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If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
You’ve heard that one before, but here’s a new version of the thought experiment: if a genocide takes place but you prevent foreign journalists from observing it, kill the key witnesses and spend hundreds of millions of dollars on propaganda, then will anyone care?
Israel’s far-right government, and its many allies in the US, are betting the answer to that question is “no”. As I write this, Israel is razing Gaza City to the ground in the latest stage of what many respected international human rights organizations and scholars have called a genocide. There aren’t as many images coming out of Gaza City as there should be because the Israeli military is still not allowing foreign reporters free access to Gaza and has murdered many of the journalists in the ground. In August, Al Jazeera’s team in Gaza City were deliberately targeted by Israel.
Nature abhors a vacuum, but propagandists love it. As Gaza burns and information coming out of the strip is deliberately limited, highly paid marketers and PR people in multinational firms are busy rewriting history in real time. Earlier this month, Drop Site News, which has done essential work on Gaza, reported that an American polling firm called Stagwell Global, founded by Mark Penn, was commissioned by Israel’s ministry of foreign affairs to rehabilitate Israel’s global image. Penn, for the uninitiated, is a pollster who facilitated Bill Clinton’s re-election in 1996 and then helped Hillary Clinton lose to Barack Obama in the 2008 primaries with a combination of hubris and racist stereotyping. “The right knows Obama is unelectable except perhaps against Attila the Hun,” Penn wrote in a Clinton campaign memo. He also proposed characterizing Obama as un-American. (Stagwell told Adweek the work in Israel was run by a “small team” and that its agencies work “across the political and issue spectrum”. Last week, a spokesperson told PRWeek the work was a “defined project with a specific brief” that had now concluded.)
Per Drop Site, the report from Penn’s firm apparently assessed that Israel has a good chance of making people forget about that nasty little genocide business if they stoke fear of “Radical Islam” and “Jihadism”. “Especially once the situation in Gaza is resolved, the room for growth in all countries [when it comes to Israel’s image] is very significant,” the report concludes. If you make people scared that babies are terrorists then they won’t mind when you murder them, basically. You can see the whole report here. (After you’ve read that, I recommend reading the new legal analysis from a UN commission which accuses Israel of committing genocide. Here’s a snippet: “Israeli security forces shot at and killed civilians, including children who were holding makeshift white flags. Some children, including toddlers, were shot in the head by snipers.”)
Once marketing firms have got their genocide-denial talking points ready to go, they need bots to help spread them. It was reported by Sludge News last week that SKDKnickerbocker LLC, which is owned by Stagwell Global, signed a $600,000 contract to run a “bot-based program” to amplify pro-Israel narratives on Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube and other platforms. SKDK, which was co-founded by the longtime Joe Biden adviser Anita Dunn and registered as a foreign agent for Israel earlier this year, described a strategy to “flood the zone” with pro-Israel messaging.
It’s not clear how much the zone has already been flooded but, last week, Politico reported that SKDK has supposedly stopped its work with Israel and “begun the process of de-registering” as a foreign agent. SKDK and Stagwell also both said they did not work on a bot initiative, just “media relations”.
Pro-Israel propaganda campaigns are already working, says Zoe Scaman, a marketing expert who has been outspoken about Stagwell’s work. “The ‘flooding the zone’ strategy works because it doesn’t need to convince people genocide is good, it just needs to make them uncertain about what they’re seeing or tired of thinking about,” Scaman told me. “Look how successfully opposition to child killing has been made to seem like extremism. The propaganda isn’t just changing minds – it’s breaking the mechanisms people use to process moral information. When reality itself becomes contested territory, systematic killing becomes just another political disagreement.”
Stagwell’s work, it should be stressed, is just one small part of Israel’s genocide-rebranding efforts. Last year the Times of Israel reported that the country’s foreign ministry was getting an additional $150m (£115m) to shape public opinion. Per the Times, the increased hasbara budget “would be used to influence sentiment in the foreign press and on social media”.
That budget seems a little over the top because it’s been made clear that Israel doesn’t have to do much in order for a lot of the US media and political class to push its messaging. Hamas committed verified atrocities on 7 October, but one of the key talking points that helped manufacture consent for the genocide was the (now thoroughly debunked) lie that they beheaded 40 babies. Normally journalists and politicians would fact-check such an inflammatory claim before disseminating it. Certainly, if a Palestinian media outlet made a claim like this, it would have to be triple-checked before anyone published it – even then it would probably go under the “opinion” section. But the beheaded babies lie was widely repeated by the likes of Joe Biden and CNN reporter Sara Sidner.
While Sidner has now apologized for not being careful with her words and the White House walked back Biden’s comments, other journalists haven’t done the same. The CBS News senior correspondent Norah O’Donnell still has a tweet up from 10 October stating: “@CBSNews learned that Israel body recovery teams have discovered beheaded babies and children in kibbutzim in southern Israel.” I emailed CBS News’s communication team to ask why they were continuing to perpetuate this misinformation and never heard back.
CBS News is owned by Paramount Global, which has not been shy about its position as a cheerleader for Israel. Paramount is in the process of acquiring Bari Weiss’s Free Press, which has consistently downplayed the genocide in Gaza and provided unapologetic support for Israel, for between $100m to $200m. Weiss will also reportedly be tasked with “guiding the editorial direction of the [CBS news] division”. According to the Financial Times, Weiss partly won over CBS owner David Ellison “by taking a pro-Israel stance”.
David Ellison is the son of Larry Ellison, a tycoon who oversees the technology company Oracle and donated $16.6m to Friends of the Israel Defense Forces (FIDF) in 2017, the largest single gift in FIDF’s history. Oracle is currently among a consortium of firms that is looking to take over TikTok. If this happens, one imagines that TikTok’s algorithm may well get a more pro-Israel bent. One of the reasons that TikTok was put up for sale in the first place is because a lot of US lawmakers were upset with pro-Palestinian messaging on the platform. Indeed, Mitt Romney explicitly referenced the issue in relation to the “overwhelming support” to shut TikTok down. It becomes much easier to “flood the zone” with propaganda when you control the zone.
It’s not just media outlets working overtime to help rehabilitate Israel’s image: if you’re American, it’s likely your elected representatives are too. Two hundred and fifty American state legislators just traveled to Israel for the 50 States, One Israel conference. I don’t know about you, but I’d far rather my representatives were doing something about public schools and healthcare in the US, instead of going on propaganda jaunts abroad.
“One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this,” the writer Omer El Akkad said in late October 2023, of the unfolding genocide in Gaza. That quote, now the title of a book, went viral because it articulated what so many of us are desperate to believe: that while we may not see justice right now, one day the truth will out. One day there will be some sort of accountability. But while it’s important not to lose hope, I’m gradually finding it hard to maintain the optimism that one day everyone will always have been against this. It is looking far more likely that one day a lot of money will have been spent to rebrand this.
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Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
