Understanding the Information War

For most of Israel’s history, the battle over international opinion was fought within a relatively centralized information environment. Newspapers, broadcast television, wire services, academic publishers, and a limited number of institutions served as the principal gatekeepers of public knowledge. Israel often faced fierce criticism, diplomatic isolation, hostile United Nations campaigns, terrorism, and persistent efforts to delegitimize the Jewish state, yet the battlefield was comparatively legible. Journalists, editors, and institutional leaders occupied identifiable positions within a finite communications ecosystem, allowing governments and advocacy organizations to understand where influence was exercised.

Since October 7, 2023, that environment has been transformed. Coordinated influence operations by state-linked actors, activist networks, sympathetic institutions, and ordinary users acting with varying degrees of coordination have engaged in a systematic, synchronized campaign to delegitimize Israel and upend diaspora Jewish communities.

This information warfare is targeting not only individuals, but the digital knowledge systems that construct answers from training data, real-time search, and curated sources, such as algorithms, search engines, recommendation engines, and artificial intelligence. The strategic objective is to shape the digital knowledge ecosystem from which people and AI draw their understanding.

Israeli and diaspora Jewish leaders have largely failed to recognize this battlefield shift. The recent report of a $50 million Israeli-funded US influence campaign illustrates the depth of the misunderstanding. However well-intentioned, it reflects an outdated model of influence. While our institutions devote enormous resources to newspaper coverage, PR, and political messaging, our adversaries are conquering the digital memory and turning contested narratives into authoritative knowledge. As AI becomes the primary intermediary between people and information, the systems that teach the world become this war’s highest-payoff targets.

The information war sparked by October 7 is an assault on Jewish collective memory and an attempt to delegitimize Jewish identity and national existence. It is a threat to Jewish historical continuity. We must heed its warnings, identify its targets, understand its tactics, and organize to deny our adversaries victory. Nothing short of our history, our future, and how we are forever defined is at stake.

The Battlefield of the New Information War

The traditional gatekeepers no longer sit at the head of the information pipeline. The new battlefield is the digital ecosystem, where algorithms determine visibility, recommendation systems shape attention, search engines drive discovery, and artificial intelligence synthesizes what people encounter. The information war is now a contest to make selected narratives discoverable, citable, and compatible with the retrieval systems AI relies on. Success is measured by influencing which sources are considered authoritative and which narratives become embedded in that record.

In this new environment, the flow of information has inverted. A misleading social media post goes viral through coordinated engagement, is amplified by recommendation algorithms, repeated by influencers, summarized by Wikipedia editors, reported by news organizations, and cited by academic papers and NGO reports. Search engines index it, archives preserve it, and, regardless of accuracy, AI systems retrieve and synthesize it.

Anti-Israel and anti-Jewish information campaigns function as integrated ecosystems designed to move narratives through this exact evolution: capturing attention, manufacturing consensus, influencing the institutions that define authority, and ultimately shaping the digital knowledge infrastructure from which artificial intelligence trains and learns.

A lesson of October 7 is that modern information warfare is no longer measured by how many people can be convinced, but by how quickly a narrative becomes the default framework through which subsequent events are interpreted.

Four Stages of the Modern Information Warfare

This framework does not assume that every participant is centrally directed, every viral post manipulated, or all pro-Palestinian activism inauthentic. However, research and risk management assessments have shown that state-instigated campaigns ignited widespread participation among people who amplified the message. Evidence also indicates that Qatar continues to fund institutions that amplify particular narratives through an ecosystem that includes Al Jazeera, university funding, think tanks, and cultural partnerships, each with its own sophisticated digital presence.

In networked information warfare, coordination may be centralized, decentralized, or emergent, but what matters is that these forces reinforce one another toward the same outcome. The result is a strategic progression through four phases, each building on the last. Attention becomes visibility, which becomes perceived consensus, which acquires institutional legitimacy, which becomes part of the permanent digital knowledge ecosystem that shapes how future information is discovered and understood.

We are fighting highly capable, technologically sophisticated adversaries, and their tactics continue to evolve.

Phase One: Establishing the Unavoidable Narrative

The first target of the information war has been the capture and monopolization of attention. The goal is not merely to make a narrative visible, but to make it unavoidable, emotionally persuasive, algorithmically dominant, and the primary lens through which subsequent events are interpreted.

Bot networks manufacture the appearance of immediate public interest through coordinated likes, shares, and reposts in the critical minutes after content appears, prompting platforms to distribute it further. Attention saturation overwhelms the information environment with a relentless stream of posts, videos, and commentary, leaving little room for competing perspectives, while sympathy manipulation reinforces this dominance with emotionally powerful images and personal stories that evoke passionate responses before the opportunity to weigh chronology or context. Narrative flooding then replaces a single claim with an endless stream of stories pointing to the same conclusion, hashtag flooding and hashtag hijacking concentrate engagement around common phrases and borrow the attention already captured by unrelated trending conversations, and deepfakes introduce convincing fabricated evidence while simultaneously eroding public confidence in authentic evidence.

