Inside Hasbara - Part 1: what two rare handbooks reveal
An investigative series on two elusive hasbara handbooks and the candid strategies they contain
If you like this article, please don’t hesitate to click like♡ and restack⟳ ! It’s a quick way to make sure more people will get to enjoy it too.
And don’t hesitate to subscribe to my newsletter for free to receive my new articles right in your inbox!
Welcome to this new multi-part series on hasbara. Over the past several months, I have been looking high and low for hasbara handbooks, though most of that time was making sure the sources were reliable and I didn’t miss any documents. Today, I am finally able to start putting the content of these documents out to the public. In this first part, which will serve as our introduction to the series, we will be doing an overview of these documents and what they contain. This will allow us in the following parts to actually enter the thick of it and analyze the content of these handbooks chapter by chapter.
You can download the PDF documents for yourself here, on my Mega account:
What is hasbara?
Hasbara is originally the Hebrew word for ‘explaining’. In ‘Israel’, hasbara is a huge state project, undertaken both locally in the entity and abroad in the world. Hasbara aims to downplay the crimes of the occupation, reframe them so much that they become invisible, and make any criticism of the entity impossible. When criticism is being made against ‘Israel’ and its actions, hasbara comes out to ‘explain’ their version of it and tell you just how great of a country it actually is — if you don’t look at the persecuted Palestinian prisoners in Jerusalem or the bombs falling in Gaza.
Our first source, the Hasbara Apparatus diagram from Molad — a zionist think tank — explains it clearly:
Hasbara is policy. It is practiced willfully and within a framework. It’s funded by the state of ‘Israel’, it employs people to do it, and it’s entirely rationalized into an apparatus. In other words, it’s an institution. While hasbara nowadays is also used to mean any pro-zionist propaganda, at its core it is a government project in the state of ‘Israel’.
As the diagram explains, hasbara begins at the national level in government. The hasbara headquarters in the Prime Minister’s office first creates the communication around an event, and then disseminates it through a cascading series of messagers. The headquarters coordinate with other institutions such as the Foreign Ministry and the Occupation Forces to craft a message around a certain event or criticism.
This messaging, when ready, is then passed down to various lobbies and NGOs who are tasked with spreading this message to their base: the common and not-so-common people. Synagogue attendees, students, and even politicians.
They are the ones then engaging on the frontlines of debate, so to speak. They might be public figures such as actors or journalists (Piers Morgan comes to mind)
Gentiles are not spared as the bulk of zionists in the world are Christians (especially centered in the USA), and they receive hasbara as well. Here, Christians for Israel makes the case for hasbara — and in doing so does hasbara. They call it “explaining the right to defend ourselves” (the author is ‘Israeli’), already framing their genocide and everything the entity has done in Gaza to this day — killing 1/10th of the population, the massacres of children, the destroying of all hospitals, the detaining of thousands of civilians and their subsequent disappearance — as something one just does in self-defense. As if there was nothing wrong or even debatable about it. It’s just common sense to do this, stop questioning it.
And while Molad claims to be on the ‘Israeli’ left, we know there is no such thing as progressive zionism (also called labor zionism historically). It remains a settler-colonial ideology. In other words, even as Molad was likely trying to expose hasbara with this diagram, they end up playing into it through their mere existence. The fact that Molad calls itself a ‘center for the renewal of Israeli democracy’ gives it away — they could not imagine themselves living in Palestinian democracy. Molad runs into the same problem as Haaretz and other ‘progressive’ “Israeli” outlets: they still want to displace Palestinians so they can occupy their land (which requires genocide), they just want to give Palestinians a nice smile while they do it.
There was already a country in which Jews and Palestinians lived side-by-side in plurality, and it’s called Palestine.
As such, we see already that hasbara is big and institutional, and not just the work of a few groups that really care about “Israel’s” reputation. It’s part of a large network — when you start discussing the destruction of Kamal Adwan Hospital and some random user comments that actually, there was a Hamas command center under it? That’s hasbara. It’s not innocent: they know that this is false, but they still persist.
Certainly some people are paid to promote hasbara. But not everyone is. We know that the IOF has soldiers tasked with making comments on social media, and we know that the zionist entity has sponsored NGOs such as the Hasbara Fellowships. But the rank-and-file are happy to do hasbara for free because they believe in the value of doing it.
All governments do propaganda of some kind. Some lie more about it than others. Originally, the word propaganda simply meant to disseminate information. There was not necessarily a negative connotation to the word. What makes hasbara stand out is that it’s been going on since the 1960s as state policy (a necessity, since “Israel” has been in the process of colonizing Palestine uninterrupted since its inception) and that has, in turn, necessarily grown hasbara to become a huge institution of the state like we’ve seen.
Why is it important to know about hasbara?
The genocide in Gaza has been going on for over a year, and we are at all times aware of the new depths of depravity and massacres the occupier commits. In that context, it is certainly legitimate to ask: why do we still care about hasbara? What can the zionist entity say that isn’t disproven by pictures coming out daily?
I have two answers to that. First, it’s still important to learn about hasbara because not everyone is immune to it. Many people do not actively seek out or find news about Palestine, and as such still depend on the large media actors to get their news, or even from “Israeli” sources directly.
The second answer is that hasbara is still being practiced even in the face of overwhelming evidence that pours out on the daily. It is useless to try and dismantle hasbara, because the point is not to argue: the point is to waste your time and convince the onlookers, and this is something hasbara handbooks are very open about.
This series is for both of these segments, and I’m sure most of us (myself included!) find ourselves to an extent into one of the two.
By learning the tactics of hasbara, one becomes able to more readily see it when it happens, and take the steps to disarm it. This makes us more productive as anti-zionists, as we become better able at finding which battles we should spend our energy on, and which battles we should ignore.
Meet our contestants
Throughout this series, we’ll be looking at two hasbara documents that are freely available online (though they require some investigating to find): The Israel Project’s 2009 Global Language Dictionary, and the 2002 Hasbara Handbook: Promoting Israel on Campus from the World Union of Jewish Students (WUJS).
Since these two books have become hard to find (especially if you don’t know them by name), I’ve uploaded their PDF copies here on Mega: https://mega.nz/folder/6mZTHYTI#Hvq2kXBzGtdkDABLmMccMA as well as the Hasbara Apparatus document. If I find more handbooks, I will also upload them to this folder.
While the two books may seem outright ancient at first glance, there’s actually nothing really new happening in hasbara. At the end of the day there’s only so many ways you can twist yourself into shapes trying to defend the indefensible. As for whether these documents are legitimate: yes, they are. The versions available online are leaked copies.
Upon opening these handbooks, the thing that first struck me was the sheer length. Both are over 100 pages long, easily 300 to 400 pages in paperback format. Clearly, there’s a lot to say. Both books speak more or less about the same topics: they share techniques on how to do hasbara, though the Dictionary also conducted polls in their study and the Campus book teaches students how to organize events and meetings — we’ll get into all of that. While the WUJS’ handbook is aimed at students on campus, most of it ultimately applies to any situation.
The challenge with these two books, and the reason I’ve put off starting this series for so long, is that I’m not sure where to even start. We have over 200 letter-sized pages of hasbara techniques being doled out one by one methodically and conveniently — fully explained so that the reader can learn to do hasbara on their own and start spouting off bullshit at the earliest time possible.
Perhaps for this first part we can begin at the similarities between the two handbooks, and tentatively offer an overview of what we will be expected to find in each document.
The Israel Project’s document spans a whopping 25 chapters. It aptly starts by giving readers some techniques in the first two chapters, before delving into issues of the time — Iran’s nuclear program, or how to talk to the “American left” (they mean Democrats under the Obama Presidency). The book uses quotes from then-President Barack Obama a lot, presenting them as examples of good hasbara to emulate in “your” own speech as well — the implications are obvious. Indeed, the document is often interspersed by asides on “words that work” or “words that do not work”, helping the reader not only understand the issue from the ‘Israeli’ side, but also quickly learn what to say in any situation.
For example, we can read on Chapter 15 that:
The children are where the next great language battle for the hearts of the world will be fought. The above quote aside, nothing quiets the Israeli-haters faster than the visuals of Palestinian children being taught how to load a machine gun, snap a person’s neck, and sing songs about the destruction of Israel. Nothing.
