Reality Does Not Transmit Itself

On war, legibility, and the burden placed on diaspora Jews

Israel failed to take seriously enough the responsibility to make reality legible.

That is a criticism the Jewish diaspora has every right to make, and it is not a small one. It is not only about Netanyahu. Not only about military decisions. Not only about settlements, coalitions, or the familiar arguments that divide Jews from one another and from the world. It is about a failure beneath all of that.

Not a failure to make itself loved. Not a failure to persuade everyone. Those goals were never fully achievable. But a failure to ensure that the reality Israel was acting inside of could be seen, understood, and judged with something closer to completeness. In the world we live in now, that is not optional. It is part of what it means to exercise power.

Because reality does not transmit itself.

I write this with anger, but not simple anger. Israelis were living inside a reality more immediate and more brutal than anything most diaspora Jews will ever know: rockets overhead, families shattered, hostages dragged into Gaza, the daily convulsion of fear after October 7. Any criticism made from a distance should begin with humility before that fact. And still, anger remains. Not outside that suffering, but inside my understanding of it. Anger that a community entrusted with the safety and legibility of Jewish life acted as though reality would somehow speak for itself.

Facts do not move through the modern world as facts. They move as images, fragments, sequences, emotionally coherent clips that travel faster than context ever will. The first intelligible frame often becomes the moral record. Everything that comes later sounds like explanation, and explanation, once a frame hardens, is often heard as excuse.

In work I did examining how coordinated disinformation moved through digital networks, I watched false or partial narratives harden into public belief before corrections could catch up. I watched emotionally powerful fragments overwhelm fuller realities. I watched people build moral certainty from emotional chronology over contextual reality. That is when I understood something simple and uncomfortable: in this environment, the first intelligible version of reality does not just inform judgment. It becomes it.

This was foreseeable.

Which is why what I saw later in Israel felt so dissonant.

I remember speaking with an IDF soldier who had been in one of the first tanks to enter Gaza. What stayed with me was not only the brutality he described, but its choreography. He told me about a group of roughly fifty civilians, men, women, and children, being herded toward Israeli tanks at gunpoint by Hamas militants, while fighters with cameras filmed the encounter.

I remember almost not believing him.

And then I kept hearing variations of the same tactic.

Later, I visited a friend serving in the reserves as a drone pilot. In a briefing room, he showed me footage of scenarios they encounter. In one video, weapons had been stored inside a school housing Hamas fighters. The target was being surveilled from overhead. The drones are loud enough that people on the ground can hear them approaching. After the drone arrived above the building, adult figures could be seen going back inside and emerging moments later with two very small children. The strike was called off.

I remember watching that and thinking: almost none of this is making it into the public moral record.

Part of what angers me is that this failure did not come from nowhere. There are reasons it happened. Israeli security culture is shaped by secrecy, operational control, and a deep skepticism that public explanation changes anything. Coalition politics reward military signaling more than long-term narrative strategy. Legal and ethical constraints make releasing battlefield and atrocity material genuinely difficult. And beneath all of it sits a fatalism I heard more than once: the world hates us anyway. Why bother.

I understand all of that. But understanding why a failure happened does not make it less of a failure. These were not merely missed communications opportunities. They were structural habits colliding with an information environment they were not built to navigate.

Meanwhile, the images that did travel were immediate, visceral, devastating. Dead children. Collapsed buildings. Grieving parents. Those images were real. That is why they were so powerful. But they were not the whole reality, and yet for much of the world they became the reality.

Another example still unsettles me. After October 7, there was footage taken from the attackers themselves, body cameras, phones, recordings of the violence as it happened. Some of the most horrific material imaginable. Much of it was shown privately, not widely distributed, out of respect for the murdered and their families.

That instinct is not wrong. But it collided with another reality.

Some will say broadcasting those atrocities would have exploited the victims and deepened the suffering of their families. They have a serious point. Some will say it would have given enemies material to celebrate, distort, deny, and desecrate. They are right about that too. No act of release here is morally clean.

