In Israel-Hamas War, a Global War of Narratives Rages Too

One week after the Hamas massacre, as a new war comes to the Gaza Strip, a parallel war is being waged—over narratives involving the Hamas attacks and Israel's response. It’s a battle for hearts and minds that has been waged for generations, but like everything else that has happened since Hamas terrorists slaughtered 1,300 Israelis and took more than 100 hostages back to Gaza, the battle lines are sharper and more dangerous. 

Now, as headlines and global attention shift from the horror visited on Israel towns and kibbutzim to Palestinian civilians and the battered communities of Gaza, the Israeli government has released fresh details and videos of Hamas’ gruesome attacks—as if to remind the world of what provoked Israel's siege of Gaza and its military response.

In the videos, Hamas gunmen were seen tossing grenades into homes and air raid shelters where civilians hid, and carting women and children off as hostages. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shared photos of a child’s blood-soaked bed. These ensured that the global press had headlines and images to pair with those from Gaza’s hospitals and crowded evacuation routes—attempts to gain advantage in the narrative war.

One week later, two things are broadly understood: Israeli civilians have suffered an unspeakable trauma at the hands of terrorists; and in Gaza, more than 2 million people are at risk from bombardment and Israel's decision to cut off deliveries of food, water, fuel and medicine.

But millions of people around the world are receiving and responding to those realities in utterly different ways.

Protestors and a growing number of public officials are accusing Israel of war crimes–the killing and wounding of civilians, the alleged use of white phosphorus in airstrikes–to which Israelis and their supporters ask: Who committed the war crimes that started this? Who hides their terrorists and weaponry among civilian populations? One side invokes the long history of Palestinian suffering, the other the ISIS-like qualities of the Hamas killers.

It’s a dangerous divide, a competition for global attention and empathy that has provoked rage far from Israel and Gaza. And it will likely deepen as the real war drags on.

Two people, one question

“What are we supposed to do?” 

That's a question many Israelis were posing this week, when asked by journalists about the siege of Gaza.

A broad consensus of Israelis has come to the view that October 7 was the nation’s September 11—and that the response must be a no-holds-barred military operation to eliminate Hamas, even if many civilian lives are lost.  

That will mean tearing up the roots of the organization, and those roots are intertwined with almost everything else in the Gaza Strip. Hamas fighters not only live among innocent civilians; they have also been known to stash weapons in homes in crowded neighborhoods (virtually all Gazan neighborhoods are “crowded”), and to keep military and other supplies in tunnels that run underneath heavily populated communities. 

Meanwhile, in Gaza, the same question: What are we supposed to do?

One needs no special expertise in the Middle East to grasp the nightmare for people inside the Gaza Strip: You live in one of the poorest, most crowded places on the planet; even in quiet times, your movements are heavily restricted; and now there will be no more water, food or electricity until and unless Hamas frees the hostages.

For the more than one million people in North Gaza, there was the additional trauma of Israel's evacuation warning Friday, and the terrible Catch-22 that entailed: Go south, with no guarantees of safety or shelter on the roads, and the possibility that you would never see your home again; or stay put–as Hamas implored–as bombs fall and the region’s most powerful army gears up for what it said Saturday would be an assault by “air, land and sea.” 

These are the twin realities, the twin horrors--but one week later, millions of people around the world appeared unwilling to accept both.  

No common ground

For many Israelis and their supporters, this is no time for empathy for Gazans–or at least not a time to emphasize their plight. Doing so, in this view, suggests a flawed moral equivalence between Hamas’s terrorism and Israel’s right to defend itself and rescue the hostages.

This narrative takes the form of an enough-is-enough, no-quarter argument. Those roots must be pulled up, whatever the consequences.

"Humanitarian aid to Gaza?” Israel Katz, the Israeli Energy Minister, said Thursday on X, as Twitter is now known. “No electrical switch will be lifted, no water hydrant will be opened and no fuel truck will enter until the Israeli hostages are returned home. Humanitarian for humanitarian. And nobody should preach us morals."

Golan Abitbul, a resident of Kibbutz Be’eri, where more than 100 civilians were killed on October 7, gave an interview to The New York Times podcast The Daily–a searing account of the massacre in which he said hopes for moderation may have died as well.