To this day, this is still a favorite go-to of hasbara shills. When all else fails, just bring out an old video of kids in Gaza dressing up as Hamas or holding an unloaded gun. Bonus points if you make a tacit point about dismantling UNRWA or the ICC with it, like these two Twitter accounts did (1, 2).
And this perhaps shows why it’s important to dissect and study these documents that have become hard to find publicly. Hasbara is still alive and well, and its tactics are still being used. In chapter 15, the Global Language Dictionary doesn’t tell the reader what to do about the videos of “Israeli” children happily calling for the genocide of Palestinians and comparing them to pests. It doesn’t care about fixing “Israel’s” own ills; it only cares to attack Palestinians, to dehumanize and isolate them so as to make their genocide more comfortable for the oppressor.
In other words, hasbara is a tool of genocide as it helps remove some friction. What hasbara tells us in a meta sense is that public opinion of the genocide is very concerning to “Israel”, and they want to erase that friction. They want us to stop caring about Palestine.
And that’s also why I feel it’s unproductive to try and take on these claims — at least, not individually. By the time you respond to one, ten more will have popped up. Hasbara is an apparatus, it has life of its own. You don’t respond to bad faith with good faith; you respond to bad faith by undercutting it, traversing through it, and not around it, to cut it in half.
For example, the common hasbara retort to these two tweets linked above would be “Well, you’re not denying that Palestinians are teaching their children how to kill Jews!” — but I literally don’t care. Unlike “Israelis”, I don’t think it’s my place to tell Palestinians how they should behave during their own genocide. It’s so low in the list of priorities right now that it’s inherently suspicious that anyone would bring this up one year into a genocide, hasbara or not. I’d rather focus on the fact that “Israel” has destroyed all hospitals in Gaza, has killed all doctors, is not allowing food in, is kidnapping Palestinians, is killing civilians in mass graves, and why they think we’re so stupid that we’d believe them when they say all of these pople are ‘Hamas’.
This is undercutting the argument. Refuse to get into it. Call it out for what it is. Put them on the defensive instead of trying to take on every single piece of hasbara that you come across.
The Dictionary continues candidly:
But explicit appeals to the heart using the victims of terror simply will not work if they are seen as calculating. If people perceive a deliberate attempt to generate sympathy, you will get none.
The problem isn’t to tell the truth from the heart, the problem is to tell the correct “truth” in a way that garners sympathy. Therefore, the Dictionary warns,
In a few hours, Israel will wake up to a new morning of funerals, funerals of babies, of innocent mothers and fathers. And this is what we face right now.
Simply doesn’t work. It sounds forced and focuses too much on “Israelis” — they themselves can realize they are insufferable to everyone else, when they want to. Instead, to do proper hasbara, one should say instead:
Let me talk about the children of the Middle East for they are our future. It is so important that our educational institutions that teach our children should be violence-free and hate-free. The key to a true lasting peace in the Middle East is in the education of the next generation of Israeli and Palestinian leaders.
Both wordings have been used by someone, as the book hints (though they don’t say when and where exactly these words were pronounced). They have been tried in fire, and the lesser option discarded. Over time, hasbara learns to become more effective, going straight to the point that resonates.
This reframing would be called masterful if it wasn’t so dangerous. It positions “Israel” as a legitimate state on par with Palestine, one in which the genocide can continue on a passive, defenseless population that has not learned how to resist.
The entire handbook is based around this premise. Genocide in Palestine is nothing new — in fact, the entire existence of ‘Israel’ has required, since day 1, the forcible removal of Palestinians from their land to make way for settlers. In 2009, Zionists were just reeling from Operation Cast Lead, an invasion of the Gaza Strip. Hamas had taken power there and expelled settlers only two years later, as a precursor to the so-called operation. The release of this report was timely.
In subsequent pages, we can find polls that Dr Frank Luntz, the author sponsored by the Israel Project to do this study (and expert Republican pollster), carried out.
Words matter, the handbook says. Both questions essentially ask the same thing, but in different ways. Why have facts or analysis on your side when you can just move some words around and manipulate people into agreeing?
