Foreign News
Israel’s digital war machine and the perils of propaganda gone wrong
The world has entered an era of instantaneous information warfare. Nations have begun positioning themselves as the righteous party in the court of global opinion — and their capacity to generate information has become their most decisive weapon.
Israel, among the earliest states to grasp this reality, took the ancient practice of hasbara and fused it with 21st-century digital infrastructure, forging it into a systematic information warfare machine.
Derived from the Hebrew word meaning “to explain,” hasbara is officially described by the Israeli state as the activity of communicating its policies and actions to the international public.
In practice, however, this definition functions largely as a euphemism. Today, that apparatus spans a vast spectrum: from official government statements to viral social media campaigns, from coordinated mainstream media messaging to paid influencer networks operating in the shadows.
Academic literature draws a theoretical line between public diplomacy and propaganda. But in practice, Israel’s hasbara operations are overwhelmingly oriented not towards truth, but towards the construction of a particular truth — a manufactured reality.
At this point, what presents itself as public diplomacy reveals itself to be something far closer to manipulation and propaganda.
Digital transformation: from 2006 to the present
The information warfare infrastructure Israel operates today did not emerge overnight — it took shape through a slow, deliberate metamorphosis.
The 2006 Lebanon War marked a decisive inflection point. Israel witnessed firsthand how footage streamed directly from the battlefield by Hezbollah profoundly shifted international public opinion.
That experience made the strategic weight of digital communication impossible to ignore. The 2008–2009 Gaza offensive then served as the effective opening chapter of a new era in state-sponsored digital propaganda.
In its aftermath, the Israeli Foreign Ministry publicly announced the formation of a dedicated unit tasked with monitoring and messaging across social media platforms in multiple foreign languages.
By 2012, social media had become the primary theatre of information warfare. During the 2014 Gaza offensive, coordinated content campaigns engineered to cast Israel as the victim reached their apex.
It was during this same period that the Act.IL application emerged — the first mass-scale digital mobilisation tool of its kind, designed to enable volunteer activists to amplify targeted content or flag it for removal with surgical efficiency.
Israel even went so far, in this period, as to offer university students scholarships in exchange for conducting online hasbara operations.
In the aftermath of October 7, Israel’s digital propaganda infrastructure underwent a dramatic leap — both in scale and sophistication.
The state budget allocated to public opinion shaping and hasbara operations surged roughly twentyfold compared to pre-2023 levels, reaching $150 million for 2025.
By 2026, Israel announced it would devote an extraordinary $730 million to its digital propaganda apparatus. Dedicated coordination units were established within both the Foreign Ministry and the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs.
The Israeli Government Advertising Agency — known as Lapam — published approximately 2,000 advertisements throughout 2024; in just the first eight and a half months of 2025, that figure surpassed 4,000, with half of those advertisements targeting international audiences.
As these revelations circulated publicly, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu met with a group of Jewish-American influencers in New York, delivering a pointed message: “We need to fight back in this digital arena, on social media.”
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