Israel's PR-War Pandemonium

The job of international spokesperson for Israel, in a state of war, is fit for a patriot, a masochist, or a diva, or better yet all three. For most of the past six months, it was occupied by Eylon Levy, a 32-year-old British Israeli with an affinity for television cameras and seemingly infinite ability to absorb the abuse that comes from publicly defending Israel, at its least defensible and at its most. When Israel was still picking through the corpses in the kibbutzim near Gaza, he reminded viewers of the carnage—both the dead concertgoers and elderly (who were real victims) and “beheaded babies” (who turned out not to be). When Israel began hunting Hamas in Gaza, he defended his country’s actions without reservation, even when the civilian toll became unbearable. His tenure ended on the last day of March, reportedly after British Foreign Minister David Cameron took exception to Levy’s rhetoric. The story goes that Cameron’s office sent a curt message to Levy’s bosses, who suspended him and encouraged his resignation.

Levy says that these reports are inaccurate, and that he was forced out because he is not, and never was, a Netanyahu loyalist. He told me he has “no reason to doubt” a conflicting report that Sara Netanyahu, the child psychologist and former El Al flight attendant married to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, orchestrated his overthrow. Cameron was a pretext, he says. Levy’s version of events is one of many data points suggesting that the Netanyahu government is obsessed with the slavish loyalty of its staff. And Levy is not alone in wondering whether such a government is fit to lead a country as divided as Israel, during this time of maximum stress. (Netanyahu’s office did not reply to a request for comment on Levy and the circumstances of his hiring and departure.)

When I met him last month in Tel Aviv, Levy still seemed dazed by the speed of his rise and fall. He said he’d never met Sara Netanyahu or her husband, but if they thought he was less than devoted to Bibi’s politics, they were onto something. Before the war, he said, he had been among the hundreds of thousands who had filled Kaplan Street in Tel Aviv to protest the government and heap disgust on Netanyahu. “The protests became a social happening—just what people did on a Saturday night,” he said. His presence was sincere, but also, in that sense, “entirely unremarkable and quite expected for someone in my demographic.”

And his distaste for Netanyahu did not evaporate after October 7. Levy’s feed on X (formerly Twitter) confirms much of what he told me about his personal distaste for the prime minister, before the Hamas attack and indeed even in the days after it. He tweeted witheringly about Netanyahu’s failure to stop the attack (“This will be [his] legacy”), and about his “useless” ministers’ failure to address the public. But he went into spokesperson mode in record time—even before he was officially tapped for the job. Levy, who says he was “taking a professional break,” when the attack happened, had previously worked as a media adviser to Israeli President Isaac Herzog. Now he saw an opportunity. “The prime minister’s office had been caught with its pants down,” Levy told me. “It was simply not prepared to deal with the deluge of media attention.” He stacked his laptop on a pile of books on his dining-room table and positioned his lamp and webcam just so. “I thought: I know how to do media. So I put out the message that I was available to give media interviews.”

[Yair Rosenberg: The day after Netanyahu ]

The media took him up on the offer, and he did nearly a dozen TV hits. Within days, he says, an envoy from the prime minister’s office asked him whether he’d like to “come on board in some official capacity.” The envoy, Rotem Sella, was the Hebrew publisher of Netanyahu’s 2022 memoir and had now joined the government to correct the pants problem. Sella, Levy says, knew that Levy had protested Bibi but didn’t care. “It was a completely insane proposition,” Levy said—a guy in his living room, openly contemptuous of the government, would now be paid to defend it. “But everyone was doing their bit, so I said, ‘Absolutely. Count me in.’”

“Within 24 hours, I found myself effectively being nationalized,” he told me. The contemporaneous record strikes a vainer tone. He tweeted a photograph of himself at a lectern, with the comment “Cometh the hour,” a Churchillian line (“... cometh the man”) that is, like most compliments, best bestowed by others rather than by oneself. But as long as Israel’s actual leaders were bunkered away from public scrutiny—when they did appear, ordinary Israelis screamed at them—this living-room Churchill could run unopposed as Israel’s man of the hour.

He said he felt a wave of disbelief, as if he were getting away with something. “I had to pinch myself,” he told me. He had been marching in the streets against Netanyahu. Now he was giving press conferences behind a lectern that said PRIME MINISTER on it. Would anyone notice the reversal? “I was wondering at what point people were going to clock that the person now speaking on TV for the Israeli government had until recently been protesting against it.”

“There was complete pandemonium,” he said, with foreign-media requests coming fast and just a tiny crew to field them. “We were operating on pure adrenaline.” In practice, that meant saying yes to all reasonable requests, and offering regular “White House–style” press conferences from the Kirya, Israel’s military headquarters. Levy’s time at the podium and on news shows made him famous, or notorious, depending on one’s view of the Gaza war. Israeli comedians lightly lampooned him in sketches. His eyebrows became world-famous when he raised them, theatrically, at a Sky News presenter who had asked a question so bizarre and pretzeled in its logic that it must be seen to be believed. (She suggested that Israel had traded 150 Palestinian prisoners for only 50 Israeli hostages because Israel undervalues Palestinian life.)

