Despite the rapid spread of misinformation against the Jews and Israel, Caroline Glick, international affairs adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said that she is hopeful that the truth will eventually win out.
Speaking at the Second Annual JNS International Policy Summit in Jerusalem, Glick focused on what she called the “eighth front” in Israel’s war: the battle over information and the spread of anti-Jewish incitement.
“In the same time that information is spreading, disinformation is also being spread deliberately and with malice of forethought,” she said.
False narratives spread quickly, Glick said, because rather than encouraging people to think about how to solve problems, it causes people “to think about who to blame for your problems,” which is a “much easier sell” and aligns with people’s existing prejudices.
As an example, she cited an interview with Jeremy Boreing, co-founder and former CEO of The Daily Wire, in which he said that whenever he posts pro-Israel content on social media, he is inundated with accounts accusing him of being Jewish, which he is not, and targeting him with antisemitic attacks.
Glick said many of those accounts appear to be automated bots activated in response to pro-Israel messaging and designed to divert attention from the original content.
She argued that some online influencers have discovered that antisemitic content generates significantly more engagement than their usual material.
Such influencers, especially among the “woke Right,” have found that “disseminating antisemitic messaging and giving approval to others to feel comfortable in their own antisemitism or to adopt antisemitism as a calling card, even if they hadn’t really thought too much about Jews in the past” is a way to get more subscribers, Glick said.
Glick also accused major media outlets and universities—the “general institutions” that people rely on for truth-telling—of contributing to what she called a broader “complex of un-truth.”
She pointed to how the New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for using a front-page image of a child with cystic fibrosis as a “blood libel” to say Israel is deliberately starving civilians in Gaza. The Times edited the child’s brother out of the photo, who appeared “healthy” and “well-fed,” according to Glick.
‘It’s called truth’
The Netanyahu adviser further criticized academic disciplines such as “settler-colonial studies,” which she described as ideologically driven rather than grounded in fact.
“I live in Efrat, I’ve never seen a colonialist in my neighborhood, and it’s all just suburban housewives,” Glick said. “And by the way, that’s where King David was born.”
She also cited Qatari funding of U.S. academic institutions as an example of how someone can “take over an institution through donations, then you can introduce entire spheres of so-called academia that are all false.”
“We have one commodity that’s on our side, and it’s little, but it’s important: it’s called truth,” she said. “It’s not the ‘Israeli narrative’ that we’re telling. These are actually the facts.”
Despite the challenges posed by online disinformation and institutional bias, Glick said she believes enough people remain committed to factual reporting and objective reality to reverse the trend.
“There are enough people in this world who care about the truth to get us over the hump,” Glick said. “Truth will win out.”
She urged supporters of Israel to remain focused on what she described as the enduring mission of safeguarding the Jewish state and Jewish continuity.
“The eternal nature of Israel is true,” Glick said, adding that the job of this generation is to “steer this forward and maintain our faith with that basic truth.”
“We have to protect our lives, our country, our people and move forward on this road to Jewish eternity,” Glick said. “That’s our job, and we’re doing a really good job.”
She also praised Netanyahu’s leadership, saying that he is “going to be spoken of the way that we speak of King David and Joshua,” predicting that future generations would remember his role during the current period in Israeli history.
“We should realize how lucky and blessed we are to be living at this time as we move forward with a new era of Jewish history,” Glick said.
