During my latest reserve deployment in the Israel Defense Forces, as Israel and America were fighting Iran, my children’s school arranged a surprise video call. On the screen was my 6-year-old son, Dviri, wearing the cap of my infantry unit. His classmates prayed for the safety of American and Israeli soldiers. I cried.
My wife was holding our family together in Miami while I was thousands of miles away. I wanted to hold my son. Instead, I watched him through a screen and understood, again, what all of this was for.
Three years after Oct. 7, I cannot write about Israel’s future as an abstract policy question or a military escalation. I am a reservist. I was a diplomat when the massacre happened. Many friends of mine were affected. Some were murdered. I have seen the hatred. But I have also felt the strength of people who refuse to leave us facing our own Sept. 11 alone.
Oct. 8 brought another shock. While Israelis were still fighting terrorists inside their communities, demonstrators were gathering against Israel in Times Square. The group ANSWER helped organize the rally and the New York Democratic Socialists of America promoted it. The dead had scarcely been counted.
What still angers me is the speed with which it all happened. The subsequent National Students for Justice in Palestine toolkit celebrated the Oct. 7 attack as “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance.” Before we could absorb what had happened, others had supplied a vocabulary to excuse it.
Beyond the seven-front military threat, Israel and America need a common strategy for the non-kinetic front: the eighth front, the front of influence. It is, in my view, the most dangerous threat to the survival of our Western civilization. A military victory can be stripped of its political value. A terrorist can be recast as a hero. A Jewish child thousands of miles away can be made to answer for a war.
But as King Solomon said, “There is nothing new under the sun.”
Credibility, accumulated slowly, is easy to destroy with one fabricated image.
There is a Cold War lesson here. Moscow armed proxy partners abroad while conducting “active measures” against Western societies. Cuba and Vietnam showed how an adversary could impose costs without fighting America directly. Subversion worked by eroding the confidence that holds democracies together.
Iran’s network recalls that use of proxies. Qatar illustrates the power of institutional influence.
Qatar has made itself useful to the societies whose judgment it seeks to influence. American university disclosures for 2025 recorded more than $1.1 billion in gifts and contracts attributed to Qatar, including funding for campuses in Doha. What obligations accompany the money? Publish the contracts.
I call this intellectual influence, but a more dangerous phenomenon is what I consider emotional influence. Football reaches somewhere a diplomatic communiqué never will. Qatar Sports Investments acquired the team Paris Saint-Germain in 2011. The 2022 World Cup in Qatar supplied a coveted “kosher stamp” of legitimacy while migrant-worker exploitation and unexplained deaths remained unresolved.
Yet on Oct. 7 itself, Qatar’s Foreign Ministry held Israel “solely responsible for the ongoing escalation.” Doha hosted Hamas political leaders while becoming an indispensable intermediary. Calling that neutral mediation insults the record.
We must examine our own decisions, too. Israel approved Qatari aid arrangements in Gaza. Washington and Jerusalem relied on Doha’s access to Hamas in hostage negotiations. A state should not accumulate influence by creating a problem and then charging the international community, in prestige and protection, for access to its solution. Qatar received too much credit for too little real altruism. It must decide which side it supports.
As an engineer, I find our response frustrating. We keep asking a press office to repair damage produced by a system. As a former diplomat, I recognize another mistake: We often start looking for friends only when we need their vote. By then, someone else may have spent years earning their attention.
Hasbara means “explanation” in Hebrew. The time for explanations as our primary strategy is over. People need to belong. An argument from someone they trust travels differently from a statement issued by a distant ministry. A diplomacy of influence means building the trust, shared interests and alliances that determine whether our voice carries weight when a crisis comes.
Our governments must recognize hostile influence as a security threat and assign resources accordingly. I propose a one-year U.S.-Israel pilot program, with a senior official in each government responsible for delivery. Within 90 days, open-source investigators and financial analysts should map one priority hostile network. Establish who funds whom. Publish substantiated findings and refer evidence of crimes to authorities, with someone responsible for following through.
A multilingual team should make original evidence accessible as a story develops. AI can assist in translation and analysis; editors must verify the facts. Credibility, accumulated slowly, is easy to destroy with one fabricated image.
The time for explanations as our primary strategy is over. People need to belong.
But exposure alone will not build an alliance. The human factor is, as always, the most important component of any initiative. In Miami, I saw how relationships with local officials and communities could bring Israeli know-how into public-safety cooperation. A community that benefits from a relationship with Israel has an experience a hostile slogan finds difficult to overcome.
The pilot program should support four practical partnerships, connecting American and Israeli capabilities with willing institutions in India, Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe. Secure a hospital against cyberattacks. Improve emergency response. Give local partners ownership and a reason to continue after the visiting delegation leaves. Trade becomes durable diplomacy when people can point to what it has improved.
My work in philanthropy makes the abuse of philanthropy particularly painful. The Holy Land Foundation case established approximately $12.4 million in support for Hamas behind a charitable facade. Honest philanthropy depends on donors knowing whom they are helping and why their commitment matters. Philanthropy can finance early work; business can sustain it. Diplomacy opens doors. These relationships can become a network of networks of allies.
After a year, independently assess what worked. Did evidence lead to lawful action? Will the partnerships continue? A billion impressions on a screen can coexist with complete political failure.
Our Judeo-Christian commitment to human dignity must be defended, even when it carries a cost. I think again of that classroom in Miami. Solidarity becomes powerful when somebody feels it personally. It reaches a parent far from home. It helps him carry on.
We owe our children more than an explanation of why the world became so hostile. We owe them a future we dared to build together. I want my children to inherit the freedom I am still serving to protect. That hope is still stronger than hatred. Now we must organize ourselves around it.
