The tentacles of Hasbara systematically control the Israeli’s information intake to create the perfect Israeli citizen and a united front in a vision defined as “the struggle against the delegitimization of the state of Israel through mass consciousness activities.”
Israel describes itself as a “democracy” where people can exercise their freedom. Unlike Russia, which has shielded its citizens from global news platforms, Israelis have access to international news outlets to formulate opinions. Good for them. Nevertheless, it is no secret that this democracy is conditioned and compromised through Hasbara. To what extent will the Israelis surrender to the soft holding tentacles of Hasbara?
What is Hasbara?
Hasbara is a reactive multifaceted Israeli propaganda strategy aiming to defend Israel’s actions and shape narratives both domestically and internationally. It triumphs on weaponizing disinformation for the sake of injecting continuous positive perception and legitimization of Israel.
Hasbara has several heads linked to and coordinated by the National Hasbara Unit. Their common goal is to engrave the Israeli narrative wherever it’s possible. It is present in media, public diplomacy, diaspora affairs, spokesmen divisions, worldwide agencies for Israel, and tourism amongst other areas. Avichay Adraee, the head of the Arab Media Division who terrorized the Lebanese during the recent war, is on that payroll.
A 2015 article, Against Hasbara:Explaining ourselves to death, published by 972+Magazine shows how Hasbara has been handling the discrediting of Palestinian suffering as early as the year 2000.
“Back in 2000, the Muhammed A-Dura killing and video sparked a trend of hasbara types dissecting all video documentation of injury to Palestinians in order to find evidence that it is doctored. They call such videos ‘Pallywood,’ and use their claims of doctored tapes to fuel the fire of the hasbara. These elaborate efforts have failed to disprove any Israeli abuses, but as +972 Magazine’s Larry Derfner pointed out, they have damaged the credibility of Palestinian grievances among various audiences.”
Pallywood is further explained in the 2020 article Why the ‘Pallywood’ myth endures as “a lasting legacy of the Second Intifada” and “is the pernicious idea that Palestinians cannot be trusted to narrate their experience of Israeli oppression.” The article notes that the hasbara term “Pallywood”— that is a combination of both Hollywood and Palestine— insinuates that footage of Israelis shooting Palestinians is deliberately staged by Palestinians to fuel anti-Israel narratives.
Until this day Hasbara continues taking on different formats and approaches. In May 2024, in an interview with ICFJ on the challenges of covering the “Israel-Hamas war”, Oren Persco, a staff writer at The Seventh Eye mentions: “I actually saw just a couple of weeks ago an article by Israel Hayom, the most read Israel newspaper that there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza. The stores are full, there is falafel, there is shawarma, there is a lack of people to distribute the huge amount of food that Israel is allowing inside [Gaza] and that’s extreme! Usually you don’t see any reporting about the humanitarian situation in Gaza, or you see questioning reports of the UN and other agencies. This was an extreme example of refuting it. The usual tendency is to not report it.” For reference, Israel Hayom is a newspaper distributed for free that relies on advertisements to generate income.
“You can come up with all sorts of new (and strange) conditions every two or three years for ending the occupation and insisting that the spit we’re feeling is just raindrops. You can blame the Palestinians for everything and obscure the simple fact that this brutal occupation is Israeli. You can tell the world that it all belongs to us because the Bible says so and believe that anyone will take you seriously. You can be sure that the memory of the Holocaust will serve us forever, and justify any injustice. Of course, it won’t work indefinitely.” Gideon Levy wrote in Haaretz,
As a way to create common grounds, Hasbara exploits the ideas of trauma bonding, existential threat, and victimhood. A lot of Israelis have openly condemned Hasbara as one that abused the history of their ancestors to justify war crimes. They talked about their journey of unlearning what they have been fed to calibrate their moral compass and end all violence. In his 2015 article, Gideon Levy adds: “The policy of denial and disconnection from reality is rising to a dangerous level… When the world starts to show encouraging signs of stirring to action, Israel further entrenches itself in its imaginary reality and erects more and more separation barriers for itself. Israel seems to think that what worked well in its society and succeeded in almost totally wiping out all consciousness and awareness, will work just as well in the rest of the world…”
Hasbara Spreads Its Tentacles Wide
Despite the efforts of media independent from Israeli narratives such as Haaretz, The Seventh Eye, and +972 Magazine to suffocate Hasbara’s tentacles by bringing truths to light, Many Israelis especially settlers, have allegedly welcomed Hasbara content with open arms— for it is the ultimate excuse of legitimizing their expansion further into Palestinians territories and Israeli army committing genocidal activities against Palestinians.
Training and workshops are available for Israelis aiming to become agents of Hasbara, specifically in North America, such as the Hasbara Fellowship Organization that enables Israelis to “defeat anti-Israel campaigns” and “answer difficult questions about Israel.”

In an attempt to break down and understand strategic dissemination of this propaganda, Molad, introduced as the center of the renewal of Israeli democracy, has published a study of how Hasbara functions and who is behind it. This apparatus’s function is further explained in several Israeli publications examining Hasbara by +972 magazine , The Seventh Eye, Shomrim , and the The Jerusalem Post.
The idea is to unify Hasbara messaging in formal and informal mediums, increase engagement, enforce a positive branding of Israel, consolidate long term partnerships abroad, and respond to crisis and strategic targeting of Arabs and influential opinion makers worldwide to further spread a clean image of Israel and legitimize its role in the region.
On September 25, 2024, only two days before Hassan Nasrallah’s assassination and right when the Lebanese started receiving evacuation warnings, an article published by Shomrim, an independent nonprofit news organization established to strengthen Israeli democracy through investigative journalism, uncovered a leaked document from the Prime Minister’s Office highlighting how Israel is losing the public diplomacy war. According to the article, titled “The Hasbara Crisis,” the document describes a leadership vacuum at the National Public Diplomacy Directorate (better known in Israel as the Hasbara unit), the hiring of English language spokespeople on a freelance basis, and the complete lack of a national public diplomacy strategy. At the discussion, the source in Shomrim’s article explains how one official warned that “ the ability to present the Israeli narrative and convey our position to the international media, and thereby to millions of people around the world, is severely compromised, which significantly undermines the effort to maintain legitimacy for the State of Israel’s actions. This leaves space for competing narratives to dominate.” The National Public Diplomacy Directorate’s response to the leaked documents published on Shomrim explains further how this apparatus works.

The very expensive octopus of Hasbara is said to engulf additional 150 million dollars starting 2025 in desperate measures to save it. This substantial increase in funding reflects Israel’s growing emphasis on salvaging global perceptions and international criticism. Times of Israel’s article “Foreign Ministry to receive massive budget for public diplomacy abroad”, published on December 29, 2024 explains: “Under the new budget, the Foreign Ministry will receive $150 million, on top of what it gets for its existing activities, for what’s officially known as public diplomacy, or hasbara in Hebrew. That sum is more than 20 times what such efforts have typically been allotted in past years.”
Hasbara can continue to exempt its preachers from their crimes. Israelis can come out of this as victims either way:victims of brainwashing and propaganda in time when the world and access to information is outrunning itself by the minute. Absence of accountability is only further drowning their expensive octopus in Palestinian blood.