But the opposite choice had a cost as well. When evidence of the initiating crime remains mostly private, while the consequences of the war are fully visible, the moral record becomes asymmetrical. The question is not whether dignity matters. It does. The question is whether, in this age, there is also a responsibility to fight for truthful information, even when the truth is painful to show.

At what point does withholding horror preserve dignity, and at what point does it allow the crime itself to become less legible than its aftermath?

I do not pretend the answer is obvious. There may have been no clean answer. To release more of that material would have risked violating the dead, retraumatizing families, and turning Jewish suffering into spectacle. To withhold it risked something else: allowing the initiating crime to become morally thinner in public consciousness than the war it unleashed.

That is the dilemma.

And I think we have been too reluctant to admit that the second risk was real.

Most people do not follow wars in detail. They encounter them. A student sees a sequence of clips on TikTok. A professional scrolls headlines between meetings. A viewer catches fragments on the news. They are not reading military briefings. They are assembling meaning from what appears in front of them.

And what appeared, again and again, were images of Palestinian suffering, real and undeniable. What did not appear with anything like the same force were the conditions that made the war what it was: the embedding of fighters among civilians, the use of human shields, the strategic manipulation of visibility itself, the decisions not to strike.

By the time explanation arrived, the story was already formed.

That vast space between those already committed to Israel’s innocence and those already convinced of its guilt, the much larger population forming judgments from fragments and impressions, was where the battle for legitimacy was actually being lost.

Some will say none of this would have mattered. That the system itself, media incentives, audience priors, ideological commitments, would have produced the same outcome regardless.

Maybe.

But that is not an argument for doing less. It is an argument for doing more, and doing it earlier, and doing it with a seriousness proportionate to what was at stake.

What was missing was not explanation after the fact, but a real-time, verified public record capable of competing with the fragmented emotional record already flooding the world.

A serious information strategy would have looked different. Within days of October 7, there could have been a structured, verified, globally distributed record of events: what happened, in sequence, with evidence attached, released in forms designed for how people actually consume information. As the war unfolded, that record could have been continuously updated with footage, context, and explanation.

Information was moving faster than verification, and public moral judgment was hardening before factual records could stabilize.

Not propaganda.

Legibility.

Reality made visible before distortion hardened into consensus.

And the cost of failing there did not stay in Israel.

The failure of legibility did not remain confined to screens. It became the atmosphere diaspora Jews were forced to live inside. Diaspora Jews were left defending fragments against a narrative told in images. They were drafted into a war they did not design and were never properly equipped to fight.

And many of them were left in another kind of bewilderment. Not the physical war Israelis are living through, but a war over personhood, memory, legitimacy, and reality. A war in which people around us can look at Jewish grief and refuse to recognize it as grief. Can look at Jewish fear and call it manipulation. Can look at Jewish peoplehood and treat it as a political problem.

This is not the same suffering as physical war. It should not be confused with it. But the connectedness is real. The Israeli war entered diaspora life through suspicion, rejection, argument, silence, and the slow discovery that Jewish personhood could become conditional in rooms that once felt safe. And the pain often fell hardest on Jews who continued to choose their identity publicly, those who refused the relief of disappearing.

Some responded to that pressure by becoming less Jewish in public, or less Jewish altogether. I understand the impulse. But there is a spiritual cost to surviving by making yourself less recognizable to your own people, and eventually to yourself.

This is why I am angry. Not because Israel failed to win a narrative. Because it failed to take seriously enough that diaspora Jews would be left carrying the moral and social fallout of a war whose reality had not been made sufficiently legible.

If Israel expects diaspora Jews to bear the consequences of its actions, then it owes them more than military resolve and retrospective explanation.

It owes them legibility.

That means something concrete. It means treating information as part of the battlefield, not commentary around it. It means verified public documentation released early, before frames harden. It means refusing the fatalism that says truth does not matter because hatred is inevitable.

Maybe some hatred is inevitable.

That is not an argument to stop fighting for what can still be made legible. Because the people living in that space of uncertainty, the ones not yet captured by either extreme, are where legitimacy is formed.

That ground was worth contesting.

Because truth, however necessary, does not transmit itself.