That illusion shattered on October 7th.

The battle against antisemitism that I once saw as distant was now unfolding in the United States. Determined to understand this shift, I set out to uncover how Americans perceive Jews and Israel—what they believe, why they believe it, and how those beliefs are formed.

If I was going to do this, I had to do it right. That meant pursuing the gold standard of research—Institutional Review Board (IRB) credentials through a university partnership for my focus groups.

But securing IRB approval took months—not because of research hurdles, but because professor after professor refused to be involved. Eleven in total.

These weren’t just any academics. They were sociologists who had built careers studying radicalization, propaganda, and disinformation—experts in how ideas spread and take hold. Yet when it came to antisemitism, they wouldn’t touch it.

“Too political,” they said.

That was my first realization: No one actually studies propaganda. They study their opponent’s propaganda. And if you only examine the other side’s manipulation, you aren’t studying propaganda at all—you’re just reinforcing your own blindspots

As I dug deeper, I realized the blind spots ran in both directions. American society has profound gaps in understanding Jews and Israel, while the Jewish community and Israel often fail to grasp how they are perceived in America. These disconnects weren’t just intellectual—they are emotional, cultural, and deeply ingrained. Bridging these gaps became my mission.

Like many Jews, October 7th shattered my sense of reality. Hamas’s massacre wasn’t just met with horror—among many, it was met with jubilance, justifications, and the casual dismissal of suffering. Among Gen Z and Millennial Americans, Israel is not widely seen as a nation, but as a stain on history.

In graduate school, we studied the greatest military minds, and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War was a gold standard. One quote stands out when I think of Hamas’s propaganda strategy:

“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”

What we are witnessing is the product of a highly funded propaganda network, which operates across many reinforcing channels. It may feel organic, grassroots, inevitable. But it’s not. It is Strategy. And they’re winning. Not just shaping public opinion, but pulling even Jews into their fold.

This isn’t just distortion or misinformation. It’s a war on truth—and a collapse of the moral compass.

The Anti-Israel Propaganda Network (AIPN) includes the usual suspects—Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, Iran, and Qatar—but it doesn’t end there. Cynical geopolitical players like Russia and China have also entered the fray, not out of ideological alignment, but because exploiting these fractures fuels social unrest and weakens U.S. global influence. Destabilization serves their interests, pulling American attention inward and away from regions they seek to dominate.

The Anti-Israel Propaganda Network (AIPN) floods digital spaces with viral content engineered to shape public opinion before facts even have a chance to register. Add to that the relentless push from bot farms, amplifying the message at an industrial scale.

The result? A simple, digestible narrative: Israel is the oppressor. Palestine, as the underdog, is naturally the oppressed. Crucially, they ensure no one zooms out to see Israel in the context of the broader region—where, suddenly, Israel no longer looks like the top dog.

While social media shapes public sentiment, universities perpetuate intellectual frameworks that justify anti-Israel narratives with academia steeped in identity politics and Marxist ideology.

The scale of influence is staggering. Reports, including those from the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism & Policy, have exposed billions of dollars in undisclosed funding flowing into American universities—primarily from Qatar.

And then there is the information warfare, controlling the knowledge base. Wikipedia pages are constantly edited and manipulated to ensure that anti-Israel perspectives dominate search results. Search........

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