Israel Secretly Targeted American Lawmakers With Gaza War Influence Campaign
In an attempt to sway global public opinion on the war in Gaza, fake accounts and sites spread pro-Israel and Islamophobic content. The operation was orchestrated by Israel's Diaspora Affairs Ministry and run by a political campaigning firm
The Israeli government is behind a large-scale influence campaign primarily aimed at Black lawmakers and young progressives in the United States and Canada. The operation, whose existence was first reported by Haaretz in March, was launched after the start of the war in Gaza and was intended to sway certain segments of public opinion on Israel's conduct.
The influence campaign made extensive use of fake websites and social media to promote content that is pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim content, as well as disinformation about antisemitism on American campuses, according to an investigation by the Fake Reporter organization, published today.
The operation was run by an Israeli company that specializes in political campaigns. According to sources and information obtained by Haaretz, the operation was commissioned by Israel's Diaspora Affairs Ministry but carried out by a different party, for fear that its exposure could entangle Israel in a crisis. Among the candidates for the job was the organization Voices of Israel, which received half of its original funding from the Israeli government. Asked for a response to this article, Voices of Israel denied that it was related to the influence campaign exposed.
Voices of Israel is a public benefit company that was founded as an initiative by the Strategic Affairs Ministry and Public Diplomacy Ministry and is better known by its original name, Solomon's Sling. The company, which is not subject to Israel's freedom of information law, was established to shape awareness in the digital and media arenas, and fight the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement and antisemitic discourse by enlisting pro-Israel activists and organizations in Israel's public diplomacy efforts.
In 2018, the company changed its name to Concert and in 2022, the name was changed again to Voices of Israel. The company's website states that "Voices of Israel has a joint venture agreement with the State of Israel led by the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and combat antisemitism" and that its fundamental goals are "to enhance the image of Israel in the global arena and combat delegitimization and new antisemitism worldwide, using tools of public diplomacy." Since the start of the war, Voices of Israel has resumed operating as part of various initiatives involving the Diaspora Affairs Ministry, headed by Minister Amichai Chikli.
The Diaspora Affairs Ministry denied involvement in the influence operation that has been revealed, but a source in the ministry confirmed that, generally, the ministry funds official campaigns as well as unofficial ones.
- Israeli influence operation targets U.S. lawmakers on Hamas-UNRWA
- Israel bought mass online influence system to counter antisemitism, Hamas atrocity denial
Various Israeli officials say that the war in Gaza has exposed a "grave failure" in Israel's hasbara, or public diplomacy. Despite the massive investment in different PR enterprises over the years, Israel hasn't been able to effectively cope with the flood of pro-Palestinian messages on social media, which have included denials of the October 7 attacks and the sexual violence that were part of them. Israel lacked the necessary digital assets to contend with what it called "the pro-Palestinian poison [propaganda] machine" and to adequately publicize Hamas atrocities and defend the war in Gaza.
Therefore, a decision was made to acquire digital assets, including avatars – technologically advanced fake online accounts with a relatively high level of sophistication that closely resemble a real person. When the Public Diplomacy Ministry was shuttered at an early point in the war, the Diaspora Affairs Ministry became the key player and held several meetings with individuals and organizations active in the field.
An organization in Israel then acquired a system for waging an online influence campaign, and the decision was made to finance official public diplomacy campaigns and support various voluntary initiatives. The parties decided to launch a campaign (or more than one) that would not be officially attributed to the Israeli government. Three months after reporting the campaign's existence, Haaretz has learned that it was commissioned by the Israeli government. Additional operations of this type may be running online right now.
Arab slave traders
The campaign began with the establishment of three fake "news sites" that copied reports from official media sources. These sites had associated Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts, which amassed tens of thousands of followers. Meanwhile, the people running the operation used hundreds of avatars to aggressively promote purported articles that served the Israeli narrative, including reports about the sexual assaults by Hamas and about alleged ties between the United Nations Relief and Works Agency and Hamas. The articles were mainly directed at the online accounts of Black lawmakers in the U.S., particularly Democrats.
