has placed no restrictions on the amount of aid allowed into Gaza. More food trucks enter Gaza daily now than before the war, 126 a day versus 70 a day, according to the UN. More than 9,500 trucks carrying 200,000-plus tons of food have been delivered since October 7th.
This makes Israel the only country in history to provide aid to its enemy during a war, and to one holding Israelis hostages at that. Food security is a serious issue because Hamas is hijacking and hoarding aid and selling it for an easy profit. Hamas has threatened to kill any Gazan who helps Israel secure incoming foreign aid.2
Hamas Lie: Israel is an apartheid state.
The reality: All Israeli citizens have full rights whether they are Jews, Arabs, Druze, Circassians, or anything else. Citizens in the Arab states and the Palestinian territories, by contrast, have no democratic or political rights.
Hamas Lie: Israel is built on stolen land.
The reality: Israel is the only country in the world built partly on purchased land. This is the myth of stolen Arab land.
Hamas Lie: Israelis are White European Jews:
The reality: This fiction is perverse as it legitimizes racism against white people. In any case, there are Jews of every skin color. Only 30 percent of Israelis are Ashkenazi (European) Jews. Almost 45 percent are indigenous Mizrahi Jews. There are many others, such as Maghrebi Jews and Ethiopian Jews.
Hamas Lie: Israel is attacking civilians.
The reality: Hamas uses civilians to defend its soldiers, while Israel uses its soldiers to defend its civilians.
Hamas Lie: Israel does not want peace.
The reality: Israel has offered the Palestinians a state on at least six occasions, including in 1937 (the Peel Commission), 1947 (the UN Partition Plan for Palestine), 1967 (the end of the Six-Day War), 2000 (the Oslo Accords), 2005 (Israel’s unilateral pullout from Gaza), and 2008 (an improved version of Oslo Accords).
On each occasion, the Palestinians rejected peace.
Hamas Lie: Israel is an occupying force.
The reality: Israel has not been in Gaza since 2005, when it unilaterally pulled out. Hamas then gained power and built a terror state.
That is how Hamas has done it. It is a stunning, if somewhat dystopian, achievement.
“Israel military says 2 civilians killed for every Hamas militant is a ‘tremendously positive’ ratio given combat challenges.” CNN.
“Hamas Warns Gazans Against Cooperating With Israel on Aid Delivery.” Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
A shameless, lying people. Eternal victims with nothing to show for except hatred, violence, misery, making their raison d’être thé destruction of other peoples & religions.
Another myth: The Palestinians want a two state solution. They say they want their own state, but they also want the so-called right of return to Israel. Sort of like having their cake and eating it too. That would essentially turn Israel into an Arab majority state that would soon be another Muslim country and probably merge with whatever "Palestinian" state was created.