This ‘Digital Warrior’ knows how to win Israel’s PR war

The next day, Lester was back on base. She stayed in uniform for six months, trying to show the reality of the war, to detail what her comrades on the ground were finding, facing and fighting.

A lengthy stint the IDF had not been Lester’s plan, though. After completing four years of national service – she enlisted in the army with the goal of serving for two years, but remained for a further two in a professional capacity – she told her friends that she needed a couple of years not thinking about Hamas. And she did indeed go on to enjoy the kind of life that Tel Aviv offers young people.

“Before October 7, I was working in a high-tech job doing marketing for a really cool company,” she says. “I was also freelancing for different clients in the high-tech world, doing Zumba at the beach and hanging out with my friends.”

But when duty called she did not hesitate and as soon as she was back on base, she was thrown into 12-hour shifts, “trying to sit there and edit video after video explaining what was going on”. If she wasn’t editing clips, she would be scrolling through social media, getting a grip on the online conversation around the Jewish state.

Most of which, it hardly needs stating, is deeply hostile toward Israel.

This, argues Lester, is for several reasons. The first is numerical: for every Jew in the world, there are 135 Muslims. Second is the malign influence of Qatari and Russian networks.

The third? Being too reasonable. Israel tries to use logic in its messaging, keeping the raw emotion inside. “Even when Israelis went on the news to talk about the hostages, they were mostly very calm, serious, tough.” By contrast, “Most Gazans who went on the news were crying.”

In addition, horrific pictures will always trump facts, specially on social media. As she puts it in her book: “My golden rule of the Israel-Hamas war is you can’t fight photos of dead children.”

In the same chapter, she notes another “silly but real” reason Israel has a major PR problem.

“We don’t have any good chants.”

The country’s complex reality cannot compete with catchiness of “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, argues Lester, and that makes winning the argument in a world of quick clips and sound-bites very difficult indeed.

But she believes the battle for public opinion can still be won.

“There are so many Israelis who are Arab, who are black, who are young and they aren’t represented in the typical hasbara ecosystem,” she says.

And having worked both inside the army’s official communications apparatus and independently, she thinks these Israelis have advantages official institutions do not. “Regular content creators condemn the things that should be condemned,” she says.

In her self-published book, aimed primarily at American Jews and friends of Israel in the diaspora, she has other difficult truths. Israeli conscription means very young soldiers with little understanding of an English-speaking audience are often on the front line of the digital war. They then go on to teach the next coterie of recruits, reinforcing the problem.

“That isn’t to say that there haven’t been incredibly skilled and hard-working people in my unit over the years,” writes Lester, “but I’m fairly sure that the digital war would look a bit different if the IDF international communications branch was run by a tech startup.”

One incident that still rankles with her, and many others, of course, others is the infamous rocket explosion at the Al-Ahli Arab hospital in the Gaza Strip on October 17, 2023. Within the hour, global media was reporting  Hamas’s Ministry of Health’s claim that 471 people had been killed and 342 injured.

We now know that the deaths and injuries were caused by an Islamic Jihad rocket that misfired. (The death toll was also mercifully lower than first reported and it appears that the ammunition hit the hospital’s car park, not the building.)

But on that terrible day it took four hours for the IDF to release an initial statement. And this was four hours too many. “Everyone was saying ‘where’s the response? ‘Where’s the response’… Four hours on social media is a lifetime,” says Lester.

Of course, it is not easy for an army of the size of the IDF to react more quickly to events of this nature. Details need to confirmed and vetted.

But she fears the unintended consequences of this due diligence, especially from Gen Z and, in due course, Gen Alpha.

“I fully believe that the digital war is as important as the war on the ground,” she insists throughout our conversation.

“It’s just a different kind of war… Israel can’t fight without the legitimacy given to us by our allies.” Their support gives Israel the freedom to fight, she says. “If we are perceived to be too much in the wrong and our allies stop supporting us, we won’t be able to continue fighting on the ground.”

Interestingly, Lester doesn’t see that much troubling content online herself. “Social media algorithms mainly show you what they think that you want to see so I am mainly spared the anti-Israel stuff,” she says. But when she does come across it “I always take the time to check facts and then respond”.

And when she does, she engages with the same passion she exhibits in her book and in person. She wrote the book because she “wanted to give people who are interested in how the IDF works and how social media affects our lives an insider’s perspective”. The result is an important insight into a key plank of modern warfare. One at which the Jewish state needs to get better.

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Digital Warrior, by Rachel Lester, is available on Amazon