Why is Israeli propaganda so incompetent?

Israel's messaging operations are such a PR disaster that you'd think they're run by Hamas.

IDF soldier Oren Lazar politely knocks on a residential door. No one responds, so after a few moments he casually jiggles the handle. But then the camera pans out, and it suddenly becomes clear what’s actually going on: there’s a door, but no house. The house has been bombed into a pile of rubble, and the door, knocked off its hinges, was just a setup to a monstrous joke.

The clip, which went viral on TikTok at the end of January, was so candid in its depiction of the carnage in Palestine, so damning a portrayal of the IDF as maniacal sadists, that it almost seems like it could have been produced by Hamas. The public’s reaction was so uniformly hostile — even among accounts who appeared to be otherwise ambivalent about the war — that it’s hard to imagine that Israel could have wanted it.

But this was no stunt by Hamas or leak by some third party. Lazar posted the clip publicly, and modern militaries keep such a tight leash on personnel social media activities that the IDF certainly knew about the clip — and may very well have actively promoted it. And stranger still, this wasn’t even an unusual incident. From drivers cheerfully singing to the camera with blindfolded Palestinians handcuffed in the back seat to IDF thirst traps prancing through battlefields, Israeli social media has been an ongoing spectacle of gruesome self-parody.