Psychological Warfare in the Grip of the Zionist Entity: When the Battle Is Waged in Consciousness Before Weapons

By Abdulaziz Yaqoub

In every battle fought, it is not the rifles alone that determine the outcome, but rather the collective consciousness of the people. Battles waged on the ground first begin in the mind. While armies are prepared for the battlefield, societies are prepared for victory—or defeat—through what is injected into their awareness and what is built or demolished in their collective memory. Israel understands well that psychological warfare is not merely a complement to weaponry, but the necessary prelude to breaking the opponent’s will and subjugating the mind before the body.

From the moment of its founding on the ruins of the Palestinian Nakba, the Zionist project was never limited to land theft. It extended to seizing the narrative, distorting history, and instilling fear in the hearts of Arabs and Muslims—not fear of weapons, but of the perceived futility of resistance.

Israel, backed by colonial Western powers, heavily invested in the narrative of a “phoenix rising from the ashes”—portraying itself as a small, besieged entity surrounded by savage enemies, while in reality exercising the ugliest forms of racial supremacy, building its occupation on the rubble of depopulated villages and silenced massacres of children and innocents. These are not incidental details but part of a long-term strategy grounded in creating an aura of invincibility—a myth of an “unbeatable army,” an “untouchable state,” and an “undisputed victimhood.”

Media, intelligence services, and research institutions have worked tirelessly to reinforce this image—not only in the West but also in Arab minds. The more Arab regimes failed to defeat the occupation, the deeper the idea became rooted among their people: that Israel is unbeatable, and that resistance is a doomed endeavor. This is the essence of psychological warfare—to convince your opponent that defeat is his destiny, that surrender is safety, and that submission to Zionist inevitability is the rational choice.

Iran has not been spared this layered war. Israeli infiltration began during the Shah’s era and continued after the revolution through high-level penetrations of security services, military circles, and social leaders, in addition to organized assassinations of scientists and sabotage of nuclear facilities. These actions were not just aimed at technical disruption but sent a public message to Iran and the world: “We see, we hear, we penetrate, and we strike whenever and however we want.” It is a calculated architecture of fear, intimidation, demoralization, and paralysis of will.

In Palestine, daily oppression is practiced as a psychological tool: storming homes at dawn, arresting children, uprooting trees, bombing family homes, the constant buzzing of drones, and collective punishment—all to entrench the idea that “occupation cannot be resisted” and that “life is only possible through normalization or surrender.”

The most dangerous tools of this war, however, are not those that bear the name “Israel,” but the Arab faces that promote defeat as “political realism,” and market submission as “wisdom” and “a step toward peace.” These politicians, intellectuals, financiers, and defeatists represent the soft front of a dirty war—fought silently in newsrooms, education systems, and entertainment screens.

Some of the most well-known tools of psychological warfare employed by the Zionist entity include:

1. Symbolic Assassinations: Not just the physical elimination of leaders, but the erasure of their image in public consciousness. When figures like Abu Jihad, Ismail Haniyeh, or Yahya Sinwar are targeted, the goal is not merely to halt a project but to implant the notion that every resistance leader is marked for death, no matter how protected.

2. Publicized Deterrence Operations: High-definition footage of airstrikes is not for documentation—it is a tool of intimidation, meant to demoralize viewers and discourage those considering confrontation.

3. Spreading Rumors and Internal Fractures: Leaking stories of defections, betrayals, and fleeing leaders is a strategy to destabilize internal fronts and erode trust between the people and their resistance.

4. Manipulating Media Language: When “occupation” becomes “conflict” and “massacre” becomes “clashes,” the narrative is obscured, and the victim’s blood is lost in neutral vocabulary. This is more dangerous than a bullet.

5. Reproducing the Concept of “Realistic Defeat”: Generations are taught that the conflict is futile, that the Zionist entity is a permanent reality, that the people are exhausted, and that peace—at any cost—is the only path to survival.

In the face of all this, possessing weapons is not enough—we must also possess the narrative, the confidence, and the memory. The enemy does not only seek to kill us, but to kill the idea within us—to extinguish our dreams and make us accept their rule as an inescapable fate.

But nations are not defeated when their land is occupied—they are defeated when their awareness is penetrated. True resistance begins from within: in language, in art, in education, in the memory of the martyr, and in the mother who instills in her child that the occupier is a stranger and that justice is not impossible.

Psychological warfare is not waged with rockets, but with meaning.

And whoever possesses meaning… cannot be defeated.