Shabbat shalom!
As a Journalism/English major in college, I was required to take a course on Major British Writers where I had my first exposure to John Milton and his epic poem, Paradise Lost, which is all about the biblical fall of man. “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven,” he wrote.
In 2023, Israel went from Paradise Engineered to Hell Televised. The Jewish state — long viewed by supporters as a battered miracle of survival, democracy, and grit — now finds itself cast in the role of the arch-villain in the global imagination. Not because the facts changed, but because the narrative did.
Milton understood what we’re living through: once you lose control of the story, you lose control of the meaning. And right now, Israel’s story — forged in ashes, sharpened by war, powered by democracy — is being unmade in real time.
There was a time — not long ago, but several ceasefires and hostage deals, and TikTok trends back — when Israel stood in the world’s imagination as a miracle. A scrappy little survivor state. A democracy of refugees. The tech-happy start-up nation whose army featured violinists, baristas, and reluctant engineers in uniform.
It wasn’t perfect, but it was admirable. Strong, but still wounded. Tough, but tethered to a moral compass forged in genocide. In the Jewish diaspora, it inspired a kind of complicated pride — the only country where “Jewish” wasn’t a punchline or a burden. Growing up, I remember it was customary for Jews in the US to donate money to Israel, to set aside “tzedakah” for planting trees, or for Hadassah or the United Jewish Fund. And we did so proudly, creating emotional and durable connections to the Jewish homeland. Many American Jews performed aliyah, and emigrated permanently to Israel driven by Zionist idealism and post-WWII Jewish statehood enthusiasm. Many were young, religious, or ideologically left-wing (kibbutzim).
And then came October 7.
The war in Gaza hasn’t just killed thousands and scar a region. It detonated Israel’s moral standing, especially in the West. On TikTok, in the academy, and across elite institutions, Israel is no longer David. It’s Goliath with a drone fleet. A once-revered underdog turned global pariah.
But this inversion didn’t happen on its own. It was scripted by a media industry addicted to victim porn, amplified by a propaganda machine headquartered in Gaza, and enabled by an Israeli leadership whose moral compass has been hijacked by self-preservation and far-right delusion.
If this is a battle for the soul of the Jewish story, then that story — for now — is losing.
Let’s start with what should have been clear: On October 7, Hamas launched the single most barbaric attack on Jews since the Holocaust. Babies shot in their cribs. Women raped and burned alive. Grandmothers dragged into tunnels. It was genocidal by any definition not marinated in post-colonial grad school jargon.
And yet — within days and even before Israel launched its defensive action — Western media began the great narrative inversion. ABC, NBC, and The Guardian cast doubt on the mass rapes due to “lack of photographic evidence.” Because apparently, Jewish women need to be re-traumatized in high-definition to be believed.
Then came the Al-Ahli Hospital hoax. A Palestinian rocket misfired and struck a parking lot near a hospital in Gaza. Within hours, the New York Times, BBC, and CNN blamed Israel — sourcing claims directly from Hamas. The death toll? Magically rounded to 500. No forensic verification. No skepticism. Just headlines.
When U.S. intelligence and open-source analysts confirmed the blast was self-inflicted — a terror rocket gone astray — the retractions, such as they were, were barely whispers in the back pages. But the protests had already erupted, the embassies had already been stormed, and the image of the Jewish state as hospital-bomber had been indelibly stamped on global consciousness.
And then, of course, the 14,000 babies lie — the Miltonic absurdity that deserves its own canto. In November, social media was flooded with claims that Israel would be killing 14,000 infants within 48 hours. The number was pure fiction, a grotesque aggregation of months of casualty figures, deliberately weaponized. But it went viral — reposted by journalists, influencers, and even Katie Couric. No correction. No accountability. Just the blood libel rebranded for a new generation: the Jewish state murders babies.
This isn’t media. It’s a morality play — and the Jews have been cast, again, as the devil. This is not journalism. It’s blood libel with better production values. As a former journalist inspired by Woodward and Bernstein, I am deeply appalled and embarrassed at the state of this once admirable institution.
And yet the real genius of the narrative inversion lies with Hamas. Their propaganda machine is a masterclass in post-truth warfare. They understand the algorithm, the camera, the cadence of Western guilt. They know how the Western media works. They know tragedy sells. They know if you point a camera at a wounded child or a pile of rubble and yell “genocide,” the algorithm takes care of the rest. They know how to control the narrative — not despite Western values, but because of them. They embed weapons in hospitals, launch rockets from kindergartens, and count on Israel’s response to generate the optics they need. They’ve weaponized our empathy, our journalism, our very language. “Occupation,” “apartheid,” “genocide” — the terms no longer mean anything. They are slogans, deployed with precision to erode Israel’s moral high ground.
