The War We Forgot to Fight

A few months ago, before Israel and Iran were openly at war, my kids asked me a question that punched clean through me.

They were talking about the Israel-Hamas war. Innocently. Quietly. In that way children ask the biggest questions in the smallest voices.

“Are we going to be okay, Daddy?”

Then came the second one.

“Are we going to win the war?”

And I told them the truth.

Militarily? Yes. Undoubtedly. We will win.

We always do.

Not because we enjoy war. Not because we worship fighting. Not because we are the monsters people with professionally laminated opinions keep pretending we are.

We win because we have no choice.

Israel does not have the luxury of losing. Jewish history does not come with a soft exit, a polite unsubscribe button or a customer service desk where we can lodge a complaint about the number of genocidal maniacs currently queued up outside our front door.

We win because the alternative is our children not growing old.

But I also told them something else – when it comes to war, nobody truly wins. War is hell. Everyone loses – something.

Some lose people. Some lose homes. Some lose sleep, innocence, safety, certainty, hope, faith. Some lose a piece of their soul.

And sometimes, even when you win on the battlefield, you can still lose something precious somewhere else.

Your image. Your voice. Your moral clarity. The ability to explain yourself before someone else explains you to the world as a cartoon villain with a flag, a Hebrew surname and sinister background music.

And that is the war we are losing terribly.

Not the military war. The narrative war. The war of words. The public stage. The media battlefield. The social media sewer with Wi-Fi.

Israel has one of the strongest, most dedicated, highly trained and most morally scrutinised armies on earth. Not perfect. No army is. War is not performed by angels in neatly pressed trousers. But the IDF operates in a reality where every decision is dissected by the world before the smoke has even cleared.

We raise our children knowing that, at eighteen, while many British teenagers are learning to reverse around a corner, buy their first legal pint and panic about A-level results, Israeli teenagers will be putting on a uniform and picking up a rifle to defend their country.

That is not normal. It should not have to be normal. But for us, survival has never been theoretical.

And yet, despite all of that, when it comes to media, social media and public perception, we are not merely struggling.

I believe the technical term for how we’re fighting this battle is: shit.

We are being absolutely pulverised on the social media stage. We are being shouted down by people who have learnt Middle Eastern history from TikTok captions, Canva infographics and that one friend at university who discovered oppression studies and now thinks “context” began on 8 October 2023.

Large parts of the press have leaned so far into their preferred narrative that I’m amazed they don’t require physiotherapy and regular shots of cortisone.

Since 7 October, lies, distortions, conspiracies and modern blood libels have been sprayed across the public square with the casual confidence of people who know they will never be asked to prove anything.

And the army of performative radicals, the protest-font revolutionaries, the purple-haired megaphone monks of moral confusion, continue to pour this stuff onto every platform de jour.

X. Instagram. TikTok. Facebook.

Even LinkedIn, somehow. The place people used to post about team synergy and quarterly growth is now apparently where Dave from procurement comes to explain why the world’s only Jewish state is the source of all evil.

Bold career move, Dave.

But here is the uncomfortable part.

They are beating us on that front.

Not because they are right. Not because their arguments are stronger. Not because history is on their side.

But because they are louder, faster, simpler and far better packaged.

Truth is complex. Lies are snackable.

History takes effort. Propaganda comes with subtitles.

And we are vastly outnumbered by people who have never read a history book but have watched a forty-second video with sad music, photos of AI generated children covered in soot and rubble and therefore feel fully qualified to explain the Jewish people, Zionism, genocide, colonialism, international law and the “real history” of a land they could not find on a map unless the app did it for them.

That is the problem.

Not just ignorance. Weaponised ignorance. Professionally styled ignorance. Ignorance with brand guidelines.

Because let’s be honest. This did not happen overnight by accident.

There are organisations, networks, influencers, funders and ideological machines out there that make fortunes shaping public opinion. Some operate in the open. Some do not. They understand psychology. They understand emotional triggers. They understand virality. They understand how to turn outrage into currency and repetition into “truth.”

And when I look at the global anti-Israel wave, the identical slogans, the same visual language, the same damn fonts, the same campus theatre, the same tents, the same chants, the same banners, the same sudden moral certainty appearing everywhere at once, I cannot pretend it all feels organic.

That is not conspiracy thinking.

That is marketing. That is coordination. That is messaging architecture. That is a campaign. A very well funded , well organised campaign. On a global scale.

