Wallowing Into War

Review of 10/7: 100 Human Stories by Lee Yaron, with an afterword by Joshua Cohen (St Martin’s Press, 2024)

One year after the October 7 attacks on Israel, hasbara, the Hebrew word for Zionist propaganda that roughly translates to “explaining,” is in crisis. Though hasbara has historically excelled at the self-mythologizing necessary for Israel to shore up international support, particularly from the United States, gone are the days when that support went virtually unchallenged.

As protesters worldwide took to the streets to condemn Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, and as users on TikTok and other social media outlets flooded the internet with images of maimed and starving Palestinians, hasbara began to take on a desperate tinge, shifting from unconvincing claims that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) was not targeting civilians to a more emotional plea, reminiscent of Iraq War hawks invoking 9/11: “We know what we’re doing looks bad, but remember October 7?”

Lee Yaron, a reporter for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, has thrown her hat into the ring with the US publication of 10/7: 100 Human Stories. She’s not alone. Since a translation of her book commemorating the victims of October 7 was published in France on April 24, refocusing on Israel’s victimhood has become an imperative for its proponents. In late April, “The Nova Exhibition” opened on Wall Street, recreating the October 7 scene of the music festival down to personal items attendees left behind. In September, the Los Angeles Times announced that University of California Los Angeles would host a one-night-only play drawn from the testimony of October 7 survivors on the anniversary of the attack (“they got Zionist Shen Yun…