This article originally appeared in South African Jewish Report on May 22, 2025.
Israel’s intensified military counterattacks since neutralising about 3 000 Hezbollah terrorists in September 2024 have rendered it the Middle East’s “strong horse”, but it has far from succeeded in the war of perception in the West. The Hamas-Iran propaganda crusade against Israel exploded in the aftermath of 7 October 2023.
Paradoxically, Israel’s near-East victories have fuelled delegitimisation and unprecedented antisemitism in the West.
On every international battlefield – universities, United Nations (UN) agencies, international courts, human rights groups, global businesses, media, and social networks – Israel has been “Nazified” and cancelled as a racist, genocidal, war criminal. This isn’t new. It began decades ago when Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) founder and arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat worked tirelessly to refashion Israel on the global stage as the new apartheid South Africa.
Since the 7 October massacre and kidnappings, Israel’s failure in the war of perception stems in large part from Iran and its terror proxies’ successful Eastern hybrid warfare. In the tradition of the former Soviet Union, today Russia and China, this blends violence, disinformation, legal subversion, and diplomatic sabotage to erode Israel’s right to exist and ultimately cause Israel’s implosion.
Iran has built on tactics that the PLO appropriated from the Soviets half a century ago, lobbying together for Resolution 3379 “Zionism is racism” at the UN General Assembly, which passed in 1975.
Beginning with PLO Founding Chairperson Ahmad Shukeiri, and later Yasser Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas, and rival Hamas, the Palestinian leadership has used the same delegitimisation “DNA helix”: constant Nazification, apartheidisation, and racialisation of Israel, depicting the Jewish state as a colonialist, imperialist entity.
The Palestinian Authority (PA), for its part, has denied Jewish history and connection to the land. Abbas has flatly denied the Holocaust and like Hamas, has supported terrorism. The PA continues to indoctrinate children to hate, murder, and maim Israelis and Jews.
Israel has mishandled the perception war. It has allowed the Palestinian leadership to co-opt the narrative on Israel for 70 years by delegitimising, de-emphasising, and degrading the power of the narrative.
Israel’s disregard of the damage that can be done by the UN has cost it.
The Eastern hybrid war seeks to subvert its enemy’s society and culture, undermining its sense of moral place and identity. It drives divisions within society.
Subversive Soviet “active measures” and disinformation aimed at the West during the Cold War are classic examples of this subversion warfare. Hamas’s psychological warfare has included hostage-taking and using them as weapons of war. It includes mobilising the red (leftist)-green (Islamist) alliance in the name of “peace”, such as students who are actively advancing “jihad” or Islamic holy war.
Since the 1970s, Arafat, mentored by Soviet strategists and Vietnam’s General Vo Nguyen Giap, recast the Palestinian cause as a third world liberation struggle. Iran’s 1979 revolution fused these methods with Islamist ideology, and now their cyberwarfare, bot farms, and propaganda fracture Western unity. Iran’s IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) has tutored Hamas operatives, many of whom were involved with the PLO in these deceptions.
One of the most blatant attempts at disinformation was the 2023 Al-Ahli Hospital bombing in Gaza, malevolently attributed to Israel while Hamas knew that Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza was responsible. Hamas produces “Pallywood” propaganda videos while double-messaging the Arab world, threatening “a million October 7s” on Lebanese TV.
In this way, Hamas, like the Iranians, projects its genocidal intent, while its South African ally sues Israel at the International Court of Justice for violating the Genocide Convention.
This “eighth front” of perception and cognitive warfare has been underestimated for decades by Israel . Western platforms – universities, non-governmental organisations, and media – have been exploited by the Iranian-regime octopus to push “apartheid” and post-colonial narratives.
Campus protests by groups like Students for Justice in Palestine and the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions coalition amplify Iran-backed talking points and Muslim Brotherhood Qatari views, weaponising antisemitism to paint Israel as an oppressor. The UN and European Union, through officials like António Guterres and Francesca Albanese, echo these accusations, exploiting Western human rights sensitivities. Iran’s model has spread, as seen in rising antisemitic incidents in Europe and North America since 7 October.
To counter the anti-Israel, Eastern-style hybrid warfare, Israel and its allies need to go on a decisive offensive by:
- Exposing enemy lies and disinformation 24/7 via conventional and social media, such as claims that the Israel Defense Forces targets civilians, while the Hamas “ministry of health” fabricates Gaza death-toll numbers.
Israel must highlight Hamas’s genocidal threats in order to unmask its dual narrative. Israel’s digital army must monitor the enemy and pre-empt propaganda attacks with real-time, real information;
- Israel urgently needs a full-time political warfare and strategic influence division within its National Security Council or other independent agency in the prime minister’s office because perceptual legitimacy is as vital to national security as military strength in today’s iPhone influenced geopolitical landscape.
It needs to incorporate cyber warfare, human intelligence, and open-source intelligence in a centralised unit that includes representation and full and efficient co-ordination between relevant government offices to align messaging and counter disinformation, while asserting Israel’s place as the most vibrant democracy in the Middle East;
- The events of 7 October proved that Hamas and the PA, with its “pay-for-slay” policies, seek Israel’s destruction, not coexistence. Israel may float confederative solutions, but ultimately, Palestinian governance must be held accountable;
- Israel needs to reframe the narrative. Position and expose Iran, not Israel, as the region’s destabilising force, exposing its support for terror and exploitation of Western institutions; and
- It needs to partner with the administration of United States President Donald Trump and other friends in the West and beyond, including Christian Zionists and moderate Muslims, to counter propaganda, deepen intelligence co-operation, and stabilise the region in the spirit of the Abraham Accords for regional normalisation and security.
Succeeding in the war for strategic influence is a crucial national security requirement. We must move from defence to offence to expose our enemies and disrupt and attack our detractors. Just as Israel succeeded in penetrating, unmasking, and dismantling Iran’s proxy terrorist network with precision, surprise, deception, and innovation in its beeper operation, it must assert a laser-targeted hybrid equivalent in the soft war.
Israel stands on the West’s frontline against Iran’s jihadist hybrid warfare. The date 7 October was a wake-up call. The tactics targeting Israel – violence, disinformation, and antisemitism – threaten democracies globally.
