America’s decision to go to war with Iran is best understood not as a response to uranium enrichment levels, regional power balances, or any coherent strategic objective, but as the product of a narrative shaped by historical trauma and moral absolutism. In that narrative, Iran is not a state with interests; it is the latest embodiment of an ancient threat to the Jews.
This deliberate replacement of empirical reality with the mythology of eternal Jewish victimhood is what I call “Hasbara Culture.” It relies on erasing historical context and replacing it with a single, sacred narrative. In the book Victimhood Discourse in Contemporary Israel, the scholar Ilan Peleg captures the psychological mechanics of this alternative reality:
“To put it crudely, there is a sense in Israeli collective victimhood that all the traditional enemies of the Jewish people are, in the final analysis, one and the same… Pharaoh = Haman = Acashverosh (Ahasuerus) = Khmelnsytsky [sic] = Hitler = the Mufti of Jerusalem = Yasser Arafat… There is a frequent, dominant tendency to collapse these victimizers into one, symbolic, and simplistically a-historic anti-semetic ‘being.’”
Other than Benjamin Netanyahu, no one is more responsible for the ultimate success of the Hasbara Culture worldview than Jeffrey Goldberg, the Editor-in-Chief of The Atlantic, and a former Israel Defense Forces soldier who later chronicled his service in his memoir, Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide.
Hellbound and Down 