On Oct. 8, 2023, while Hamas terrorists still roamed Israel’s southern kibbutzim, hundreds of burned bodies remained unidentified and weeks before the Israel Defense Forces launched its ground campaign in Gaza, hundreds gathered in Times Square chanting “globalize the intifada” and “resistance is justified.”
The facts were still buried beneath the ashes. Yet the global verdict had already been reached.
Israelis often blame our losing battle for public perception on our policies, leadership or inflammatory declarations by rogue ministers. Such statements mask a more uncomfortable truth: Israel was caught in an influence trap set long before Oct. 7. Threat intelligence firm Cyabra found that more than 40,000 fake profiles were activated within 48 hours of the attack, many created months or years earlier, lying dormant like digital sleeper cells.
Israel built the Startup Nation on cyber intelligence and technological innovation. Yet in the battle for perception, we fight 21st-century influence campaigns with 20th-century tools. Two structural mismatches explain why.
The first is technological. Hostile state actors, unconstrained by rules or ethics, use automated networks, algorithmic manipulation and AI to shape digital feeds before facts even emerge, while official Israeli public diplomacy remains fixated on traditional media. By the time a covert operation surfaces as a headline or a street protest, public sentiment has hardened.
The flydubai attack showed how fast this works. On Sept. 30, the terrorist co-pilot of flight FZ1073 to Tel Aviv started stabbing the captain and attempting to crash the plane. The wounded captain and some brave passengers fought him off. Sixty-seven minutes after the distress signal, the first post on X accusing Israel of staging the attack appeared.
Within 12 hours, the Combat Antisemitism Movement had documented nearly 3,000 posts blaming Israel, the Mossad or Jews for the attack, drawing 3 million views. The researchers likened this to influence operations hostile states use to destabilize the West. As one researcher put it, this was “a script that already exists.”
The second mismatch is organizational. Adversaries run a synchronized, multi-tiered campaign: State intelligence agencies seed the narrative, automated networks amplify it, verified influencers legitimize it, and radicalized movements carry it to scale. Despite immense effort by organizations, philanthropists and state bodies, the Israeli and Jewish side operates in parallel without a shared intelligence radar or unified strategy.
This cognitive war is not a distant Middle Eastern affair. The U.S. Director of National Intelligence has revealed that actors tied to the Iranian government posed as activists online, encouraged protests over the war in Gaza and even funded protesters to stoke discord in American society. Iran’s then-Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei personally wrote to American university students, declaring them a branch of the “resistance front.”
Legitimate grievances exist, but Iran systematically hijacks them to radicalize swing demographics and divide Western societies from within. Israel is merely the testing ground; Western democracies are the ultimate prize.
This is not just a public relations challenge for Israel; it is a revival of global antisemitism. For decades, Jerusalem has separated hasbara—defending Israel’s actions—from combating antisemitism in the Diaspora.
Israel was caught in an online influence trap set long before Oct. 7.
That divide is no longer relevant. Antisemitism long predates Israel, and hostile state actors now weaponize its ancient tropes of conspiracy and demonization against the Jewish state. Simultaneously, radical movements on Western streets and campuses use anti-Israel rhetoric as cover to target Jews, holding any Jew “accountable” for the existence of the Jewish state. Whether a Jewish student in New York or London supports Israeli policy, dissents from it or remains uninvolved, they are attacked simply for being Jewish.
The two efforts remain distinct, but since Oct. 7 they overlap as never before. As an Israeli, I believe our state capabilities must serve as an active shield for world Jewry, uniting Israel and the Diaspora in a synchronized global defense.
This requires rebuilding Israel’s reactive messaging apparatus. First, end the over-reliance on uniformed briefers. To Israelis, a military officer projects reassuring authority. To Western audiences, a uniformed general discussing strategic and civilian policy looks like martial law, playing into adversaries’ branding of Israel as a militarized state. The IDF spokesperson must be confined to tactical combat briefings.
Strategic communications should be centralized within the National Public Diplomacy Directorate in the Prime Minister’s Office, with a trained civilian media spokesperson and cabinet discipline that keeps extreme, unscripted declarations from eroding our credibility. Moreover, the government must partner with the global ecosystem without controlling it; civil society must retain complete independence.
The state should do the heavy lifting independent actors cannot: deep web monitoring, mapping covert foreign influence networks and producing open-source threat intelligence. The government should function as a data utility, surfacing real-time intelligence on anti-Israel campaigns and antisemitic threats for independent communicators worldwide.
The state cannot win a digital war alone, nor was it meant to. Since Oct. 7, philanthropists, grassroots activists and tech leaders across the Jewish world have mobilized immense resources to defend Israel and fight rising hate.
Moving from emergency response to long-term defense, our primary challenge is synchronization. Organizations often fund similar tools or solve identical problems in isolation. Coordination would eliminate duplicated costs, freeing every philanthropic dollar for localized messaging, community support and campus engagement.
To beat a coordinated adversary, we need a division of labor rooted in natural strengths. Israel’s tech sector and intelligence capabilities can act as the central radar, detecting hostile campaigns before they gain momentum—which, as the flydubai attack showed, can take barely an hour.
Narrative building and local defense must remain decentralized and locally owned. Diaspora leaders understand the Western public square, campuses and local media far better than any Israeli official. Armed with real-time intelligence rather than government talking points, they retain authenticity, independence and the data for proactive, culturally resonant campaigns.
When Israel provides the research foundation and world Jewry drives independent advocacy, our parallel efforts become one shield on two fronts.
