All life is narrative. Control the narrative, and you control public perception and opinion.
At the moment, Israel and President Joe Biden seem to be losing the narrative thread. I say “seem,” because I haven’t interviewed everyone in the world on this, of course. But based on what’s making news, former President Donald J. Trump and the Palestinians seem to be winning the battle for hearts and minds, in large part because the battle is being waged not primarily with words but with images.
There is not a one-to-one correlation or cause and effect here but rather an overlapping of the presumed presidential contest and the Israel-Hamas War. Biden, we are told ad nauseam, is too old to be president, even though he’s just three years older than Trump and healthier though not nearly as good at marketing. In a digital age in which marketing is defined by actual images rather than words, by an emotional argument rather than an intellectual one, some, maybe even many, think Biden looks, moves and speaks like an old person no matter how many bipartisan bills he’s been able to push through or international coalitions he’s forged.
Whereas to them Trump, with his dyed blond pompadour and “mancake,” projects vigor; his hatred, passion; his arrogance, confidence; his rambling at his New York civil fraud trial, folksiness; and even his girth, weightiness, no matter how ineffectual and vindictive his presidency was.
“It’s not really age. It’s how you function at that age, rather than anything. And Trump functions a lot better than Biden,” said Isiah Chamberlain, 18, from Rindge, New Hampshire, who plans to vote Republican. He said this about a man who thought there were airports during the American Revolution, that Alabama is an East Coast state and, recently, that he was in Sioux Falls (South Dakota) when he was in Sioux City (Iowa).
No sooner had the polls come out reinforcing what Chamberlain said, though, than the Democrats once again punched above their weight class in an off-year election — enshrining abortion rights in the Ohio constitution, reelecting Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and taking both houses of the Virginia state legislature in a repudiation of Trumpkin Gov. Glenn Youngkin.
Biden may be viewed as old, but the Dems are far from disarray: The Repubs have once again been repudiated.
Still, Trump retains his ability to control the imagistic narrative, leading some voters to choices that are really not in their interest. Black men think Biden hasn’t done enough for them economically, even though under Biden the economy has rebounded from Covid-fueled inflation and Trump has proved to be no friend to minorities. The young people who are deserting Biden are doing so, according to polling, because he hasn’t done enough about climate change and Palestinian support, even though he has signed executive orders on climate change and is pushing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on a pause that would let supplies into Gaza and the hostages and foreign nationals out.
So actively or passively (by not voting), these environmentally minded, pro-Palestinian young people would support the man (Trump) who is sure to do nothing for the environment and Palestinians, joked Jimmy Kimmel, host of ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”.
Those of us who were young once understand that when you are young, you tend to lead with your heart and not your head. But frankly, the ignorance of many young people in the United States is appalling. And it’s not entirely their fault. Their parents, educators and the digital age have conspired to produce a generation that knows nothing of the arts and humanities, because they supposedly are not the disciplines where the money is. So, many of these kids know a lot about STEM (let’s face it, computers) but nothing about writing a declarative sentence or what the Holocaust was.
They don’t understand the long, complex history of an oppressed Israel in the ancient world, which led to a diaspora and a persecution of Jews as “Christ killers,” (even though the historical Jesus was Jewish), which in turn set the stage for Adolf Hitler’s “Final Solution” of Jewish extermination. When Hamas attacked the Israeli music festival on Oct. 7 — killing 1,400 people, raping women and beheading babies as well as kidnapping 240 people — it triggered a Holocaust reminder in Jews around the world that has been reinforced by subsequent acts of anti-Semitism.
But the Oct. 7 atrocity, which involves an intellectual, historical argument as well as an emotional appeal, is not what we have seen or at least not what we are seeing now. What we see now is the relentless bombardment of the Palestinians, with the Hamas-controlled Health Ministry saying that more than 10,000 people have been killed, 4,000 of them children. Whether or not you trust those numbers, there are the individual images — of couples wailing as they hold a bloody blanket, of children with blood-streamed faces raising their hands to heaven as they call for parents who will never respond, of communities digging through the rubble for any sign of life with their bare hands.
Because the brutality of the festival massacre was deemed so great that it has not been fully shown to the world, that world is left with the Achillean ferocity of the Israeli response. As with the vigor comparison of Biden with Trump, the narrative of the Israel-Hamas War is nat merely verbal or even primarily verbal. It’s visual. It’s visceral. It’s X and TikTok. Playing the passive-aggressive game consigned to those with the traditionally weaker hand, the thuggish Hamas understands this. It’s the kid who keeps torturing the brother until the brother hauls off and gets smacked by the mother, because all she saw was the response, not what led to it. With its tunnels and hostages — it’s basically holding all of Gaza hostage — Hamas has created the overwhelming Israeli response.
But there’s more to it than that: That response is complicated by Netanyahu who, for a variety of reasons, failed to protect his people and has never made a good faith effort toward a two-state solution as the aggressive Jewish settlements on the Palestinian West Bank suggest. For the Palestinians and their supporters, this underscores their own history, in which the West and the Western-allied Israel have only sought to displace and disenfranchise them.
Certainly, Netanyahu’s shift in tone can only reinforce this. At first, he stressed that Israel had no interest in staying in Gaza after it presumably bombs the hell out of it, wiping out a Hamas whose leadership is based in Qatar and that has surely already metastasized. Now Netanyahu says Israel will be an indefinite military presence in Gaza — but not a political one — to prevent further terrorist attacks, although how you can be a military presence without politics is hard to understand. Already, the United States is pushing back on this. You can imagine the rest of the world’s reaction.
Israel will surely win the military battle for Gaza, but it may have already lost the P.R. war.