600+ avatars focused on UNRWA ties to Hamas
The follow-up report by Fake Reporter now being published shows the full extent of the Israeli influence operation, which pivoted into "a large-scale, well-coordinated effort to attack and smear groups that are typically pro-Palestinian. These groups include citizens of Western countries (mainly the U.S. and Canada) of Islamic origins, using deeply Islamophobic and anti-immigrant content.
At the end of April, the "news sites" mentioned above began promoting a site called the Good Samaritan, which mapped and ranked American universities according to the amount of alleged antisemitic incidents on their campuses and whether it was safe for Jews to study there. An examination of the site's code showed that it included unique features from the sites that were previously revealed.
A network analysis found four other websites that used the same IP and promoted content designed for certain audiences. One was the United Citizens for Canada site, which had multiple social media accounts and disseminated heavily Islamophobic material, including claims that Muslim immigrants were a threat to Canada and demanding a sharia state. Another was the Arab Slave Trade site, which was copied almost entirely from Wikipedia and was aimed at Black Americans, trying to repeat the message that the Arabs had been slave traders in Africa. Yet another site was called Serenity Now, which branded itself as anarchist and anti-establishment, sought to convince young Americans to oppose the creation of a Palestinian state because "states are manmade structures" and a Palestinian state "would hurt the goals of the progressive movement."
Facebook removed accounts connected to these fake sites a few weeks ago. Last week, Meta and OpenAI confirmed the existence of the influence operation and ascribed it to the Israeli company Stoic. According to information obtained by Haaretz, the company has several software systems that allow the profiling of target audiences and creation of adapted content for them, as well as an influence platform called Ma'acher that enables the mass creation of fictitious online accounts and their simultaneous activation on several social networks.
Fake Reporter also found a direct link between the influence operation and the Israeli company. Evidently, the creators of the fakes sites accidentally included in the original code mentions of a GitHub account connected to an executive with Stoic and a Stoic code for the mass creation of fake accounts. Stoic is known as a company that specializes in political technologies, audience mapping, information analysis and management of volunteers and digital campaigns. Most of its activity is abroad.
The report by OpenAI that uncovered the activity by Stoic dealt with exploitation of the company's ChatGPT AI platform for the creation of unattributed content for influence campaigns. In addition to the Israeli operation, activity directed at India's government was also identified. It was the first report by the AI corporation dealing with disinformation created using its systems, despite several similar cases in the past two years: As previously reported by Haaretz, the group Team Jorge made wide use of AI to create disinformation campaigns in support of Israel, while the Russian Doppelganger campaign and another influence operation have made use of similar tools.
Stoic declined repeated requests for comment.
"It's just a tragedy that the State of Israel only discovered the Internet on October 7," said an intelligence source who was present at meetings about the issue of public diplomacy at the very beginning of the war. "Hundreds of millions of shekels were spent on hasbara, four different ministries were established, but in the end, subcontractors had to be paid very quickly to get a lot of digital content up very fast. It's not surprising that one of them was caught in the end."
Three sources from the field of public diplomacy and influence campaigns say that the exposure of the campaigns has hurt Israel and impacted its ability to respond to the array of un-organic online forces being employed against the Israeli narrative. "It's a shame that Facebook and OpenAI are going after Western campaigns that are not an influence operation, but a factual campaign meant to persuade people and answer dangerous lies," said one of them.
Fake Reporter's Executive Director Achiya Schatz told Haaretz that "running the foreign influence campaign against American lawmakers is amateurish, irresponsible and anti-democratic." Just as Fake Reporter has called on the Israeli government to take steps against foreign influence campaigns, he added," the Israeli government is expected to refrain from taking similar actions, especially ones that target Israel's significant democratic partners. The money spent on this campaign would have been better spent in protecting the Israeli public from foreign intervention."