Jennifer Murtazashvili, a professor at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh, arrived in Israel in January with her family as part of her academic work and found herself in the midst of a multi-front regional war. In an Op-Ed published over the weekend in The Washington Post, she describes what she calls an “alt-war” — in which people in her home country are exposed to false information and fake videos online, while the reality on the ground, as she describes it, is entirely different.
“Something strange is in the air. I wake up every morning in Tel Aviv having survived another day. Sirens go off in the middle of the night; we go back to bed countless times. We wake to news that the Iron Dome intercepted the vast majority — 92 percent by official counts — of incoming rockets,” she writes. “I step onto my balcony and hear the never-ending construction. An Israeli economist I know says, 'We are always building and rebuilding the Jewish state.' I sip my coffee, get my kids into their remote school lessons and then open my email and direct messages to see what happened in the imagination of the United States the day before.”
She recounts how she moved to Israel with her husband and four children at the end of January for a Fulbright Fellowship, just weeks before the war broke out and became "a most accidental correspondent: the person everyone back home texts when they cannot tell the difference between what is on their feed and reality on the ground,” she writes.
According to Murtazashvili: “We are living through the first alt-war: a conflict in which the war fought online and the war fought in reality have diverged so completely that they might as well be happening on different planets. It’s not that people lack information, it’s more that they are constructing an entirely different alternate reality — one that confirms what they already believe."
She writes that, most mornings, "my phone is full of panicked messages. A friend in Pittsburgh. A colleague in Central Asia. A relative in New York. They have all seen the videos of intense missile barrages ravaging Tel Aviv. One video sent to me featured what were ostensibly Israelis marching in droves, on foot across what appeared to be the Judaean mountains escaping the country as it collapsed behind them."
"The videos I’ve been sent are all fake. They are either generated by artificial intelligence or simply old footage from somewhere else. I know, because I am here," she writes.
Murtazashvili says the first night of the war was the most frightening. “A missile struck about a quarter of a mile from our apartment. The noise shook our building. One person was killed — a woman who did not reach a shelter in time. That tragic event lodged the importance of the shelters in the mind of my children like no lecture of mine ever could."
“But after that first night, my kids saw that life continued. In shelters across Tel Aviv, I have found myself alongside Muslims, Jews, Christians and recent arrivals. The furious debate consuming the American internet feels distant in these spaces. People are mostly tired but hopeful that a better future is on the horizon.”
She adds that “What worries me more than the fake videos are the people who cannot fathom that this war is going well for the United States, for Israel and maybe even for the long-suffering people of Iran. The strategic picture is more favorable than the online narrative suggests. Iranian options are narrowing to outcomes that all leave Israel better positioned than before, whether that is regime change in Tehran, a negotiated arrangement under American pressure or a ceasefire along the lines of the Houthi deal.”
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Apartment hit by rocket in Tel Aviv: 'The first night of the war was the scariest'
(Photo: Yariv Cohen)
She cites an Israeli political analyst, who says that based on the markets, Israel will come out of the current war stronger.
“You would not know any of this from Washington," she writes. "Two weeks into the war, I watch otherwise reasonable analysts sprint to catastrophe. Former officials, thinktank scholars, credentialed professionals who are supposed to know how to read a conflict. Within days they had written the obituary: quagmire, overreach, disaster. And that narrative has continued unabated.
"The liberal internationalist left and the isolationist right — two camps that have agreed on almost nothing for decades — have suddenly found themselves in lockstep, racing to declare the war a failure before it had barely begun,” she argues.
"This is the defining feature of the alt-war," Murtazashvili writes. "It is not that people lack information, but that the success of the war conflicts with their priors and so they have constructed an alternative war: one in which Tel Aviv is burning, Washington never heard of the Strait of Hormuz before last week and the whole enterprise is doomed. Because that is the only version they can psychologically accept."
This is the new "blob", that "has found its common cause not in a policy position but in a psychological need. That need is feeding an alternative reality more vivid and viral than anything the enemy could produce."
“There is a demand that fuels an alternative reality — sharper, more colorful, more viral — far beyond anything the enemy could produce. Meanwhile, in the real war, she concludes, "I step onto my balcony each morning. The construction crews are already at work. My kids log in to school. Israel, bruised and tired, keeps building toward a better future for itself, and the region."