Stop treating the anti-Israel movement like it’s Haman.

That’s what Herzl was thinking when he witnessed the Dreyfus Affair, and what millions of Jews were thinking when they supported the fledgling Jewish state after the Holocaust. It was simple. Survive the onslaught. Fight back. Win.

Today, Israel faces a new threat, one that is far more complicated. The anti-Israel movement, which I won’t mention by name since that would be contrary to the purpose of this post, thrives on punitive economic measures, de-legitimization, and other elements that rely entirely on public support for their cause. But the Zionist movement, by and large, has fought back with the same ferocity, and the same techniques, as the Jews of Persia Before the Common Era.

Against Haman, we could fight fire with fire. When the citizens of Persia rose up to kill the Jews among them, the Jews “struck at all their enemies with the sword.” We can’t do that anymore. The new fire isn’t the sword but the bloody photograph circulated by anti-Israel agitators via social media, and the more attention we give it, even negative attention, the more we fan the flames.

Interestingly, most anti-Israel people gather their initial information not from the social media campaigns of anti-Israel hecklers, but from the campaigns of Israel’s supporters. We get so wrapped up in fear of those who hate Israel that we end up helping them by spreading their message far beyond their capacity to spread it on their own. Many Zionist writers inadvertently expose uninformed people to anti-Israel organizations by directly opposing the latter’s claims. For example, one such anti-Israel movement has openly declared that they have benefitted from the media attention surrounding Jewish movie star Scarlett Johansson’s support for the Israeli company, SodaStream. While many Zionists, myself included, loudly applauded Johansson’s statements, anti-Israel organizations used the public discourse on the subject to vocalize their more general opposition to the Jewish state.

This is something that I, myself, am certainly guilty of. Everything from mentioning anti-Israel groups by name to publicly refuting their points gives them a spotlight, and I have done those things often. It’s not that we shouldn’t talk about anti-Israel arguments within the pro-Israel community; on the contrary, it’s important to know how to respond to anti-Israel claims when forced into a direct confrontation. But changing a profile picture to a crossed out anti-Israel logo only makes the uninformed reader curious as to the nature of the organization that is being opposed.

For a long time, it was those sorts of negative techniques that I used most. I was so enraged by the anti-Israel arguments around me that I wanted nothing more than to disprove everything that my anti-Israel peers said. It was emotional: something that I felt in my gut. We were under attack, so we had to fight back. I went to Israel and I met the people who were victims of daily rocket fire but who were still accused of being the aggressors, and I felt an acute sense of injustice that I only wanted to correct. Nothing bothered me more than seeing anti-Israel Jews; I couldn’t understand how they, of all people, could oppose the country that sought to protect them. In the eighth grade, I became interested in Israel only because I found myself in arguments about it. I made the jump from being casually pro-Israel to actively Zionist as a purely emotional response, out of sheer, uncalculated, outrage with the anti-Israel movement. It was the way I might have felt as a Jew in Shushan.

But somehow, none of that was rational. Had I been calmer and more collected, I might have realized that arguing privately with my anti-Israel friends wasn’t going to reach anyone, and that making those arguments public were likely to turn outsiders off from Israel. I should have been working to create a positive image of Israel from the start. That would have been the best way to defeat the people with whom I wasted so much time arguing directly.

These anti-Israel people are not Haman. Everyone knew about the plan to kill the Jews on the 13 of Adar because King Achashverosh issued a decree to the entire kingdom. This new enemy does not have that capacity unless we give it to them.

So what’s the solution? We need to focus on positive rebranding. We spend too much time talking about how Israel is not an oppressive state and not nearly enough time talking about how Israel is a force for good in the world. The solution is not to keep fighting back like our historic counterparts in Shushan, but to think about truly effective advocacy and paint a new image of the Jewish state.