In a report released in early July, the state comptroller found that, nine years after the threat of foreign digital interference was first identified in Israel, the country still has no national policy and no single government body leading the response.
The World Economic Forum ranks disinformation as the No. 1 global risk in the short term. In Israel, responsibility is scattered across many agencies with no coordination, and the result, in the report’s words, is that “the Israeli public is exposed.”
But, contrary to the impression the report leaves, this is not merely a bureaucratic problem of dividing up authority, or the absence of a single address.
The gap I wish to dwell on is a conceptual one, stemming from a cluster of considerations that keep the issue from being handled in a systematic, holistic way – unlike other challenges, such as cyber, that have been met over the past decades.
The missing defense
This is no theoretical threat. Since October 7, researchers have documented a wave of foreign influence operations aimed at the Israeli public.
The “Isnad” campaign – linked to the Muslim Brotherhood and active from Turkey after October 7 – ran hundreds of fake profiles on X that spread thousands of messages to press for ending the war on terms favorable to Hamas.
A sustained Iranian campaign has sought to weaken the Netanyahu and Bennett governments alike and to deepen Israel’s rifts – for instance, around the hostages and the protests against the judicial overhaul.
Russia, too, has stepped up its influence efforts since the war in Ukraine broke out.
These are only examples; during the elections, additional actors are expected to operate, on a large scale and with growing use of artificial intelligence.
Research by the Institute for National Security Studies showed that around the 25th Knesset elections, Iranian actors operated in several directions at once: on one hand, messages calling to suppress the vote of Israel’s Arab population, and on the other, a “stolen election” campaign and the delegitimization of its results, ostensibly attributed to right-wing supporters.
The adversary is not trying to crown a winner; its aim is to deepen the divide, erode mutual trust, and dissolve the public’s ability to decide freely on the basis of reliable information. An election is an excellent opportunity for it, when the public’s nerves are raw and the political system is more polarized than ever.
Foreign interference operations do not invent disputes out of thin air. They ride on authentic fault lines, amplify genuine local voices, and hide within legitimate discourse.
The result is a deliberate blurring between foreign interference (FIMI) and domestic information manipulation (DIMI) – local political speech, sharp and even offensive, yet entirely legitimate as part of the democratic game.
The distinction is not semantic. Against a hostile foreign actor the state is permitted – indeed obligated – to act, while in domestic discourse government involvement is a redline. And because the adversary takes pains to erase that line, every government body fears that action against “foreign interference” will be perceived – or exploited – as interference in domestic politics.
This is the central obstacle that has blocked the emergence of a systemic response in Israel.
In Israeli public debate, a concern from the opposite direction has surfaced in recent months: that actors within the political system are casting doubt on the integrity of the elections as a pretext to challenge the legitimacy of the process.
Some domestic actors even amplify foreign influence operations when these suit their interests, so that external and internal messages become so intertwined that isolating them is difficult and at times impossible.
The two concerns – foreign manipulation from without and the sowing of distrust from within – feed each other and erode public confidence in the process.
Precisely for that reason, any mechanism to defend against foreign interference must be built to be transparent, limited, and subject to oversight, so that it does not itself become a tool in the hands of a political camp.
The FIMI dilemma
The counter-FIMI response developed in the European Union shifts the focus from content to behavior. Instead of asking “Is this message true or proper?” – a question the state can hardly adjudicate – one asks whether coordinated inauthentic behavior lies behind its distribution: bot networks, fake personas, and coordinated accounts posing as citizens.
A bot has no freedom of expression. This distinction unlocks the FIMI/DIMI trap: it allows action against the foreign mechanism without touching authentic Israeli content, however sharp.
This principle rests on a framework of four components, all applicable in Israel.
Resilience – raising the digital literacy of the public and the media, so that identifying fake content becomes a widespread skill.
Situational awareness – orderly, transparent monitoring of the arena in real time, including scrutiny of the answers AI engines give to Hebrew-and Arabic-language election queries, today a near-total blind spot.
Regulation and disruption – requiring platforms to manage risk and to be transparent about the origin of political advertising, in the spirit of the EU’s Digital Services Act and Israel’s Election Propaganda Law.
And international cooperation – since the adversary, the platforms, and the arena all cross borders.
A shared defense
A further essential layer is civil society. Western experience teaches that combining research institutes, civic organizations, and the media – rather than concentrating power in the state’s hands alone – is what lends the effort legitimacy and reduces the suspicion that the mechanism is being used politically.
An independent civilian body that exposes an Iranian persona network is perceived differently from a government agency doing so on the eve of an election.
Civil society also disperses power and builds the trust without which any defensive mechanism collapses.
But without a lead government address, all of these remain scattered efforts. The National Security Council – or another body the government designates – should formulate the policy, define the phenomenon as a strategic threat, and regulate the division of roles between the security agencies and civil society, with mechanisms of oversight, transparency, and reporting to the Knesset to ensure this power is not diverted to political ends.
These will need to be implemented immediately after the elections; until then, the Central Elections Committee must lead the defense of electoral integrity against external and internal threats alike.
The bottom line: orderly, transparent state action against foreign interference is not a threat to democracy and free speech – it is the condition for protecting them.
Whoever protects public discourse from foreign manipulation, while taking care not to turn that defense into an internal political weapon, protects the right of Israel’s citizens to choose on the basis of truth and to trust the result.
The window before the elections is closing.■
The writer is a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies.