For decades, the Jewish community has been fighting the wrong battle. We have acted as though our challenge was about wrong facts, incorrect maps, unfair accusations, or the lack of emotional narratives. If only we could explain Israel better—teach the right history, correct the record or share enough data—the lies would dissolve. And yet, they have only intensified.

This failure is not because our facts are weak or our story unconvincing. It is because the Jewish community continues to diagnose the crisis as a problem of misinformation rather than ideology. But modern-day antisemitism—anti-Zionism—is not a misunderstanding. It is a disinformation war—a narrative system engineered to cast Israel and the Jews into a predetermined villainous role. And yet our communal response remains fixated on what I call “inward advocacy,” a set of strategies that turn our pockets out while leaving the ideological machinery of anti-Zionism untouched.

Broadly, the Jewish communal organizations have relied on three predictable and reactive approaches. The first is looking at self-hasbara, or public relations. This often manifests in Jewish students on campus hosting events such as “This is what a Zionist looks like” or “Ask me anything: I’m a Zionist.” In this subset of inward advocacy, we respond to demonization by offering educational tours through our history, culture and achievements, believing that more knowledge will undo disinformation. In essence, we put ourselves under a microscope.

The second strategy of inward advocacy is “innovation nation strategy,” which attempts to align Israel with dominant cultural or political values, whether progressive or conservative. We highlight Israel’s alignment with Western political or cultural values, diversity, democracy, LGBTQ rights or tech innovation, believing that borrowed prestige can neutralize ideological hostility. But once again, we are the object of scrutiny, not the anti-Zionists.

The third is “data correction.” We correct falsehoods, supply statistics and deliver legalistic rebuttals, arguing against accusations that were never intended to be tested for truth. To illustrate the point, imagine a Jew being accused of using the blood of a non-Jew for ritual purposes and consumption. A data correction strategy would suggest that the Jew respond by explaining that Jewish law forbids the consumption of blood by presenting kosher dietary laws and by clarifying that the cup raised on Passover contains wine and not blood. With historical distance, we can see how futile and even absurd this approach would be. Today, we draw a boundary and name it: “That is blood libel.” We may educate about the history of blood libel, but don’t defend ourselves by explaining our rituals.

The same dynamic is unfolding today. Because we lack historical distance from the anti-Zionism era, we struggle to recognize the pattern when Israel is accused of being a settler-colonial state or Zionism of racism.

Yet these “colonizer” and “racist” accusations operate exactly like the blood libel; they are modern iterations of an old method of constructing Jews as villains through fabricated moral charges. Most pro-Israel advocacy programs respond by training students to prove that Jews are indigenous, precisely where the accuser—the anti-Zionist—wants them to be. Meanwhile, the accuser avoids scrutiny entirely, continuing to deploy demonization tactics without ever becoming the subject of investigation.

To correct the colonizer libel, Jewish organizations believe that if they show that Israel is made up of non-white Jews, they would win this battle, believing once again that the issue is about misinformation. But libels don’t respond to facts. It doesn’t matter that half of Israeli Jews do not look white; the libel is that Israel was born in “sin” because Jews are not a nation, but a religious group that arrived in Palestine from Europe.

All three approaches fail for the same reason—they accept the role assigned to Jews within the disinformation script. They make us defendants in someone else’s moral theater. Most importantly, the genocide, apartheid, colonizer and ethno-state libels are that: libels. Libels are not lies or wrong facts. Their purpose is to demonize.

The problem isn’t a deficit of facts or emotionally resonant narratives. A Jewish student can master every historical detail of Zionism and yet remain helpless when confronted with the accusation that “Zionism is colonialism.” This isn’t because of a lack of information; it’s because they are walking into a moral theater in which the verdict has been prewritten.

Yes, history matters. And yes, we should teach our kids deep history so that they can know they are on the right side of it. But no amount of historical grounding dissolves a libel. Today’s accusations—“Israel is a settler-colonial state,” “Zionism is racism”—operate the same way. They are not critiques; they are narrative weapons. And yet we continue to respond by proving Jewish indigeneity, proving Jewish attachment to land, proving Jewish historical continuity.

However, the failed cycle goes as follows: We keep proving; they keep accusing. Nothing changes. Because we are speaking into a script that only knows one role for Jews: the villain. It is time to change the battlefield.

What does that mean? The reflex to explain Israel is understandable. Jews are a people of texts. But explanation is reactive, and in a disinformation environment, reactivity is surrender. Every time Jews answer “Are you a colonizer?” with an explanation of Jewish history, the frame has already succeeded. We would never respond to a blood libel by explaining dietary laws. Yet when accused of racism or colonialism, we treat the claims as genuine misunderstandings instead of the ideological constructions they are.

The most powerful and largely neglected strategy available to the Jewish world is to turn the lens around. Instead of answering accusations, investigate the accuser. Shine the spotlight on the ideology: anti-Zionism. This means revealing the origin story of anti-Zionism— that it was the pet cause of the Soviet Union to construct a villain out of Israel and Zionism. Reveal the role that the KGB played in creating the Palestinian national movement, how it coded Israel as guilty of racism and colonialism, thus giving the West an opportunity to cleanse themselves of their perceived white guilt. Shift from “are these accusations true?” to “who invented these accusations and why?”

This single shift moves Jews out of the defendant’s seat and forces the accuser into the role of claimant, where they belong. We must stop shining a spotlight on our virtues and begin spotlighting the ideological systems that feed antizionism. We must teach how propaganda constructs villains, victims and rescuers, as well as train students to identify the cycle of libels inherent to each era of Jew-hatred. Empower our students to see patterns. Finally, build curriculum around ideological literacy, not just history, which means teaching students about post-colonialism and why Critical Race Theory imports anti-Western and anti-Zionist visions for liberating the world from the “sin” of colonialism.

The Jewish community is armed with centuries of history, a deep moral tradition and a story that has reshaped civilization. But none of that matters if we keep fighting the wrong war. We must stop defending and start exposing. Our future—and our children’s ability to walk through the public square with dignity—depends on making this pivot now.

The post Three failed strategies of ‘inward advocacy’ appeared first on JNS.org.