Sa’ar says the obvious: Israel must win the narrative

Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar stood before 108 Israeli ambassadors in Jerusalem and declared that Israel “cannot succeed” without revolutionizing its public diplomacy.

He is right.

But he is also late. And he is not going far enough.

For decades, Israel treated public diplomacy like an afterthought, a side gig, a luxury, a job for volunteers, students, donors, or whoever had a spare hour and a social media login. 

The Jewish state built one of the world’s most advanced militaries, but left the global information battlefield dangerously undefended.

Now, after a year of relentless diplomatic warfare, Sa’ar is finally saying what many Israelis and professionals in the field have been shouting for years:

Israel cannot afford to win on the battlefield while losing in the court of global opinion.

And the current Foreign Ministry, in its structure, skillset, and personnel, is simply not built to win this war.

Israel Let Its Adversaries Define the Narrative

Sa’ar spoke about new skills, new training, and new media awareness. He emphasized that ambassadors must now operate in the arenas that shape public perception: social media, civil society, Christian and Jewish communities, the global press.

All of this is true, but none of it should be news.

Israel’s adversaries understood this 20 years ago. Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and their global echo chambers invested early in shaping narratives, influencing campuses, dominating digital platforms, and weaponizing human rights discourse. 

They built coalitions with NGOs, think tanks, and activist networks. They learned the language of the West and deployed it with ruthless discipline.

Meanwhile, Israel’s Foreign Ministry continued to behave like a small, conservative bureaucracy designed for cables and formal communiqués, not for TikTok wars and viral disinformation.

There are talented, dedicated people in the ministry. But as a system, it is calibrated for classic diplomacy, not for a nonstop, multi platform information battlefield. 

The staffing profile, the training, the culture, and the incentive structures do not match the intensity or complexity of today’s narrative war.

Israel, brilliant in tech, intelligence, and strategy, somehow ignored the fact that legitimacy itself is part of national security. It spent years under staffing, under training, and under valuing the very people meant to defend that legitimacy.

A Massive Budget Increase, And an Uncomfortable Truth

Sa’ar unveiled unprecedented funding:

NIS 545 million (US$ 145 million) for public diplomacy

NIS 2.35 billion in total (US$ 630 million), the largest allocation in Israel’s history for this field

This is impressive, necessary, and overdue.

But money alone does not fix a structural problem. The increased budget is not just an upgrade, it is an admission of failure. For years, Israel neglected its global narrative and now must spend heavily to catch up in a fight it should have been preparing for all along.

Here is the part Sa’ar did not say clearly enough.

You cannot fight a twenty first century information war with a twentieth century bureaucracy and an inward facing, risk averse staffing model. The current ministry personnel, through no personal fault of most individuals, simply do not collectively reflect the full range of skills, experience, and agility needed to lead this kind of global campaign.

You do not get a streaming era impact with an old broadcast mindset.

The Foreign Ministry Alone Cannot Win This War

If Israel truly wants to transform its public diplomacy, it cannot just “train ambassadors” and “upgrade digital skills” inside the existing system. That is tinkering at the margins.

Jerusalem needs a deeper pivot:

• Bring in top tier private sector talent from around the world, professionals who have run global campaigns for major brands, tech companies, NGOs, and political movements.

• Recruit across all branches of strategic communications, including digital strategy, crisis communications, creative direction, brand architecture, data and audience analytics, grassroots organizing, influencer work, media planning and buying, and narrative design.

• Integrate global Jewish and pro Israel talent that already lives and breathes the media ecosystems of New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Los Angeles, São Paulo, and beyond.

• Build hybrid teams where career diplomats work side by side with world class PR experts, former journalists, social media strategists, designers, and campaign veterans.

In other words, Israel must stop pretending that the current ministry staffing alone can carry this mission. It cannot. Not at this scale, not at this speed, and not against adversaries that have been playing this game seriously for decades.

Top talent exists in Israel, in the diaspora, and across the communications industry globally. The question is whether Israel is prepared to invite them in, give them authority, and let them operate with the speed and creativity this battlefield demands.

Yes, It Is an Uphill Battle, But Israel Does Not Get to Opt Out

Sa’ar pointed to recent “great success” in messaging during the June confrontation with Iran and noted rising visibility of official channels. That matters. But even the best campaigns are operating in a hostile environment:

Entrenched anti Israel sentiment

Platform and algorithmic biases

Academia dominated by anti Zionist narratives

Hostile international organizations

A media landscape primed to scrutinize Israel more than any other democracy

Israel must internalize something uncomfortable: It is fighting uphill because it abandoned the hilltop for years, and because it failed to build the professional, global grade communication infrastructure that its situation demands.

But the answer is not despair. The answer is strategy and seriousness.

Israel does not get to complain that the playing field is not fair. Zionism was never about fair conditions. It was about building anyway. That same mindset now has to be applied to the narrative front.

Diagnosis Is Not Enough, The System Has to Change

The minister said that in 2026 public diplomacy will be central, that ambassadors must become digital warriors, and that new training pipelines will reshape the Foreign Ministry from the ground up.

This is good and necessary, but not sufficient.

Training existing staff and launching new courses is like upgrading the radar on a ship whose engines are still from the 1970s. Helpful, but not transformative.

Transformation means:

• Opening the gates, creating fast track routes to bring in top private talent, Israeli and non Israeli, Jewish and non Jewish, as long as they are committed to Israel’s legitimacy and know how to move opinion.

• Rebuilding the organizational chart, allowing cross functional teams that look more like a modern campaign war room than a traditional ministry corridor.

• Measuring impact in real time, looking at impressions, sentiment, narrative penetration, and agenda setting, not just counting press releases and meetings.

• Accepting calculated risk, because viral impact and zero risk do not coexist. If everything is polished enough for a committee, it is probably too dull for the internet.

Without these moves, Sa’ar’s speech risks becoming just another moment of rhetorical clarity followed by bureaucratic stagnation.

Israel Can Still Win the Narrative War

Sa’ar’s address to the ambassadors is a wake up call, but also an indictment. Israel is years behind where it should be, facing adversaries who mastered the information battlefield long before Jerusalem acknowledged it was a battlefield at all.

Yet giving up is not an option. Not for the Jewish state. Not in the age of viral warfare.Not when legitimacy itself is a strategic asset.

To win, Israel must treat public diplomacy as what it actually is: Not public relations in the narrow sense.

Not marketing.

But national defense, as critical as missile defense, as strategic as intelligence, as consequential as any military operation in Gaza or Lebanon.

That means admitting a hard truth: The current Foreign Ministry personnel and structure, on their own, are not enough.

Israel must now do in diplomacy what it has always done in security, innovate, adapt, and outperform its adversaries by harnessing the very best talent the world has to offer.

Sa’ar is stating the obvious.

The real test is whether he is willing to act on the obvious and bring in the global, elite, private sector firepower that can finally give Israel the narrative edge it has been missing for far too long.