America and Israel’s Media War with Iran
This past year has seen the Middle East rapidly destabilise. Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack on Israel set forth a series of events that have spiralled into an all-out regional confrontation between Israel, American forces, and Iran and its proxies.
Hezbollah began firing missiles at Israel on 8 October, which led to the evacuation of 60,000 Israelis from towns along its northern border. On 13 October Israel launched a ground invasion of Gaza. In November the Houthis began attacking commercial shipping in the Red Sea that led to American airstrikes on Houthi sites in Yemen. On 29 January 2024, a drone attack from an Iranian-backed militia killed three US service members in Jordan. On 1 April 2024, an Israeli attack on a building attached to the Iranian embassy in Damascus killed senior members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). This provoked a massive missile and drone barrage against Israel on 13 April that was intercepted by Israeli, American, and Jordanian air defence. In September, after months of exchanged fire and failed ceasefire negotiations by the US and France, Israel invaded Lebanon to oust Hezbollah. On 1 October, Iran launched another missile attack on Israel that was similarly shot down. Several days later, Israel retaliated by striking inside Iran hitting Iranian air defence and missile production facilities. It was the first Israeli attack directly on Iran.
But now that the 45-year shadow war has come to light, the global media war has begun. Iran presents itself as a victim of Western imperialism and champion of Palestinians, whose proxies are “defending” Iran against the “Zionist regime.” In contrast, America and Israel believe that they are defending the liberal democratic world against an expansionist Islamist theocracy. Iran’s anti-Western narrative has caught on. In the absence of widespread knowledge of the causes and history of the shadow war, news media have clashed over how to portray the conflict.
Iran’s proxies are Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, militia groups in Iraq, and the Assad regime of Syria. Together they form the “Axis of Resistance” which has been responsible for tremendous destruction across the Middle East. In Yemen the Iran-backed Houthis started a civil war that has killed hundreds of thousands of people. The Houthis missiles and drone attacks in the Red Sea have severely damaged the flow of global shipping. Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy in Lebanon, was responsible for the suicide bombing of the US barracks in Beirut in 1983 which killed 241 American servicemen and 58 French troops. The IRGC has a history of targeting Iranian dissidents abroad. In March of this year, a TV host from Iran International, an anti-regime news network, was stabbed in London by Iran-backed criminals. Hezbollah and Hamas are designated as terrorist groups by the US, UK, and EU. The EU still does not list the entirety of Hezbollah as a terrorist organisation, only its “military wing” despite there being no distinction in practice. In 2012, the US State Department added the IRGC to its list of proscribed terrorist groups, followed by efforts in EU countries to do so.
Despite the legal designation and their history of terrorism, news agencies do not always refer to Iran’s proxies as such or even mention their terrorist designations. The BBC sparked controversy by refusing to call Hamas terrorists on 7 October. An opinion article from the Guardian advocated the removal of Israel from the United Nations because, as the author wrote, “Israel has launched attacks on multiple countries and occupied territories: the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran.” No mention was made of 7 October or the missile and drone attacks on Israel from these territories. The article argued that Israel was worse than Syria, Russia, and North Korea, and was the only country that needed to be thrown out of the United Nations. Russia, China, and Iran have used bots and created misinformation on social media to spread Hamas’s messaging with the intent of undermining the United States. Misinformation evokes strong emotions and usually uses shorter mediums, like reels and memes, than paid-access mainstream media’s in-depth analyses and peer-reviewed journalism. This allows propaganda to spread faster and reach a wider audience. All good journalism has a responsibility to explain the complexities and vastness of history instead of falling into emotionally charged media narratives.
To fully understand the media wars, one must understand antisemitism. At first, the war between Iran and Israel may appear to be another war of rival powers. However, Iran is not motivated by the usual understandings of “great power competition” but by radical Islamist antisemitism. As with Christianity, Islam has a long history of antisemitism going back to its origins in the seventh century. When translated from Arabic, the Houthi’s slogan is literally: “God is the Greatest. Death to America. Death to Israel. Curse the Jews. Victory to Islam.” Iran fundamentally seeks the destruction of Israel and regularly posts billboards glorifying their aims. Though not as widely reported on, Iran also targets Jewish communities around the world. The worst incident was in 1994 when a Hezbollah suicide bombing on the AMIA Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires killed 85 people, the deadliest terrorist attack in Argentina’s history. It took thirty years of legal battles and cover-ups before the government of Argentina acknowledged that Iran was behind the attack. In June 2023, Israeli intelligence services prevented an Iranian terror plot on a Chabad House in Cyprus. That November Israeli intelligence services also helped Brazilian security thwart an attack on Brazil’s Jewish community. Viewing antisemitism for what it is, as racism and a malignant conspiracy theory, will go the farthest to combat Iran’s propaganda. Iran wants to wipe Israel off the map not out of any genuine concern for Palestinians, but because of its hatred of Jews.
A mural demanding justice for the victims of the AMIA suicide bombing in 1994
Iran’s narrative of defying the West and the supposed Jewish-Zionist conspiracy strongly appeals to some disenchanted Westerners and extremist forms of Islam. Iran’s rhetoric about Israel has become the focal point for all the American and European wrongs done to the Islamic world over the past centuries. Defying the “Zionist regime” restores Islam’s sense of pride and creates identity through collective struggle against the other. Israel’s geographical location in the Holy Land, with Jerusalem as its capital, adds insult to injury. The goal of Iran is to conquer Jerusalem, called “Quds,” which the IRGC’s foreign operations branch is named after. This holy quest for Jerusalem evokes visions of restoring the Islamic Golden Age.
Iran’s narrative also resonates with Westerners who are disenchanted with the role of Western liberal democracy in the world. In their eyes, the Western world of past and present is imperial, oppressive, and irredeemable. These, usually college-aged, Iran sympathisers and supporters might be motivated by misplaced feelings of white guilt and shame surrounding the destructiveness of past American wars in the Middle East. This off-shoot of Postcolonial theory sees destroying Zionism, which has lost its original definition of merely being Jewish self-determination in its historic homeland, as recompense for the West’s past sins. Not only is Israel neither white nor European, but nothing done by an abstractly defined “West” decades or centuries ago justifies terrorism or the destruction of any country. But, the biggest factor in turning global opinion against America and Israel is the high civilian death toll. Israel’s military campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon, similar to the US-backed Saudi intervention in Yemen against the Houthis, have had catastrophic collateral damage. Though America and Israel may blame Iran due to its underlying support for terrorism, the greater the civilian death toll becomes, the fewer followers their media narrative will have.
If the United States and Israel want to win over the hearts and minds of international society, they must develop a long-term strategy to fight Iran’s propaganda. The US State Department should invest more in the Bureau of Public Affairs. America and Israel must also do everything they can to avoid civilian casualties and provide necessary humanitarian aid to populations caught in the shadow war. But for the United States to truly beat Iran’s narrative, they must be willing to call out Iran in international forums. America must stop deceiving itself with its “pivot to China” strategy and the idea of a withdrawal from the Middle East. The America-Israel-Iran war may be only just beginning.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the wider St. Andrews Foreign Affairs Review team.
Cover image courtesy of Mehrnews via Wikimedia Commons, ©2023. Some rights reserved.
In-text image courtesy of Embajada de EEUU en Argentina via Wikimedia Commons, ©2024. Some rights reserved.
