Not long before Israel’s election, an account on X/Twitter posted an image of the prime minister and his wife hemmed in by menacing soldiers, with a caption wishing them the fate of the Ceausescus. The account carried an Israeli name and was written in native-sounding Hebrew.
FakeReporter, the Israeli watchdog that tracks fictitious accounts, linked it to an Iranian influence operation. That single post captures the problem that David Siman-Tov’s analysis, “The war of trust,” which appeared in the August 31 edition of The Jerusalem Report, left hanging. Attacks now arrive in fluent Hebrew at almost no cost, and the machinery meant to answer them is scattered across agencies that do not work as one.
Cheap, fast, and fluent
Generative artificial intelligence has removed the last technical barriers for Israel’s adversaries. Large language models produce targeted content in flawless Hebrew within seconds, at a price close to zero.
During the June 2025 strikes on Iran, a network called Isnad, founded by an exiled Egyptian activist, spread doctored images of burning buildings that exaggerated the destruction in Israel, aiming to break public morale. Iranian networks run most of the campaigns tracked inside Israel, with some Russian activity behind them.
The reach is real. Nearly one in five identified disinformation campaigns succeeded in planting material that Israeli media then reported as genuine news.
FakeReporter’s researchers describe the mechanism plainly: interference networks radicalize people, draw out reactions that might otherwise stay private, then amplify them. The World Economic Forum ranked disinformation as the world’s top short-term global risk of 2025, and Israel is living that ranking.
No communication
Israel’s state comptroller reported in June that the country is completely unprepared for foreign influence operations. There is no national policy and no authority responsible for the threat.
Siman-Tov, a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, calls this a conceptual failure: the state still protects infrastructure when it needs to start protecting the cognitive space where citizens actually form their opinions.
There is movement behind the silence. Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) reportedly now ranks foreign interference as a top-level threat and has sent staff to countries facing similar risks to study their methods. But an intelligence service alone cannot guard what happens in a family WhatsApp group, and that is where most Israelis meet the lie first.
Other democracies are starting to notice they share the exposure. Taiwan has spent years building rapid-response teams and civic tech tools after absorbing waves of pressure campaigns from Beijing, and its playbook is studied in Washington and Brussels. Sweden weathered a sustained campaign before its NATO accession and rebuilt parts of its psychological defense around civilian institutions rather than intelligence services.
The common thread is uncomfortable for a country that prizes its own inventiveness: the defense that works is slow, boring, and institutional, a standing capability with a budget line and a boss, and Israel is the one front in this war that never built one.
The economics of the fight are worse than the politics. An influence operation can be launched from a laptop anywhere for the price of an afternoon, and the material it produces never expires: a doctored clip forged in June resurfaces in September with a new caption, and the fact-check written the first time does not travel with it.
Defense is the opposite. Every fake has to be found, documented, rebutted, and then found again when it comes back. Small watchdog outfits are doing work that properly belongs to a standing national institution, on budgets that would not cover a single missile interceptor.
What is working
The honest answer is that the most effective defenses so far are the smallest ones. FakeReporter and similar civil society monitors find the fake networks faster than any ministry does.
Newsrooms that check before amplifying have started to close the laundering route that one in five campaigns depended on. And the individual habit holds more power than it gets credit for: pause before sharing something engineered to provoke. Readers who want to check what they are forwarding can use verified reference material instead of the feed that served them the fake.
Siman-Tov warned of a next stage he calls data contamination, where hostile actors pollute the information that AI models are trained on, so the falsehood comes pre-baked into the tools people trust for answers. The goal of all of it, he noted, is not necessarily to change how people vote. It is enough to plant the idea that the election is rigged.
The contamination warning deserves more attention than it has received, since it moves the battlefield somewhere no fact-checker patrols. When a hostile network seeds false statistics and forged documents into the open material that language models learn from, the falsehood stops arriving as a suspicious stranger and starts arriving as a memory.
A student asks a chatbot about an Israeli election incident and receives, in confident prose, an invented event that traces back to Tehran’s fabrication mills. No alert sounds.
The lie has been laundered not through a newsroom but through the archive itself, and correcting it means chasing copies of a training corpus nobody controls. Israel’s research community has begun cataloging these poisoned sources, but the effort is scattered across universities and volunteer groups with no mandate, no budget, and no authority over the platforms that serve the answers to billions of people.
There is a quiet precedent for fixing it. Israel once treated cybersecurity as a niche concern for banks and the military, until sustained attacks forced the creation of a national authority with real powers.
The same recognition now has to arrive for the cognitive layer, and the cost of delay compounds quietly: every month without verification standards, every newsroom that publishes first and checks later, and every model trained on unexamined material makes the next campaign cheaper for the adversary and dearer for the defense.
The river keeps rising whether or not anyone agrees it is a flood.
Israel built its defenses for an ocean of missiles. It is now facing a river that never stops flowing, in its own language. The seawall was designed for a different sea.■
Mark Ginsberg is an American-Israeli writer based in Efrat, in the Judean hills south of Jerusalem. He writes about Israeli society, technology, and security for the Times of Israel, and his recent analysis has appeared in Breaking Defense and World Geostrategic Insights.