And they do not fear civilian death — they rely on it. Every corpse becomes a martyr and a sermon. Every collapsed building a set piece. They flood WhatsApp channels with casualty reports (unverified, unsegregated by age, gender, or combatant status) and the media dutifully repeats them, unquestioned. Meanwhile, Israeli spokespeople hold up drone footage and talk about “precision-guided munitions” to an audience that has already stopped listening.
But perhaps the cruelest irony is this: Jews, more than any people, carry a deep historical discomfort with justifying ourselves to those who hate us. There’s something fundamentally dehumanizing in having to prove we’re not demons. After pogroms, after the Shoah, after generations of expulsion, many Jews instinctively recoil at PR. We want to live, not explain. But in this war — this digital Eden where narrative is everything — silence gets interpreted as guilt. Dignified restraint doesn’t go viral. And moral complexity gets flattened into a single Instagram slide with a crying child and a red “Free Palestine” banner across the top.
Nowhere is the narrative collapse more devastating than among young diaspora Jews.
On American campuses, Zionism has been rebranded as white supremacy. Birthright is suspect. Shabbat dinners are canceled. DEI offices (what’s left of them) treat Jewish students as problematic, privileged extensions of the Israeli military-industrial complex. Jewish students are told they must disavow Israel to be considered “progressive” or be cast as part of the “oppressor class”.
Even within Jewish homes, there’s a schism. Older generations remember 1967. Younger ones remember a trending infographic accusing their homeland of genocide. They feel trapped — forced to choose between Jewish identity and social acceptance. Between solidarity and safety. As a result, younger generations are split: is Israel a moral homeland or a militarized embarrassment?
It’s no wonder my nephew, who was raised Jewish with a bar mitzvah in Israel, and, who attended Jewish summer camps, feels anxious about any public displays of his Jewish identity. A Jewish generation adrift. Disaffection. And in many cases, a complete severance from Zionism — not out of betrayal, but out of fatigue.
And into this wasteland of moral confusion and generational fracture strides the embodiment of narrative collapse: Benjamin Netanyahu.
Bibi didn’t invent antisemitism. But he managed to confirm every anti-Israel stereotype while overseeing the worst security failure in Israel’s history. He dismantled judicial independence, empowered theocratic racists, ignored the military’s warnings, and governed like a Roman emperor facing indictment.
Instead of uniting the country after October 7, he weaponized grief. He let extremists stay in power. He refused to take responsibility. He made “winning” in Gaza a slogan, not a strategy. He is a man governing as if the state is a bunker built solely for his ego. He may currently be winning the war with Iran, but for many young Jews abroad, Bibi isn’t just a political liability — he’s an emotional dealbreaker. He confirms every slander, fuels every caricature. He has made it exponentially harder to defend Israel without wincing. To care without explaining. To stand with the Jewish state without having to clarify, “But not that government.”
For many diaspora Jews — even those who love Israel — he is a bridge too far. The leader who turned Paradise into parody. Who made standing with Israel feel like standing with a smirking strongman dodging subpoenas.
Regaining the Narrative
How this epic tragedy ends is beyond my speculative powers. But we need to be steadfast in our efforts to change the narrative. Israel is not a colonial project. It is not genocidal. It is not an apartheid state. But when you lose control of the story, the facts stop mattering. The world is no longer parsing your morality — it’s reacting to your image.
And when that image is shaped by enemies who seek your destruction, by journalists who outsource truth to terror ministries, and by a Prime Minister who treats the truth like a prop — the result is what Milton warned us about: a Hell made from what was once a kind of Heaven.
But if the soul of Israel is to survive this chapter, it needs to reclaim the lost narrative. And the real question isn’t just whether Israel can win the war in Iran and Gaza, it’s whether it can reclaim the story.
Because even if the field is lost, “all is not lost; the unconquerable will…” — and in that will lies the enduring essence of Jewish peoplehood: the refusal to submit, the courage to rebuild, and the stubborn hope that even the most inverted narrative can be set right.
Because if we let our enemies — and our own failures — dictate what Israel is, then we are no longer just defending a country. We’re mourning a narrative. And narratives, once lost, are not easily resurrected.
Be safe out there.
Brad out.
Jew News Review 