CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The Eighth Front: How Israel Plans to Occupy the American Mind

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

In December 2025, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met in Palm Beach, Florida, with evangelical Christian Zionist leaders and university presidents. He told them that Israel had been fighting a “seven-front war,” and warned that there was now an eighth front: the battle “for hearts and minds in the West,” particularly among young people, and, above all, in the United States.

And almost two years ago, I wrote how Western media normalizes genocide, not through silence, but through language. Euphemism and clinical jargon do the work: framing Israel’s wars against Palestinians in Gaza and the people of Lebanon as a war with “Hamas” or “Hezbollah,” “clashes” for massacres. Each nuance desensitizes the reader by degrees, and each redirects focus from the child under the rubble to the geopolitics above it. The vocabulary was never neutral. It was the first draft of the narrative Israel needed to numb the human conscience and perpetuate the world’s indifference.

Traditionally the media used to operate behind closed doors. In the editorial rooms where a handful of gatekeepers decided what the public would see and what it wouldn’t. But not anymore. Social media broke that monopoly. When citizen media took over, a Palestinian teenager livestreaming from Gaza or exposing Zionist youth mobs in the West Bank, a nurse filming the inside of a hospital, or a father recording the cries of his baby beneath the rubble. The gatekeepers are no longer the only lens through which the world sees, and this new media reality terrifies Netanyahu and threatens Zionists’ monopoly........

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