Why Israel Must Fight for Reality Itself

By the time Israel manages to refute a lie, the lie has often travelled the world, been translated into dozens of languages, cited by activists, repeated by journalists, adopted at the United Nations, absorbed into school curricula, embedded into Wikipedia entries, and fed into the large language models increasingly shaping how billions understand current events.

Israel is fighting a cognitive war alongside its wars against Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran. It may ultimately prove just as consequential.

For decades, Israel’s enemies understood something that many Israelis dismissed as secondary: victory is not achieved only on the battlefield. It is achieved in the realm of perception, and by determining which facts people encounter, whose voices are considered authoritative, and which narratives become accepted truth.

The objective is not simply to persuade, it is to construct an alternative reality.

In that reality, Zionism, the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, is no longer understood as the movement through which an indigenous people returned to its ancestral homeland after centuries of persecution and exile. Instead, it is recast as a uniquely illegitimate colonial enterprise.

In that reality, the world’s only Jewish state is transformed from a nation defending itself against organizations openly committed to its destruction into the primary source of instability in the Middle East.

In that reality, claims of “genocide” and deliberate “starvation” are treated not as contested allegations requiring rigorous evidentiary standards, but as established facts repeated with increasing certainty.

None of this happened by accident.

The old propaganda model depended on newspapers, pamphlets, television broadcasts, and speeches. The new model is networked, decentralized, and self-reinforcing.

A report by a respected or even highly-suspect NGO is cited by journalists, journalists are cited by international organizations, international organizations are cited by Wikipedia editors, Wikipedia becomes a source for students, activists, and casual readers.

Large language models trained on publicly available material absorb these narratives as consensus, and future journalists then consult those same systems for background information.

The loop closes but has endless ramifications.

What begins as an allegation ends as accepted reality.

We have already witnessed how this process operates.

The controversy surrounding recent reporting on allegations of Israeli sexual abuse by Nicolas Kristoff of the New York Times offered a revealing case study.

Many of his sources can be traced back to one organization, the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, which is run by a virulently anti-Israel obsessive with ties to Hamas and a history of incendiary and false accusations against Israel.

These libels were then amplified through media reporting, echoed in international discourse, and entered broader public consciousness before underlying evidentiary standards had been fully scrutinized.

Nonetheless, the issue extends far beyond any single article or report.

Increasingly, a relatively small number of highly motivated activists understand that the architecture of knowledge itself has become contested territory.

Edit histories on online encyclopedias, search engine optimization strategies, coordinated social media campaigns, selective sourcing practices, and advocacy-driven reports all influence how future generations understand today’s events.

Wikipedia occupies a particularly important place in this ecosystem. For millions of people, it serves as the first stop for understanding complex topics. Researchers have demonstrated that organized groups of editors have systematically shaped entries relating to Israel, Zionism, terrorism, and the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

This should alarm anyone committed to intellectual integrity: open knowledge platforms can be vulnerable to sustained ideological capture.

The consequences extend into artificial intelligence.

Large language models do not independently discover truth; they identify patterns within the information on which they are trained.

If the available corpus increasingly reflects distorted narratives, omissions, activist framing, or ideologically curated sourcing, those distortions risk becoming embedded into the next generation of digital knowledge tools.

Students asking basic questions about Zionism, the history of the conflict, or the nature of terrorist organizations such as Hamas may increasingly receive answers reflecting accumulated biases rather than balanced historical understanding.

The danger is not that technology becomes anti-Israel.

The danger is that technology mistakes activism for consensus.

Israel’s adversaries grasp the significance of this shift.

Iran invests heavily in state media, influence operations, and digital manipulation. Hamas has long understood the value of imagery, symbolism, and emotional narratives. Hezbollah operates sophisticated media networks alongside its military infrastructure.

Meanwhile, many Israelis still cling to the comforting belief that facts speak for themselves.

They do not.

Facts require advocates, evidence requires distribution, and truth requires infrastructure.

This does not mean Israel should embrace disinformation, fabricate evidence, or abandon its democratic values. Quite the opposite. Democracies possess an enormous strategic advantage: reality itself.

However, reality only matters if people encounter it.

Israel needs to invest seriously in the defense of truth. That means training a generation of editors, researchers, historians, technologists, and communicators capable of engaging where public understanding is actually formed.

It means ensuring that accurate information appears not merely in government archives but in search results, educational resources, encyclopedias, social media feeds, podcasts, documentaries, and AI training datasets.

It means recognizing that a press release issued in Jerusalem is not enough if millions encounter an opposing narrative first through TikTok, Wikipedia, Google, or ChatGPT.

Israel must compete in the marketplace of ideas with the same seriousness that it approaches missile defense.

The cognitive war will not end with a ceasefire in Gaza, a weakened Hezbollah, or a nuclear agreement with Iran. It is a long-term struggle over historical memory, moral legitimacy, and the boundaries of truth itself.

If others write the story of Zionism, of October 7, of Jewish indigeneity, and of Israel’s right to defend itself, then military victories may prove temporary while narrative defeats become permanent.

The first responsibility of a free society is to defend its citizens.

The second is to defend reality.

Today, for Israel, the two have become inseparable.