Netanyahu claims social media manipulation hurt Israel’s image in the US

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed on “60 Minutes” Sunday that the dramatic shift in public opinion on his country could be traced to the rise in social media.

“Israel has gone to unbelievable lengths to get innocent civilians out of harm’s way,” Netanyahu said. “We text message millions of text messages to them—make millions of phone calls to them, pamphlets, leaflets, you name it, OK? We have seen the deterioration of the support for Israel in the United States almost — I would say, it correlates almost 100% with the geometric rise of social media.”

He continued, “And that by itself is not what caused it. And I don’t believe in, you know, in censoring them or anything. But I’ll tell you what happened. We have several countries that basically manipulated social media. And they do it in a clever way. And that’s something that has hurt us badly.”

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Netanyahu acknowledged that Israel has made “mistakes” in its war against Hamas but emphasized that they were not deliberate actions.

“Israel is besieged on the media front, on the propaganda front, and we’ve not done well on the propaganda war,” he said.

Netanyahu remarked that even host Major Garrett would not be immune to negative propaganda if there was enough pressure against him.

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“I can paint you as a monster,” Netanyahu said. “And if I say it often enough, enough people will believe it.”

An NBC News poll in March found that only 32% of Americans view Israel positively while 39% of Americans saw the nation in a negative light. The shift was far more pronounced among Democrats and independents, while Republicans were still largely sympathetic to the Jewish state.

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This shift in opinion followed Israel’s war with Gaza, as well as the U.S.-led military strikes on Iran.

During the interview, Netanyahu indicated that the war with Iran was “not over” yet despite significant accomplishments.

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“I think it accomplished a great deal, but it’s not over, because there’s still nuclear material, enriched uranium that has to be taken out of Iran. There are still enrichment sites that have to be dismantled. There are still proxies that Iran supports. There are ballistic missiles that they still want to produce. Now, we’ve degraded a lot of it. But all that is still there, and there’s work to be done,” Netanyahu said.