“Israel is losing the PR war” has become a familiar complaint, one often accompanied by claims that Israel’s public relations are terrible, that Jews are failing to tell our story effectively, or that we simply need better messaging. We debate branding, storytelling, public relations, social media strategy, influencers, visual identity, and campaign strategy. Yet when those efforts fail to produce the outcomes we seek, the prevailing response is not to question the approach, but to refine it still further. Rarely do we stop to investigate the problem itself: to ask what is actually producing these outcomes, whether we have a diagnosis at all, and whether the assumptions guiding our response are correct. 

We have misunderstood communication itself. We have come to think of communication primarily as the process of crafting and delivering messages from a sender to a recipient. As a result, we have devoted extraordinary attention to the sender and the message while giving comparatively little thought to the audience. Communication is not simply the successful transmission of information. At its core, communication is a process of meaning-making. The sender may craft the message, but the audience determines what that message means. Audiences interpret every message through the narratives they have already internalized, along with their existing........

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