Israel's message to the world must be clear: Hostages for a ceasefire, now - opinion

• Published date: 30 March 2024
• Author: EVAN NIERMAN
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

Israel now must launch an all-out public relations offensive with a single overriding message: "Return all of our hostages and there will be a ceasefire." It must insist on an explicit, unbreakable linkage between the two, and drive this message forward with the Biden administration and the entire world, again and again

Israel cannot afford to wait because Hamas and its apologists and supporters are winning the PR war. The Palestinians are unparalleled masters of propaganda who have succeeded in painting Israel as a rogue nation disproportionately employing devastating force against defenseless civilians and seeking the genocide of the Palestinian people.

The IDF, in this telling, is a remorseless engine of destruction driven by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right coalition of political leaders who oppose Palestinian statehood and are unwilling to compromise to achieve a two-state solution.

To see the success of the Hamas PR strategy, just look at the protests occurring throughout the world. The narratives are wrong-headed but pervasive: Israel murders babies, the Jewish nation has devolved into an apartheid state, the world should support a "free" Palestine "from the river to the sea."

Hamas's absurdities must not go unchallenged

While spinning their false narratives, Hamas propagandists focus on lopsided body counts comparing the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza and the number of Israelis killed on October 7. What's missing, of course, are context and reality. Hamas targets and murders civilians, including women and children, even mutilating bodies and employing mass rape to oppose so-called "occupation."

Hamas-controlled institutions intentionally conflate numbers of dead fighters killed in combat with Palestinian civilians used by them as human shields.

These absurdities cannot go unchallenged with Israel smeared by legions on social media parroting Hamas talking points. It should be Hamas which is correctly labeled as genocidal, with the onus upon them to immediately end the war.

For months, "ceasefire" has been the demand of pro-Palestinian demonstrators. Israel should undercut them by expressing willingness to implement an immediate ceasefire, but if and only if Hamas immediately releases all hostages.

This positioning would signal that Israel will no longer play Hamas's cynical game of facilitating protracted bloodshed and suffering by haggling over the number of jailed Palestinian offenders to be released per innocent Israeli...