Dr. Einat Wilf on The Algemeiner’s “J100” podcast. Photo: Screenshot

Dr. Einat Wilf, a former member of the Israeli parliament who recently founded the new Oz political party, offered a stark assessment of Israel’s current war effort on The Algemeiner‘s “J100” podcast.

“The most important war that Israel has to fight is a war of ideas,” she told Algemeiner CEO Dovid Cohen.

“If I were to put it in percentages … 30 percent was physically in Gaza … and 70 percent was in people’s minds, on screens, in words,” she explained. “And to that war, we were effectively a no-show.”

Her argument was not that Israel failed militarily but that it misunderstood the full scope of the battlefield.

“There was a time when the Jews had nothing — no land, no army,” Wilf said. “Their only way to achieve anything was to tell their story.”

She was pointing to early Zionist leaders such as Theodor Herzl and Chaim Weizmann, who operated in a world where persuasion — not force — was the primary tool available.

They were not commanding armies but building legitimacy, reframing Jewish vulnerability as a political problem and persuading the world to recognize it as such. In other words, before Zionism had military power, it had the force of argument.

Wilf contended that once Israel gained sovereignty and military strength, that function diminished.

“We atrophied that muscle,” she said.

That atrophy matters more in today’s environment than ever before, Wilf argued, noting that modern conflicts are fought not only on the physical battlefield but also through the contest of narratives, where legitimacy is constructed or eroded.

Wilf criticized Israel for not treating this second battlefield as strategically central.

“Our enemies understood that this is the war that they were fighting,” she said. “If you don’t get the story right, nothing else matters.”

At its core, Wilf’s argument is not about communications but ideology.

“People do things in the name of ideas,” she said, contending that Israel has too often treated Hamas, Palestinian rejectionism, and Iran as security challenges alone without addressing their narratives of victimhood and exportation of an anti-Western worldview.

If these ideas remain intact, according to Wilf, military action alone cannot resolve the conflict.