Since October 7, anti-Israel and anti-Jewish campaigns have largely won this opening battle. Investigations have documented coordinated inauthentic behavior across major platforms, automated accounts, reactivated dormant profiles, and synchronized amplification networks, with threat-intelligence assessments reporting links to Iranian and Qatari associated operations whose early engagement drew recommendation algorithms into converting artificial momentum into genuine visibility. Hashtags including #FreePalestine, #CeasefireNow, and #StopGenocide rapidly dominated feeds and trending topics, reinforced by a continuous stream of eyewitness accounts and emotionally compelling imagery, most often circulated without military or historical context. By the time Israeli and diaspora Jewish organizations began responding, much of the world’s attention, and its emotional framing, had already been captured.

Take-Away Conclusions

Attention is the gateway to influence, and it determines which stories receive coverage, and which narratives advance toward consensus, legitimacy, and enduring digital memory. Once a narrative captures sustained attention, journalists investigate it, influencers amplify it, and institutions respond to what already appears to be the dominant conversation, turning the platforms themselves into force multipliers.

Phase Two: Translating Visibility into Perceived Consensus

Having captured attention, the second objective has been to transform visibility into perceived consensus by persuading audiences that a narrative has already been independently validated, broadly accepted, and established as the legitimate version of events.

Brigade coordination synchronizes thousands of supporters through closed channels like Telegram, Discord, Signal, WhatsApp, directing them to amplify specific content at the precise moment algorithms determine broader visibility, while sockpuppet networks replace obvious automation with realistic fake personas that make coordinated messaging appear to come from countless independent people. Citation cascades then convert repetition into credibility, referencing the same underlying claim across news stories, NGO reports, and social posts until it appears independently verified by numerous sources. Semantic engineering reshapes the vocabulary of the debate, promoting emotionally charged terminology that frames public understanding before evidence is even considered, and context collapse presents authentic images and facts while stripping the chronology required for accurate interpretation. Finally, coordinated advocacy is transformed into what appears to be an authentic movement. Manufactured consensus creates the impression that journalists, academics, and trusted institutions have independently reached the same conclusion, while astroturfing presents centrally organized campaigns as spontaneous grassroots activism, while alliance building recruits student groups, labor unions, and faith communities to repeat the same themes through trusted voices.

After October 7, these campaigns expanded well beyond social media into journalism, NGOs, universities, and segments of the political elite. Terms such as genocide, apartheid, settler colonialism, and occupation became normalized across public discourse; exaggerated casualty accounts circulated without effective rebuttal; and the resulting appearance of overwhelming scholarly, legal, and public agreement became, in and of itself, evidence offered in favor of the narrative’s credibility.

Take-Away Conclusions

By the end of this phase, our adversaries had manufactured the appearance of consensus and established a self-reinforcing ecosystem in which visibility becomes credibility and repetition becomes evidence. This did not require convincing everyone a narrative is true, only that everyone else already believes it. As a result, journalists grow reluctant to challenge apparent established fact, institutions align with the perceived consensus, and public figures weigh the cost of dissent. The silence reinforces the illusion of consensus, setting up the next war objective,  capturing the institutions that define credibility.

Phase Three: Leveraging Perceived Consensus to Acquire Institutional Authority

Having manufactured consensus, the third objective is to institutionalize the narrative by embedding it within the platforms and cultural institutions that define public knowledge. At this stage, information warfare shifts from influencing conversation to shaping institutions. Success is no longer measured by trending topics, but by whether trusted institutions begin adopting and legitimizing the preferred interpretation.

Search engine occupation floods the internet with search-optimized content engineered so preferred interpretations appear first both to human users and to the retrieval systems generative AI relies upon, while influencer relay chains move a narrative upward through successive, increasingly authoritative voices, from activists to micro-influencers, celebrities, journalists, and academics, with each layer adding another increment of borrowed credibility. Wikipedia capture, meanwhile, shapes one of the world’s most consulted reference sources, a platform whose editorial outcomes cascade directly into news coverage, student research, and AI training data.

A second cluster of tactics governs interpretation rather than exposure. Selective truth builds a narrative from facts that are individually accurate while omitting competing evidence that would materially change their meaning and micro-influencer swarms mobilize thousands of small, ordinary-seeming accounts whose combined activity reads as more authentic than a handful of prominent voices. Screenshot propagation detaches claims from their sources, obscuring later corrections; “just asking questions” invites a damaging conclusion without ever stating it outright, and dog whistles and code words let coordinated communities evade content moderation through symbols and insider terminology.