I know this because many many moons ago, I worked closely enough to that world to see the actual machinery behind the curtain. I worked with a start-up consulting group that dressed itself in benevolence, compassion and world-healing language. It convinced even me that its intentions were noble. Honourable and for the good of humanity.

Until the mask slipped. Until the ugliness underneath became impossible to ignore. Until I found myself knee-deep in things I wish I had never known existed. Surrounded by people who made James Bond villains seem comical.

So no, I do not look at the sudden global choreography of anti-Israel messaging and think, “What an amazing coincidence that thousands of people across countries, campuses and platforms all spontaneously adopted the same slogans, aesthetics and moral vocabulary at the same time.”

That is not how influence works. That is not how movements grow. That is not how messages travel.

Let’s look at the music industry for a simple comparison.

People love the myth of the overnight success. The unknown singer sleeping on his friends sofa for five years who suddenly becomes a global star because one song magically “went viral.”

Lovely story. Mostly nonsense.

Behind that overnight success there are often years of work, millions in spending, teams of marketers, producers, stylists, agents, publicists, playlist strategists, social media experts and people whose entire job is to make the public believe something simply exploded into existence.

It did not. It was built. It was pushed. It was engineered.

The same applies here.

You do not turn anti-Israel hatred into a global youth identity overnight without money, infrastructure, strategy, repetition and emotional manipulation.

You do not get the same slogans, same symbols, same accusations and same moral inversions appearing across continents overnight because everyone just happened to have the same little epiphany over oat milk and Marxism.

This is not grassroots. This is astroturf with a keffiyeh filter.

And this is the part that should frighten everyone.

Not just Jews. Everyone.

Because the people chanting this bile today are not going to remain twenty-year-olds in badly fitting trousers forever.

One day, some of them will grow up. A few may even read a book. Some might even look back with shame and embarrassment.

But many of them will simply carry these lies forward, polished by time into something they now call “fact.”

They will become teachers. Journalists. Lawyers. Judges. Politicians. CEOs. University lecturers. Police officers. Police chiefs. Civil servants. People with budgets, platforms, influence, hiring power and policy control.

Today they are screaming slogans on campuses. Tomorrow they may be deciding whether your child gets into a university, whether your community receives protection, whether antisemitism is taken seriously, whether Jewish history is taught honestly, whether Israel is treated as a normal country or as the world’s designated punching bag with a blue-and-white flag.

That is the terrifying part. Not the noise. The inheritance of the noise.

Because lies do not stay as lies when they are repeated long enough by people who mistake volume for virtue.

They harden. They fossilise. They become “common knowledge.” They become the thing “everyone knows.”

And once a lie becomes part of the moral furniture of a generation, removing it is no longer a debate.

It becomes archaeology. You have to dig it out. Layer by layer. Slogan by slogan. Myth by myth.

And that is the real challenge.

How do you educate the lies out of people who have been emotionally rewarded for believing them? How do you reach someone whose hatred has been dressed up as compassion? How do you speak truth to someone who thinks their ignorance is bravery?

How do you dispel a visceral belief when the believer has been told that evidence itself is suspicious, history is propaganda, Jewish pain is manipulation and Israeli survival is oppression?

That is the monster we are facing. Not just hate. Certainty. Not just lies. Identity.

Because for too many people, hating Israel has become less of a political opinion and more of a personality accessory. It gives them belonging. Status. A tribe. A costume. A script. A villain. A cause. A dopamine drip of moral superiority.

And you cannot fact-check someone out of a religion they did not realise they had joined.

So while they have been building that machine, what have we been doing?

Explaining. Defending. Fact-checking. Correcting. Begging people to acknowledge that murdering babies is bad. Asking the world, with exhausted disbelief, whether rape is still considered a crime when the victim is Jewish.

Trying to convince people that the hostages are real. Trying to remind them that Hamas started this war. Trying to explain that Zionism is not a swear word, but the ancient, indigenous liberation movement of the Jewish people returning to their ancestral homeland.

Trying to squeeze three thousand years of history into a comment box underneath a video posted by someone called @DecoloniseYourLatte.

And that is where we are losing.

Because facts matter. But facts alone do not move the modern world.

Stories do. Emotion does. Images do. Repetition does. Confidence does.

And our enemies understood something we forgot:

You can lose every moral argument and still game the algorithm.

Israel built Iron Dome to intercept rockets. Now we need a Truth Dome to intercept lies.

Not censorship. Not propaganda. Not some clumsy government department making PowerPoint slides with all the charisma of a wet napkin.

