Sadly, tragically, frustratingly, the pro-Israel side is being led by its opponents like an obedient, trained pony into the most self-defeating position possible.
All of a sudden, the entire narrative about October 7 has become about whether anybody was raped. Rape accusations are notoriously the hardest to get victims to testify and to find proof. In a situation where many people were murdered, where there’s a pile of uncontroverted dead bodies, why is it necessary to argue about rape? Is rape worse than murder? Obviously not. Murder is the worst thing that can happen. And nobody can deny it happened in Israel on October 7.
Anti-Israel propagandists around the world have seized on the rape narrative because it offers them an easy way out. You can drown in discussions of why rape victims don’t want to come forward.
But guess who doesn’t have this problem?
The dead.
The dead are not worried about being harassed on social media by overheated Hamas fanboys. That’s why the Hamas crowd so joyfully pounds on the rapes. The rape debate allows them to avoid the subject of the dead.
In propaganda wars, there are some basic rules. If you don’t follow them, you’ll be controlled and bled by your opponent.
One such rule is: stay on point and don’t debate minutia. If a mass murder of a thousand unarmed people was perpetrated, that’s the message that has to be repeated on every screen and every electric appliance. And by the way, I just realized that I have no idea how many people were murdered on October 7. I’m completely on Israel’s side and it would be helpful to know the number to continue getting out the message about the horror that was perpetrated. Instead, I see on social media endless debates about rape as if the existence or lack thereof of those rapes somehow made the murders less or more terrible.
Clarissa's Blog 
I noticed that in the posts of some people from Israel in my Facebook…
I do not think they are being “led by opponents”. It is a somewhat desperate (and not necessarily cynical/conscious) move in a propaganda war, due to seeing that old methods of that war are not working. The majority in the world is not seeing Israel as an underdog (in the broader historical context), accusations of antisemitism are ignored more frequently then they used to, and the argument about the dead seems to be losing its power as the number of Palestinian civilian dead exceeded the number of Israeli civilian dead, so Israel is in need of something that a) is true / can be proven, b) Palestinians have done and Israelis have not and c) resonates with the Western left (for whom the “Palestinians are not real and have no culture” stuff is taboo but “Palestinians have rape culture” might work). I do not know if it will work on the Western left, but it seems to be working on the Israeli left.
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Yes! Totally. Nobody is going to buy Israel as a victim. It’s not 1946. There’s no beating Palestinians in what concerns abjection.
But victimhood stories don’t fly as well as stories of courage and resilience, anyway. A young mother defended her kibbutz single-handedly for 72 hours while clutching her 16 babies to her chest until her great-grandpa, an admiral and the founder of Mossad burst through the gates with his platoon of IDF heroes and rescued the mom and her now 17 babies because she actually managed to give birth while defending the kibbutz. This kind of thing energizes people for support a lot more than posters of hostages and all that sort of stuff.
I’ve been collecting money and getting out support for Ukraine for a long time now. I never show any photos of destroyed buildings. I never share any victim stories unless they end in some sort of inspirational triumph. Because that’s what works. Sad and pitiful doesn’t work because psychologically healthy people can’t sustain a state of misery and sadness for over 3 minutes.
This is a rule for everybody. Want support for your cause? Inspire, uplift, be somebody people want to imitate, not somebody they want to avoid because it’s depressing.
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“Nobody is going to buy Israel as a victim”
Very true.
“Rape accusations are notoriously the hardest to get victims to testify and to find proof”
Another big problem: Race trumps sex in the victimhood sweepstakes…
Israelies are coded as western white people by most of the world and Palestinians are brown…
Look at Rotherham for how this scenario plays out in the real world….
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