Meanwhile, a third cluster works to suppress competing voices. Coordinated mass reporting exploits platform moderation systems by organizing mass reports against opposing accounts, reputation poisoning attacks the credibility of journalists and scholars so audiences dismiss the messenger before they ever weigh the message, community note manipulation extends the contest to fact-checking mechanisms themselves, and omnipresent ecosystem penetration embeds the same narrative across universities, museums, entertainment, and civic life until it no longer reads as an opinion at all, but as ambient common knowledge.

After October 7, anti-Israel and anti-Jewish efforts made significant gains at this level. Search results grew saturated with content emphasizing genocide, apartheid, and humanitarian suffering. Editorial disputes over Wikipedia’s entries on Israel, Zionism, and Gaza reflected a clear recognition, by all sides, that reference platforms would shape future understanding. Selective presentations of authentic facts frequently omitted the October 7 attack itself, the Israeli hostages, and Hamas’s documented use of civilian infrastructure, embedding contested interpretations within the search engines, encyclopedic entries, and educational materials that both people and AI systems consult.

Take-Away Conclusions

If Israeli and diaspora Jewish institutions are defeated at this phase, the resulting narratives will no longer depend on activists or social media. They will be reproduced through research, education, and policy until they are embedded in the institutions that define credibility. Today’s reporting becomes tomorrow’s archive. Once institutional reports enter the historical record they can shape the training corpora of AI models. The fight is therefore not only over what people believe today, but over the authoritative digital record that will shape how future generations, and the AI systems they consult, understand Israel and Jews.

Phase Four: Transforming Institutional Authority into Permanent Digital Memory

Strategic Objectives

Phase Four is the culmination of the campaign and, this article argues, the ultimate objective of the information war. Having secured attention, manufactured consensus, and acquired institutional legitimacy, the objective shifts to preserving those gains within the permanent digital knowledge ecosystem.

Platform-native content adaptation translates a single narrative into the language, format, and conventions of every major platform, such as TikTok, Instagram, X, Reddit, YouTube, podcasts, and long-form articles, maximizing engagement while the underlying message remains constant.

Archive building then transforms short-term campaigns into long-term historical memory through articles, academic papers, Wikipedia entries, and searchable databases that will remain accessible for decades. By becoming the very sources journalists, educators, and search engines consult, the advocacy of today evolves into tomorrow’s accepted historical record.

The most consequential tactic of this phase, and arguably of the entire framework, is AI knowledge engineering, the deliberate creation and optimization of digital content designed to influence what large language models retrieve, synthesize, and present when users ask them questions. While traditional SEO optimizes content to be found and ranked, AI knowledge engineering optimizes knowledge so an AI system can understand it, trust it, combine it correctly, and use it in an answer. The fundamental departure is from document competition to knowledge legibility.

Organizations publish FAQs, explainers, glossaries, and structured question-and-answer content built specifically around the prompts users are likely to submit to systems such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Grok, in effect, prompting the prompt. As this material accumulates citations, backlinks, and institutional references, it becomes increasingly influential within the corpora AI systems will train on and retrieve from.

Since October 7, anti-Israel and anti-Jewish campaigns have generated an extraordinary and continuously expanding volume of searchable content on Israel, Jews, Zionism, and Gaza, adapted simultaneously across every major platform so that users encounter the same core themes wherever they consume information. This expanding archive of articles, reports, and reference entries has increasingly been organized into formats readily accessible to search engines and retrieval-enabled AI. Success in this phase cannot be measured by headlines. It must be measured by the long-term character of the digital knowledge ecosystem – search-result prominence, the persistence of durable archives, and the consistency with which AI-generated responses reflect, or fail to reflect, historical context and verified evidence.

Take-Away Conclusions

The extraordinary success of our adversaries’ efforts since October 7 cannot be explained by superior organization or technology alone. The deeper problem is that our adversaries understand the new information ecosystem more clearly than we do. While we concentrate on today’s visible consequences, they invest in the digital knowledge ecosystem.

The War for Tomorrow’s Truth

Every tactic described in this article is one component of an interconnected system of modern information warfare, coordinated and implemented by sophisticated, well-funded anti-Israel and anti-Jewish forces. Together they form a strategic architecture capable of moving narratives from social media into institutions, archives, search systems, and artificial intelligence.

The struggle over Israel is the first major test of a far larger transformation in how knowledge is created, preserved, and transmitted. The same dynamics shaping perceptions of Israel today will increasingly shape how future generations understand Ukraine, Taiwan, climate change, pandemics, immigration, elections, religion, scientific discovery, civil rights, and countless other subjects whose histories are becoming inseparable from the digital record. For most of history, societies fought over territory, resources, and political power. The internet, recommendation systems, search, and digital archives shifted the battlefield, and artificial intelligence is completing that transformation by becoming the primary interface through which people increasingly access knowledge.

We are now in a war for knowledge and truth, and whether we prevail will determine not only what future generations remember, but what they are able to know.