In regards to Promoting Israel on Campus (the WUJS handbook), we find more of the same — at least for this introduction. The first chapter of the book is dedicated to teaching the point and principles of advocating for “Israel”. The document opens prophetically with the sentence Jewish students are often identified as representatives of Israel.
The reason that they may be considered inherent representatives is exactly because “Israel” has spent all of its existence blurring the lines between Judaism and zionism (an ideology that did not exist prior to 1881), thus forcing every Jewish person to essentially reckon with “Israel’s” existence in one way or another and making them, willingly or not, representatives of “Israel”. This is something the zionist entity has done purposely and is born from it, not from anti-zionist activists.
The book never addresses this position; they consider it to be a given. Instead, they present their zionist rag as a service to unconvinced Jewish students, stating:
It is important for a Jewish student, however reluctantly they might be involved in Israel advocacy, to be clear about what the general aims, and what his or her personal aims, are in this realm. [emphasis mine]
In other words, Jewish students should read this book to learn how to navigate “Israel” advocacy, on the basis that they still need to advocate for “Israel”, they just need to learn how to do it exactly. The zionism can escape you, but you can’t escape zionism.
The handbook goes on to explain that the point of advocating for “Israel” is to influence public opinion as well as public leaders. The handbook is generally very honest about why it exists and what it wants to do. They state black on white that “Israel benefits from public support economically - in terms of willingness to visit Israel and buy Israeli goods” when explaining why public support is important. BDS was only started in 2005.
Still in the first chapter, the book shares a quick and easy tactic for hasbara: negative and positive arguments. Negative arguments start with “this action was justified because…” which we’ve heard countless times since October 7 2023, 21 years after this handbook was written. Again, nothing is new.
Positive arguments (or pushing positivity as the book calls it) instead demonstrates the good side of “Israel” — or the one that hasbara wants to show us. You’ve probably heard that “Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East” — pushing positivity is exactly doing that.
In the second chapter, dedicated to teaching students how to do bigger-scale advocating (such as writing to the press or organizing a talk), the book points out that it is better to write to an elected official as a concerned citizen rather than as part of a group as:
Politicians are quick to discount letters that they see as part of organised campaigns conducted by pressure groups. For this reason, letter writers should identify themselves as concerned citizens, and not as members of organisations.
Can we still say after this that hasbara just “happens” or is simply the word for “explaining”, as this thread on the Reddit subforum Jewish Left attempts to answer? There is a clear cascading of information here: first the hasbara office puts out directives and arguments. These then get passed down to groups and NGOs, who distill them into books (or get paid to write them by the office) to train their base of constituents with. Then, the constituents happily set out to serve as a bulwark for hasbara on the ground. There’s nothing accidental or random about it: “Israel” does it because it needs to salvage its reputation, and because it works.
Despite the age of this handbook, it’s still very relevant today because it’s so open about what it’s doing. In 2002, Yasser Arafat was still head of the Palestinian Authority and Gaza was still settled. The Camp David accords had been held just one year earlier.
The book has an interesting chapter on ‘point-scoring’ debate and when to (or not to) use it, but I think we’ve already gone through a lot of information and this will be better left off for the next part in this series!
If you can’t wait, you can download the PDFs for yourself using the Mega link provided earlier of course, but we will likely come back soon to this series. I can’t say at this time when exactly the next part will come out and how many parts in total there will be, but we will definitely be coming back to these two documents.
Your support helps me keep writing these in-depth essays. If you appreciate my work, consider joining the Critical Stack and gain access to our private Discord community!
Bitcoin (BTC SegWit network) - bc1qcdla40c3ptyrejvx0lvrenszy3kqsvq9e2yryh
Ethereum (Ethereum network) - 0xd982B96B4Ff31917d72E399460904e6F8a42f812
Litecoin (Litecoin network) - LPvx9z9JEcDvu5XLHnWreYp1En6ueuWxca
Upgrade your subscription here:
Share this essay:
Thank you for this post!
I genuinely would like to know who are the unsubtle doofuses literally naming their propaganda program Hasbara (lit: "Explain")? That is as shrewd as the Soviet regime calling their newspaper Pravda (lit: "Truth").