We need storytellers. Writers. Designers. Historians. Comedians. Teachers. Filmmakers. Parents. Students. Artists.

People who can explain who we are without sounding like we are reading from a legal defence document.

People who can take history, truth, grief, humour, fury, survival and turn them into something human.

Something shareable. Something impossible to ignore.

Because our story is not weak. Our story is extraordinary.

We are an ancient people who survived empires, exile, massacres, expulsions, pogroms, gas chambers, terror tunnels, rockets, hostage-taking, demonisation, betrayal and the exhausting stupidity of people who think “go back where you came from” is a clever thing to say to Jews standing in Judea.

We have carried books across continents.

Songs through fire. Recipes through exile. Prayers through centuries. Languages through silence. Children through nightmares. Hope through history’s burning buildings.

And still, somehow, we are here.

Still building. Still singing. Still arguing over food. Still turning trauma into jokes because frankly, therapy is expensive and humour has been our national emergency generator for about three thousand years.

So what do we do?

We educate. Relentlessly. Creatively. Early.

Not with dusty lectures that make children feel like they are being slowly buried under laminated worksheets.

We tell the story properly. We tell it humanly. We tell it before TikTok does. We teach that Jews are not guests in our own history.

We teach that Zionism is not colonialism, but the return of an indigenous people to the land that shaped their language, calendar, prayers, festivals, archaeology, memory and soul.

We teach that Israel is not perfect, because no country is, but it is not the cartoon demon created by people who would struggle to locate the Jordan River without Google Maps and emotional support.

We teach that Palestinians are human beings too, not props in someone else’s ideological theatre.

We teach that Hamas is not “resistance” with unfortunate branding, but a genocidal terror organisation that built tunnels under civilians and then sold their suffering to the world as strategy.

We teach that two truths can exist together: Palestinian civilians can suffer terribly, and Israel can still have the right, duty and moral obligation to defend its people.

We teach complexity. Because complexity is where truth lives.

And we make it impossible for the next generation to inherit these lies without at least hearing the truth knocking loudly on the door.

Not politely. Loudly. With evidence. With stories. With history. With archaeology.

With Jewish voices from every shade, country, language and background.

With Israeli Arabs. With Mizrahi Jews. With Ethiopian Jews. With Holocaust survivors. With 7 October survivors. With hostage families. With soldiers. With Christian Israelis. With Druze Israelis. With peace activists. With grieving parents. With children who just want to grow up without sirens.

We cannot only answer the lie after it has gone viral.

By then, the poison has already entered the bloodstream.

We have to inoculate against it before it spreads.

That means schools. Youth groups. Books. Videos. Talks. Podcasts. Social posts. Art. Comedy. Music. Film. Every tool. Every platform. Every voice.

Because if they have built a machine to manufacture hatred, then we need to build a movement to restore truth.

Not a machine of propaganda. A movement of memory. A movement of clarity.

A movement that says: you do not get to erase us, demonise us, rewrite us, flatten us, or turn three thousand years of Jewish history into a thirty-second content snack for people who think nuance is a brand of oat milk.

The lies have to be educated out. Patiently when possible. Sharply when necessary. Publicly when required.

And with enough courage to stop pretending that every person screaming for our destruction is simply “misinformed.”

Some are misinformed. Some are manipulated. Some are useful idiots. And some know exactly what they are doing.

We need to learn the difference.

Because the useful idiots of today may become the powerful idiots of tomorrow.

And nothing is more dangerous than a fool with authority, a lie in their mouth, and the full confidence of a generation that was never taught the truth.

So yes, my children. We will be okay. But not if we stay silent.

Not if we let people who hate us tell the world who we are. Not if we allow the loudest, angriest, most historically illiterate voices in the room to become the narrators of Jewish survival.

We do not need to out-hate them. We do not need to out-scream them. We do not need to become what they are. We need to out-create them.

Out-teach them. Out-story them. Out-truth them.

We need to remember that the battlefield is not only in Gaza, Iran, Lebanon, Syria or wherever the next missile comes from.

It is also on our phones. In our schools. On our campuses. Inside newsrooms. Across social media. Around dinner tables.

In the minds of children asking their fathers whether they are going to be okay.

And the answer must still be yes. But this time, we have to fight the war we forgot to fight.

The war for truth. The war for memory. The war for the right to tell our own story.

Because if we do not tell it, someone else will.

And judging by their current draft, they are absolutely butchering the plot.