An ad on Hulu showcased an imaginary Gaza full of DJs, hotels and smiling people. Courtesy of Hulu

By Mira Fox February 1, 2024

In a recent Hulu ad, images that appear AI-generated flash by: children playing on the beach, people dancing under disco lights, fancy hotels and a building that looks oddly like the Taj Mahal. The slogan? “Visit Gaza.”

“This is what Gaza could have been like,” says a narrator as the ad ends. “Without Hamas. Free Gaza from Hamas.”

The ad, which ends with the emblem of the state of Israel, seems like a marked shift in focus and tone for the country’s hasbara, or public relations outreach, which has, since Oct 7., focused on the atrocities committed by Hamas in its attack on Israel. But to Chas Freeman, former president of the Middle East Policy Council and a retired diplomat who served in numerous countries, it just seems like more of the same PR strategy the country has been using — increasingly unsuccessfully — for years.

Most of Israel’s hasbara efforts in the U.S., he said, have focused on two goals. One is positive — “burnishing the image of Israel: start-up nation, talking about making the desert bloom,” he explained — and the other is negative, focused on denying allegations of questionable military actions and painting Palestinians as the enemy. 

That message, Freeman says, is “all Palestinians are Hamas. Everything is Hamas.”

That means most wartime hasbara efforts — in posts online and ads on TV and in children’s video games — have consisted of things like clips of soldiers withholding fire or providing aid in Gaza contrasted with stories of Hamas’ atrocities on Oct. 7 or images of the still-missing hostages. These serve to enforce a black-and-white, good-vs.-evil framing of the war, with Israelis on the side of good and Palestinians supporting evil. Israel even released a fairytale animation shortly after Oct. 7 on social media that cast Hamas as wolves attacking Goldilocks’ house, with Shira Haas of Unorthodox narrating in the role of Baby Bear.

The new ad, which was met with derision online, breaks with this pattern on the surface; it is the first campaign to center everyday Gazans. Given the frequency with which Israel’s social media accounts post videos shaming pro-Palestinian protesters — hint: it’s often — it is jarring to see the state sponsoring an ad ostensibly promoting Palestinian welfare.

The shift in approach seems to indicate a tacit acknowledgement that Israel is in a losing battle to try to gain international sympathy for its war effort, with the news inundated by images of starving and wounded children in Gaza and reports of astonishingly high death tolls — more than 26,000, according to recent reports.

American support — both cultural and monetary — is essential to Israel’s war efforts. The U.S. is its biggest ally, aiding it both militarily and in the public discourse. But even as Americans still generally support Israel, they increasingly don’t support the war, according to a Times/Sienna poll — particularly younger Americans ages 18-29. The survey found that a plurality of Americans of all ages believe Israel should stop its military campaign to protect against civilian casualties, and that 48% of that younger group think Israel is intentionally killing civilians.

The Hulu ad — a campaign that can reach a broader audience, one outside the extremely-online Twitterati who tend to heavily critique Israel — positions Israel as aligned with those horrified by the toll of war on civilian Palestinians. We too, it seems to say, want better for Gazans; it poses Israel as a humanitarian force, fighting for the freedom of the civilians. #FreeGazaFromHamas.

But, of course, the ad still serves to justify Israel’s military campaign. Freeman said he sees the ad as another in a long line of examples of Israel losing its hasbara touch.

“I think you’re giving them too much credit,” Freeman said when I suggested that Israel is changing tactics to reflect international displeasure. “I think Israel has inhaled its own propaganda. It has lost touch with the external realities that people outside its circle see,” he said.

“I’ve historically been very impressed by the effectiveness of their activity, it’s been pretty slick,” he continued. “But this time around it’s been pretty awful and unpersuasive to anyone but the already committed.”

After all, anyone who isn’t already committed to Israel might note that Israel holds some responsibility for Gaza’s lack of a booming luxury tourism industry. It has kept Gaza under a punishing blockade for decades, with the support of Egypt. And of course, many people feel that the army isn’t demonstrating great care for the civilians whose alternate, Hamas-free reality it touts in the ad; just look at the ever-rising death tolls.

“At some point, Lincoln’s adage, that you can’t fool all of the people all of the time, comes in,” Freeman said. “I think Israel needs to rethink this. I mean they should rethink their policies — if you don’t have a good policy to sell, that’s a problem for propaganda.”

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