Why Israel is losing the PR war

The louder Sky News after dark shouts, the more left-partisans learn that to be pro-Israel is unaligned with their personal politics. (Conversely, the more the ABC avoids the Jewish perspective, the more convinced right-partisans become that no pro-Palestinian arguments can have merit.) The media, political parties and even the broader population is starting to pick partisan sides on a topic that demands nuance.

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Now university students and hobby protestors are reciting Hamas’ favourite slogan, “from the river to the sea”, at anti-Israel protests across Australia. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has said the slogan is violent and has no place in Australia. His condemnation couldn’t prevent West Australian Labor senator Fatima Payman using the slogan at a pro-Palestine rally outside Parliament House.

Payman, who was born in Afghanistan, is the first Muslim woman to wear the hijab in federal parliament. Rarely discussed before the current war, it should now finally be obvious that the dispute between Israel and Palestine is not just territorial, but faith-based. Muslims are generally supportive of Palestine, regardless of their country of origin. Around the world, MPs in electorates with significant Muslim voting blocs are feeling pressure from these communities to take their side against Israel.

This points to another reason why Hamas can be quietly confident that things are heading in the right direction for its purposes.

In Australia, a new organisation, Muslim Votes Matter, has been formed to influence political outcomes, and Muslim advocacy groups are undertaking media training.

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These things are not in themselves sinister – many interest groups lobby governments to make themselves heard. But with Muslim groups becoming more powerful throughout the Western world and feeling the connection to the Palestinian cause through shared faith, the negotiating position of whoever leads Palestine is only getting stronger.

Meanwhile, despite the fact that Israelites lived in the Jewish city of Judea before the land was renamed Palestine, Israel stands accused of colonialism, that most odious of modern sins.

For Jewish people around the world, there is a nightmarish quality to the trajectory. Since the vote at the UN, Albanese has acknowledged that antisemitism is being expressed more openly than at any other point in his lifetime. More to the point is that it has come back so soon that some Holocaust survivors are still alive to see it.

After decades of relying on education to ensure that anti-Jewish sentiment never rises again, it is especially devastating that antisemitism is now manifesting in concentrated form on university campuses. For universities, the preference of the encamped protestors for slogans over arguments is a brand-damaging demonstration of the way education can render people stupid.

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For Jewish students, it’s a live re-enactment of their grandparents’ plight: they can remove outward evidence of their Judaism and hope they’re not spotted, or answer to the protesters’ satisfaction the question of whether they are, or have ever been, a supporter of Zionism.

Most horrifying is the growing realisation that the public relations strategies they have been relying on to prevent this moment from coming again have been outflanked by an opponent which contains elements who wish for their destruction. But then, totalitarians have always been good at propaganda.

Parnell Palme McGuinness is managing director at award-winning campaigns firm Agenda C. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens.