Cognitive Battlespace Failure Endangers All Jews
Today, we live in a world where norms and assumptions have been hijacked and words like genocide are torqued and transformed into weapons. Our decline into a post-literate and post-factual society, driven mainly by social media, is rapidly degrading people’s critical ability to interpret the world, making them increasingly vulnerable to fake news and conspiracy theories.[1] This is nothing new for Jews, who for millennia have been the focus of symbols and icons wielded to summon, engage, and inflame hatred against them. But the abject failure of Israel in the Hamas War to develop a unified and effective response to the antisemitism stoked by Hamas reveals two striking strategic blind spots: a victim psychology that Jew hatred is so entrenched that it is beyond the reach of persuasion or effective communication; and, misappreciation of the rapid information flows of our era. In order to maintain the safety of Jews everywhere, Israel and the Jewish community must get a handle on the new attention drivers and win the cognitive battlespace.
The 10/7 Hamas invasion aptly illustrates how outrage can be conjured up and weaponized to dominate the information environment. After committing depraved atrocities–torture, mass rape, mutilation, beheadings, and the burning of children–Hamas then hid behind civilians in Gaza. Hamas intentionally put them in harm’s way to ensure the highest possible civilian casualties and generate sympathy for their plight that would force an end to Israel’s military operations.
Hamas supporters wasted no time to invert reality and create a blood libel framing the Israeli military response as “genocide,” which would metastasize Jew hatred globally. This libel was trumpeted despite clear evidence that only Hamas harbors genocidal intent. Hamas has, in fact, expressly called for the death of Jews, citing with authority to the words of their Prophet Muhammad (Article 7):
The [Day of Judgment] will not come about until Moslems fight Jews and kill them. Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out: ‘O Moslem, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.
To support the historically false and morally perverse claim of genocide, scholars indulge in Holocaust denial. For example, Columbia University professor Marianne Hirsch tortures history by equating this singular atrocity to a morally twisted notion of exceptionalism, which, she claims, obscures and fosters denial of the purported genocide in Gaza. Her falsified premise profanes the memory of the Jewish victims who fell victim to a radically evil state machine wielded as an instrument of mass terror and murder.
Hamas and its supporters also claim that Israel’s military campaign, including evacuation orders, amounts to a systematic effort to remove Palestinians from their land permanently, which they frame as ethnic cleansing amounting to genocide. The claim is a false projection that mirrors and inverts the concerted expulsion of Jews forced to flee from Arab countries amid persecution, violence, and loss of property.
There is a trove of information that could have been marshalled to counter Hamas’ counter-factual narratives. Global experts, like British Colonel Richrad Kemp, did testify to the strategic and humanitarian dilemmas that arise in urban warfare, and how Israel made historically unprecedented efforts to minimize the deaths of innocent civilians while Hamas did its best to martyr as many Gazans as possible, “on a scale that evokes the ritual slaughters of ancient times.”
But in these post-literate days, can facts counter shamelessly false propaganda and win cognitive dominance? The archetypal judeophobic libel, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was a proven forgery almost upon first publication. But the fact of forgery (e.g., as unmasked in 1921 by The Times of London) did not prevent it from circulating widely and ultimately serving as a “license for genocide.”
Hamas has cruelly demonstrated that hearts and minds are a critical part of the modern battlespace. For Israel and Jews globally, the fight must be taken to the “attention infrastructure”–the ensemble of digital technology and tools that organize and channel collective human attention in the modern information landscape. Against the symbols and icons weaponized by Hamas to inflame hatred of Jews, the global Jewish community and Israel have only mounted a fragmented and ad hoc response. The ethical and moral self-restrictions that circumscribe Jewish pushback (e.g., restriction of the dissemination of the horrible Hamas videos documenting its massacre and sexual violence) are as self-destructive, quaint, and outmoded as the Polish cavalry charge against the German Blitzkrieg on September 1, 1939. (Does the Startup Nation need an Orde Wingate of cognitive warfare to teach it how to aggressively carry the fight to its enemies?)
It is long recognized that Israel generally dismisses strategic messaging (hasbara) as ineffective because Jews believe that deep-rooted hatred against them is so ingrained and ideologically motivated that it cannot be changed through persuasion or information campaigns. This skepticism must change with the times and Jews must learn how to master the cognitive battlespace. The virtual abdication to Hamas of this key warfare vector is exacting an exceedingly high price: the safety of Jews across the world.
Endnotes:
- See, e.g., G. Rayner, Revealed: The devastating memo that plunged the BBC into crisis, Telegraph (Nov. 6, 2025), https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/11/06/read-devastating-internal-bbc-memo-in-full/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email; Cf., N. Ferguson, Without Books We Will Be Barbarians, Free Press (Oct. 10, 2025), https://www.thefp.com/p/niall-ferguson-without-books-we-will-be-barbarians?r=5df65k&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