As the war proceeded, and Gaza suffered more death and destruction, Levy’s resolute refusal to accept blame for civilian misery earned him the hatred and distrust of many. He maintained that opinion polls revealed that Hamas “represents the Palestinians.” His own language tended to be civilized and diplomatic. But when Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter used language (Nakba) guaranteed to make Palestinians think they were about to be ethnically cleansed, rather than repudiate those words, Levy seemed to relish the challenge of rising in their defense. And he treated other concerns about ethnic cleansing, which did not come from nowhere, as simply “outrageous and false accusations.” (“As a government official,” Levy told me later, “there is a limit to the amount you can repudiate statements by members of the government, even when they’re supremely unhelpful.”)

Levy’s performance was “indicative of what is wrong with a lot of Israel’s PR efforts,” Aymenn Al-Tamimi, a British translator and analyst who knew Levy when they were Oxford undergraduates, told me. He expressed doubt that Israel’s ideal representative would be a recreational contrarian with an accent straight from the Oxford Union. Levy, Al-Tamimi said, “treated his spokesman position as though it were a debating competition.”

In late November, after a brief pause for a successful prisoner exchange, the Israel-Hamas war resumed, and the government started facing intense domestic criticism for failing to engineer another swap. Around that time, the team handling Israel’s shambolic public-diplomacy operation started to get hints of an effort to purge those with suspect politics. “Something changed,” Shirona Partem, another erstwhile protester who had joined the government’s press team after October 7, told me. In addition to Levy, whose job was to speak on the record to foreign outlets, the government had hired a small crew of press liaisons to take media requests and coordinate interviews. “We were building something professional, not political,” she said. Partem emphasized that they spoke only to foreign media, so nothing they did could have been construed as undermining the government against its domestic opposition.

By December, though, her unit was told to stand down. Partem and others had developed relationships with reporters, and also with various Israeli experts and government offices from which those reporters were seeking information. Many of them kept replying to media requests—showing up for work, in effect, after having been fired. But officially, their positions were left empty. The prime minister’s office is known to be jealous of power and credit, and it had begun ensuring that no professional operation would succeed the apolitical team it had shut down.

Levy was exempt from the December purge, and for the next months was even unleashed to speak to Israeli media. He had recently gone viral for the eyebrow incident, and the government liked having someone with a little brio in front of the cameras, in contrast to the ministers who were still either shy or gaffe-prone. But he says he soon began to sense a chill in his relationship with the prime minister’s office. On January 17, he was told to share the podium more—a request that went against his instincts, as he had been trying to build a personal relationship with viewers and media, and also because he is a diva. He suspects that his protester past had become an issue, even though he maintains that it did not affect his work. “I don’t think that anyone who watched any of the interviews or press conferences I gave could say I injected personal opinion,” Levy said. Soon, someone in the prime minister’s office was briefing the media against him. He stressed that he has no direct knowledge of who was responsible, though multiple sources told me Sara Netanyahu had become irate over perceived political disloyalty.

The British foreign minister’s alleged complaint about Levy came in March, according to the BBC and Israeli media. That began the terminal phase of Levy’s spokesmanship. In a tweet, Cameron had urged the passage of more aid into Gaza. Levy countered that the channels for aid were unimpeded, saying, “There are NO limits on the entry of food, water, medicine, or shelter equipment”—a claim at odds with the extreme scarcity of all of those items in Gaza. Cameron’s office allegedly sent an arch inquiry to the prime minister’s office, to see if Levy was freelancing. Levy was soon suspended, though he denies that Cameron ever intervened to have him sacked. Levy said the supposed complaint was in fact just a single WhatsApp, sent from a Foreign Office employee to the prime minister’s office. (Cameron’s own spokesperson said, “We wouldn’t comment on the domestic appointments of another government.”) But he soon found his position untenable, and by April, he had resigned completely and was back in front of a camera at home, representing Israel pro bono.

Levy is in some ways understanding about the return of politics. “Cracks emerged,” he told me. He rattled off a number of bitter divides among Israelis: whether to prioritize the destruction of Hamas or the return of hostages; whether Netanyahu should resign now or later; whether the military should invade Rafah. These are all hard questions, he admitted, and it is to be expected that they would be divisive. “But my job was to keep politics aside,” he says. “And it’s sad to see that politics can infect what should be a national mission.”

Partem, his colleague, is now back in private life too. She told me she worries about how poorly Israel has waged its PR war—especially compared with Iran and Russia, both anti-Israel maestros. “We’re on the right side of history, but it feels like we weren’t able to convey that message,” she said. Her time as a mouthpiece for the government gave her hope, she added, “because she found that Israelis of all political persuasions were willing to work together—even if the government itself was too focused on its survival to join the effort. “Anybody who is in power for too long gets a bit delusional,” she told me. “We know there are people up for the task. But this current government is really a unique set of people who shouldn’t be there.”