Hasbara

The word is a noun formed from the Hebrew verb “to explain,” and the choice of verb is the whole argument. Where other states describe their overseas messaging as public diplomacy, information policy or, less flatteringly, propaganda, hasbara frames the exercise as clarification: the assumption embedded in the term is that Israeli policy is defensible and that adverse reaction is a failure of understanding rather than a disagreement about facts or values. The academic literature makes the point precisely — hasbara is a communicative strategy that “seeks to explain actions, whether or not they are justified,” and has been characterised as reactive and event-driven, mobilised when something has happened rather than sustained as a positive case.

Israeli commentators have been candid about the gap. Ron Schleifer, writing in 2003, called hasbara “a positive-sounding synonym for ‘propaganda’.” Israeli practitioners, for their part, have tended to find the Hebrew term itself too defensive and to prefer “public diplomacy” in English-language settings.

Institutionally, hasbara has moved between bodies. Responsibility has been shared over time by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and, at points, by a dedicated Ministry of Public Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs; after that ministry closed during the war that began in October 2023, the National Information Directorate took on the task of coordinating the public diplomacy activities of the various government bodies. Around the state apparatus sits a wider ecosystem of advocacy organisations, campus programmes and monitoring groups.

For an archive, the practical consequence is a sourcing rule rather than a grievance. Material produced by Israeli state or state-aligned advocacy and monitoring bodies is evidence of what those bodies say — and often useful as such — but it is not a neutral record of Palestinian speech, Palestinian institutions or Palestinian history, and it cannot be used to establish them. This archive treats such material the way it treats any interested party’s account: citable as an attributed fact about the speaker, never as the record of the people it describes.

The term is worth defining precisely for a second reason. “Hasbara” is sometimes deployed in argument as a way of dismissing any Israeli or Jewish voice without engaging it, which is both unfair and self-defeating: it would rule out precisely the Israeli historians, jurists and human-rights organisations whose work is the strongest evidence in this archive. The word names a specific state communications practice. It is not a description of a people, and it is not a licence to stop reading.

Sources

• Hasbara — definition, scholarly characterisations and institutional history, with the underlying citations