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 However well-intentioned, it reflects an outdated model of influence.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........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)