“I don’t know what I am thinking now,” Abitbul said. “We always thought that peace and negotiation is the solution. I don’t think anyone thinks so now. We lost our faith. We don’t think there could be any kind of reason to talk with these animals.”

Echoes of this view could be heard in Washington. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), suggested there was no avoiding the killing of Gaza's civilians because of Hamas’ habit of blending with the population.

“Terrorists attack Israel, kill Jews then run & hide behind civilians,” Rubio said on X. “Israel hits them back. These savages then run to the global press & pressure the West to get Israel to stop…This time it must be different.” 

The Biden Administration has made clear–in statements and its deployment of military assets to the region–that it stands firmly with Israel. By week’s end a concern for Palestinians was woven into the message: in a Saturday call with Netanyahu, President Biden “affirmed his support for all efforts to protect civilians”, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken was engaged in regional diplomacy aimed at creating a humanitarian corridor for aid and/or safe passage for Gaza’s civilians.

But the basic U.S. message remained: Israel has the right to act as it sees fit.

Then there was the other narrative. 

Even in the immediate aftermath of the massacre, there were gatherings in global capitals and American college campuses expressing solidarity with Palestinians--often without a word of sympathy for the Israeli dead. 

On Tuesday, the Stanford Students for Justice in Palestine argued in a letter to the Stanford Daily that the Hamas attacks were “part of the ongoing, decades-long struggle against Israeli oppression” and that Palestinians had “the legitimate right to resist occupation, apartheid and systemic injustice.” Banners celebrating the terror appeared on the Stanford campus; one said, “The illusion of Israel is burning.”

On the other side of the world, outside the Sydney Opera House, marchers at a rally chanted, “Gas the Jews.”

Those were among the most extreme forms of a pro-Palestinian narrative. For many others, the view was that while Hamas deserved condemnation, the Israeli response was only the latest in a series of injustices visited on the Palestinian people.

That narrative goes something like this: The Palestinians have suffered generations of indignity at the hands of Israel, which has regularly damaged the Palestinian cause and the fundamental desire for statehood. Netanyahu is blamed in this view for beating back progress towards a two-state solution, cutting deals with Arab states as a way of putting Palestinian issues on the back burner, and even propping up Hamas itself to avoid chaos inside the Gaza Strip.  

Friday's evacuation warning, in this narrative, wasn't a humanitarian gesture from a military wishing to avoid hurting civilians; it was seen as an echo of the 1948 naqba, or catastrophe, the war that led to the creation of Israel and the displacement of some 100,000 Palestinians. 

That narrative has inspired protests around the globe and increasingly, comments from European leaders as well. The European Union’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell Fontelles, said that while “Israel has the right” to defend itself, punishing all Gazans would violate “humanitarian law” and do nothing to bring peace or long-term security.

“Not all the Palestinian people are terrorists,” Borrell added. “So a collective punishment against all Palestinians will be unfair and unproductive, will be against our interest and against the interest of the peace.”

A Facebook post - and the replies

On Friday the Eurasia Group President Ian Bremmer posted a short message to his Facebook page that blended the competing narratives. 

“Destroying Hamas will make Israel more safe,” Bremmer wrote. “Destroying the lives of 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza will make Israel less safe. Protecting the lives of civilians is a matter of basic humanity. It's also in the self-interest of Israeli citizens.”

Bremmer has a lot of followers–and his posts often generate thoughtful responses. But reading the replies to this one was like a doom-scroll into the current narrative war, and a reminder of how hardened the two sides have become. 

Among nearly 300 responses, there were familiar arguments, almost no agreement with Bremmer’s both-sides formulation, and no shortage of vitriol. 

“No one in the West can keep Jewish extremists in check,” said one. 

From another: “Make the entire Gaza area a sandbox, and then rebuild.” 

There were calls for the destruction of Israel, others for the destruction of Gaza, and only a few examples of anything like common ground.  

“The level of disinformation and hate speech around the coverage and reaction to this conflict on social media is greater than I’ve ever experienced,” Bremmer told The Messenger Saturday. “The algorithms are promoting content that’s incensing people, regularly exposing them to violent views and imagery they would never experience on mainstream media.”

A peaceful solution to the battle over narratives may be as difficult, in its own way, as a resolution of the war itself.