Many of us who love Israel live with a kind of split personality. On the one hand, we try to fight the propaganda of lies directed against Israel — the kind of “academic research” that churns out anti-Zionist pamphlets. On the other, we look at our own brothers, flesh-and-blood hooligans, anti-Zionists from the right, who repeatedly carry out rampages in the West Bank and sometimes loot, destroy and kill. We have enemies from within. Where does that leave us?
But this is not really a split personality, because it is the same struggle: a struggle for justice, truth and a Jewish, democratic and moral state. And in that struggle, mistakes are made and failures occur.
Clashes between settlers and Palestinians in Qusra
Take, for example, a fictitious research institute that produced dozens of articles presenting the Israeli point of view. Tens of millions of dollars were invested in the effort. Had just a few million dollars been spent instead on identifying and arresting the hooligans in the West bank, had scenes of horror like those in the village of Qusra — whose name has now become known around the world — been prevented, it would have done far more good. But even without Qusra, the project’s impact on search engines or artificial intelligence systems would have been negligible.
Qatar and China are among the leading foreign sources of funding for U.S. universities and research institutions. These are two repressive states: the first is linked to terrorism and is a global center of the Muslim Brotherhood — in other words, radical Islam — while the second systematically violates human rights. The result is that in the humanities and social sciences, supporters of the BDS movement constitute a majority. It is roughly equivalent to giving a group dominated by white supremacist racists a monopoly over research on African Americans.
The answer to this built-in distortion is not fictitious articles. Even if everything in them is true and far more accurate than the output of racist academics, they will have no impact. The propaganda distortion in academia, the media and social networks turns even the most just wars into the most unjust ones.
Israel’s war against Hamas and the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran are wars against an axis of evil. They are wars against entities that threaten annihilation and arm themselves in order to carry it out. These are wars that, if they are not fought now, will ultimately exact a terrible price from both East and West.
Israel has countless justifications for its determined fight against the jihadists threatening its destruction. Precisely because the genocide claim is a product of propaganda rather than fact, and precisely because even the UNICEF study published last week shows that there was never famine in the Gaza Strip, there was no need for AI-generated articles to refute the lies.
What was needed was to spread around the world the statements of Hamas leaders about the “annihilation of Jews and Christians,” the “conquest of Europe and the two Americas,” the “use of children and women as human shields” and the recruitment of children for combat. No fiction was needed to point out that even according to the list of the dead published by Hamas itself, most of those killed were men of fighting age.
Yet time and again, in meetings with students on campuses or with Jewish communities, I encountered a frightening lack of knowledge. I heard them pleading for facts. Not AI propaganda.
Most important of all, there is a policy problem. It is difficult to make Israel’s case while authorities fail to act against rioters in the West Bank and while figures from the anti-Zionist right, such as Itamar Ben-Gvir, make inflammatory statements. It becomes even harder when hooligans repeatedly operate in the village of Qusra, the IDF appears powerless and no arrests are made. These criminals are enemies of Zionism, Judaism and the state. But they have supporters in the government.
Even with misguided policies, Israel has outstanding advocates, from Douglas Murray and attorney Natasha Hausdorff to Richard Kemp and John Spencer. There are also remarkable researchers such as Salo Aizenberg, Gabriel Epstein and many others, most of them working in English.
With just a few million dollars, their thoughtful arguments could reach a much wider audience. They speak the truth. They are real people. They are excellent. There is no need for bots.
But above all, Israel needs a government that fights the hooligans within. One can only hope that will happen after the election.