Fleur Hassan-Nahoum. Photo: Illustration by David Taragin

On the morning of Oct. 7, 2023, Fleur Hassan-Nahoum was at home in Jerusalem when her
daughter woke her to the sound of sirens.

Jerusalem was not accustomed to them. After several alarms, Hassan-Nahoum — observant and
ordinarily offline on Shabbat — opened her phone. Messages from Arab journalist friends began
arriving. She turned on the television and watched the scale of the Hamas attack become clear in
real time.

Then her phone rang. It was the BBC.

Hassan-Nahoum, who was then serving as deputy mayor of Jerusalem, remembered wondering
why one of the world’s largest news organizations was calling her. She was a municipal
politician, not an official military spokesperson.

Then, she said in a recent interview on The Algemeiner‘s “J100” podcast, she understood: Other
people were not answering.

The call forced a decision. “We’re at war,” she recalled thinking. “I’m not a soldier, but I can do
this.”

So, she answered.

For the days that followed, Hassan-Nahoum effectively became an unofficial Israeli
spokesperson, communicating what she was learning to international media before eventually
being formally asked to assist by Israel’s foreign minister.

The podcast episode is a compelling personal story. But it also illustrates a much larger criticism that Hassan- Nahoum returned to throughout the conversation: Israel has repeatedly treated communications as something talented individuals can improvise rather than as a strategic capability that must be built, staffed, diversified, and maintained.

“The Israeli government still haven’t woken up to the fact that we’re fighting a narrative,” she said.

That assertion might sound strange in a country led for much of the last two decades by
Benjamin Netanyahu, arguably the most internationally recognizable and rhetorically skilled
Israeli politician of his generation.

David Cohen, host of the podcast and CEO of The Algemeiner, raised precisely that objection: How could a government led by such an experienced communicator fail to understand communications?

For Hassan-Nahoum, the contradiction is part of the explanation. She argued that Israel has too often confused having a gifted spokesman with possessing an actual communications strategy. A Netanyahu speech at the United Nations or an address to Congress may command attention, but neither substitutes for a network of credible voices capable of communicating with different audiences, in different languages, across different platforms, every day. A country cannot outsource its entire narrative to one person.

That distinction is particularly important because Hassan-Nahoum’s definition of communication is more complicated than simply explaining Israel’s case more aggressively.

Before entering politics, she worked as a strategic communications consultant, helping Israeli entrepreneurs, executives, academics, and researchers translate complicated ideas into compelling messages. Her basic lesson from that experience is almost counterintuitive in an era of political shouting: good communication begins not with the speaker, but with the listener.

“It’s not about what you want to say,” she told Cohen. “It’s about the audience you’re talking to.”

Hassan-Nahoum quickly clarified that this does not mean pandering or simply telling people what they want to hear. Rather, she explained, it means understanding what an audience cares about, what
language it responds to, and where it is starting from before attempting to move it somewhere
else.

“In other words,” she said, “it’s not about you. It’s about them.”

That may be the more consequential critique buried inside her criticism of Israel’s public diplomacy.

Much of the debate over Israel’s communications failures revolves around volume: Why are there not more spokespeople? Why are hostile claims not rebutted faster? Why is one side better at TikTok? Why did a particular interview go badly?

Those questions matter. But Hassan-Nahoum’s argument points toward something more fundamental. More spokespeople repeating the same message do not necessarily produce better communication. Neither does a perfectly delivered speech if it is designed primarily around what the speaker wants to say rather than what a particular audience is capable of hearing.

In that sense, Israel’s narrative problem may also be a listening problem.

Hassan-Nahoum learned that lesson during her own campaign for Jerusalem City Council.

Rather than conduct what she called a conventional speaking tour, she embarked on a “listening
tour.”

She would enter rooms, ask people questions, and allow them to speak. Sometimes, she recalled, she would leave having said almost nothing herself — only to overhear people praising how impressive she had been.

What had she done?

“I listened to them,” she said. “I didn’t pretend to listen to them. I actually listened to them.” Hassan-Nahoum described listening as a “magic wand” that political and business leaders routinely fail to
use.

There is an obvious lesson here for domestic politics. But there is also one for the narrative battle Israel has found itself fighting since Oct. 7. Communication is not merely the ability to formulate the strongest possible case for yourself. It is the ability to understand the person who does not already agree with you — what they know, what they distrust, what moral vocabulary they use, and what assumptions they bring to the conversation.

That does not require watering down Israel’s positions or avoiding arguments that may be unpopular. It requires something harder: recognizing that persuasion and self-expression are not
the same thing.

The morning Hassan-Nahoum answered the BBC, Israel needed somebody to pick up the phone. Nearly three years later, the harder challenge is making sure that when someone does, there is a broader strategy behind the answer.