“Operating in active combat zones is scary, but you know what’s scarier?” A four-slide post from the Israel Defense Forces climbs from a soldier’s fear to the fear of losing a country, and lands on one answer: the army. This case study names the fear appeal propaganda behind it, and asks the question the post never does: whose civilians?
An army post in four slides
On 22 October 2026, the Israel Defense Forces published a four-slide post on its verified Facebook page with one line of caption: “Our mission remains: Protect our civilians.”[1] Read in order, the slides form one sentence:
A ladder of fear: how fear appeal propaganda works
Each slide raises the stakes. The first fear belongs to soldiers. The second is fear for civilians. The third names an enemy. The fourth is the fear of extinction: “not having a country to defend.” By the top of the ladder, the only thing standing between the reader and the end of the nation is the army.
Psychologists have studied this kind of message for more than seventy years. In 1953, Irving Janis and Seymour Feshbach published the first experiment on persuasive communications “which attempt to motivate people to conform with a set of recommendations by stimulating fear reactions.” They found that the effectiveness of a persuasive message tends to be reduced by a strong fear appeal “if it evokes a high degree of emotional tension without adequately satisfying the need for reassurance.”[2]
In 1992, Kim Witte’s extended parallel process model explained when fear works and when it fails: it depends on “the relationship between threat and efficacy,” the size of the danger and whether the audience believes there is a response that works.[3]
Transfer: weapons, labelled as protection
Three of the slides show weapons: a warship firing, troops on night operations, a fighter jet taking off. Navy, ground forces, air force. Over all three sits one caption about protecting civilians.[1]
The Institute for Propaganda Analysis called this transfer in 1939: carrying the feeling attached to one thing over to another.[4] The warmth of “protecting civilians” is carried over to the hardware. Nothing in the post says where the weapons are used, or on whom.
“Our mission remains”: the principles of war propaganda
In the post, the army’s mission only ever “remains” protection. Every operation becomes defence before anyone asks what it did.
Fear in combat is real
Soldiers in combat are afraid, and saying so is not propaganda. We don’t mock it. The technique isn’t the fear. It’s the turn the post makes with it: the soldier becomes the one in danger, and the operation becomes defence.
The post asks readers to feel for the people holding the weapons. It never shows the people on the other end.
Whose civilians? The International Court of Justice
The post says “our civilians” three times. It never mentions the civilians the same military operates among. On 26 January 2024, in South Africa’s case against Israel under the Genocide Convention, the International Court of Justice ordered provisional measures. By fifteen votes to two:[7]
The civilians on the other end
On 16 September 2025, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded that “Israeli authorities and Israeli security forces committed four of the five genocidal acts defined by the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.”[8] Israel rejects the finding.
UNICEF reports that from 7 October 2023 to 3 February 2026, “71,803 Palestinians have been reported killed in the Gaza Strip, including at least 21,289 children.”[9]
None of them appears in the post. Our framework calls this framing asymmetry: one side’s people are protected, threatened, defended; the other side’s are absent. Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky described the pattern in 1988 as “worthy” and “unworthy” victims.[10]
What the post says, and what it leaves out
Fear appeal propaganda and three more techniques: the checklist
“Protect our civilians.” Whose?
Nothing in this post is a factual claim that can be checked true or false. That is what makes it effective. It works on feeling: fear first, then reassurance, then a mission that only ever “remains” protection.
That is the media literacy lesson of this case. When a message makes you afraid and then offers you one protector, ask what the protector does, and to whom. Fear appeal propaganda works best when that question never comes up.
- The ICJ order of 26 January 2024 indicates provisional measures. The Court has not ruled on the merits, and nothing here says it has.
- Israel rejects the UN Commission of Inquiry’s September 2025 genocide finding.
- We quote Morelli’s principles in English from a 2001 review that lists them, not from our own translation of the book.
- The post does not say where its photographs were taken. We make no claim about any specific operation shown.
- This case study analyzes framing. It makes no claim about the intent of the post’s authors, and it does not dismiss the fear of soldiers in combat.
Fear appeal propaganda: quick answers
What is fear appeal propaganda?
A message that raises fear of a threat and then offers one response as the way out. Janis and Feshbach first tested fear appeals in 1953; Witte’s extended parallel process model (1992) explains that they depend on the balance between threat and efficacy.
What did the ICJ order on 26 January 2024?
In South Africa v. Israel, the Court ordered provisional measures, including that Israel “ensure with immediate effect that its military does not commit” acts under the Genocide Convention. It has not ruled on whether genocide occurred.
Is this article mocking soldiers’ fear?
No. Fear in combat is real. The case study analyzes how the post turns that fear into a frame where every operation is defence.
This case was first published as Case 013 of The Propaganda Tracker. To document is to resist erasure.
More cases from The Propaganda Tracker: Light vs. Darkness (Case 012) and The Letter: What the Israeli Army Cut From a Child’s Words (Case 011).
Fear appeal, transfer, the principles of war propaganda and framing asymmetry are catalogued, with their research, in the Propaganda Technique Database.
See how we verify claims on this site.