Title: Israel Is Losing the Cognitive War: AI Disinformation Outstrips National Defenses, Analysis Warns
Generative artificial intelligence has removed the last technical barriers that once protected Israel from sophisticated foreign influence operations. Large language models can now produce targeted, fluent Hebrew content within seconds, at a cost close to zero, giving hostile actors a tool that is cheap, fast, and almost impossible to distinguish from authentic Israeli discourse. According to a new analysis by Mark Ginsberg, published in The Jerusalem Post, this technological leap has transformed disinformation from a crude propaganda weapon into a surgical instrument capable of shaping Israeli public opinion from the inside. The warning is not theoretical. During the June 2025 strikes on Iran, a network called Isnad, founded by an exiled Egyptian activist, spread doctored images of burning buildings in Israel, exaggerating the destruction and aiming to break public morale. These images were designed to be emotionally overwhelming, and they traveled rapidly across social media platforms, bypassing traditional gatekeepers and landing directly in the feeds of ordinary Israelis. The analysis notes that Iranian networks run most of the disinformation campaigns tracked inside Israel, with some Russian activity detected behind them. The reach of these campaigns is already measurable: nearly one in five identified disinformation operations succeeded in planting material that Israeli media then reported as genuine news. That statistic represents a significant breach of the country’s information ecosystem. FakeReporter, an Israeli civil society organization that tracks foreign interference, describes the mechanism plainly: interference networks radicalize people, provoke reactions that would otherwise remain private, and then amplify those reactions to create the illusion of widespread consensus. The World Economic Forum has ranked disinformation as the world’s top short-term global risk for 2025, and Israel, according to Ginsberg, is living that ranking in real time.
Despite the severity of the threat, Israel’s official posture remains dangerously unprepared. The state comptroller reported in June that the country has no national policy for foreign influence operations and no authoritative body responsible for countering them. This is not a minor administrative gap; it is a structural absence at the heart of national security. Siman-Tov, a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, describes the situation as a conceptual failure. The state, he argues, continues to protect physical infrastructure while neglecting the cognitive space where citizens actually form opinions. That cognitive space is now the primary battlefield. Disinformation campaigns do not need to hack databases or destroy missile batteries; they need only to shape what Israelis believe about their government, their security, and each other. There is some movement behind the silence. The Shin Bet, Israel’s internal 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 the analysis stresses that an intelligence service alone cannot guard what happens inside a family WhatsApp group, and that is where most Israelis first encounter a lie. The most vulnerable spaces are not classified military networks but everyday digital conversations between neighbors, parents, and colleagues. The absence of a coordinated national response means that hostile actors can operate with relative impunity, iterating their tactics and adapting their messages faster than any single government agency can track them. The state comptroller’s finding is a stark admission: Israel, a country that prides itself on technological sophistication and military innovation, has no answer to a threat that can be launched from a laptop anywhere in the world.
Israel is not alone in facing this threat, and the analysis points to other democracies that have recognized the danger and begun building defenses. Taiwan, which has absorbed waves of pressure campaigns from Beijing, has spent years developing rapid-response teams and civic technology tools designed to detect and debunk disinformation quickly. Taiwan’s playbook is now studied in Washington and Brussels as a model of civilian-led resilience. Sweden, too, weathered a sustained influence campaign before its NATO accession and then rebuilt parts of its psychological defense around civilian institutions rather than intelligence services. The common thread in these successful approaches is uncomfortable for a country that prizes its own inventiveness: the defense that works is slow, boring, institutional, and enduring. It is a standing capability with a clear budget line, an identifiable leader, and a mandate that outlasts any single government. Israel, Ginsberg argues, is the one front in this global cognitive war that never built such an institution. The result is an asymmetry that grows worse every day. While Israel’s adversaries refine their AI-enabled bots, fake identities, and emotionally targeted narratives, the country’s official response remains fragmented among intelligence agencies, media watchdogs, and academic researchers who have no formal coordination and no shared authority. The recent use of fake Israeli identities and AI-generated content to infiltrate online spaces where Israelis consume and share information illustrates the sophistication of the threat. These operations are not clumsy or easy to spot; they are designed to blend into the flow of everyday digital life, waiting for the moment when a fabricated story aligns with an existing social tension and then detonating across networks.
The economics of the fight make the situation even worse. An influence operation can be launched from anywhere in the world for the price of an afternoon, and the material it produces never expires. A doctored clip forged in June can resurface in September with a new caption, and the fact-check written the first time does not travel with it. Each resurrection requires a new rebuttal, a new investigation, and a new explanation to the public. Defense, by contrast, is labor-intensive and expensive. Every fake has to be found, documented, rebutted, and then found again when it comes back in a slightly altered form. Small watchdog organizations such as FakeReporter are doing work that properly belongs to a standing national institution, and they are doing it on budgets that would not cover a single missile interceptor. This mismatch has profound strategic implications. The attacker only needs to succeed once; the defender must succeed every time. The attacker can deploy thousands of variations of a lie; the defender must answer each one without ever seeing the full scope of the campaign. The analysis warns that foreign influence operations are increasingly using fake Israeli identities and AI-generated content to infiltrate the online spaces where Israelis consume and share information, making it harder for ordinary citizens to distinguish between authentic conversations and manufactured ones. The result is a slow erosion of trust, not only in media institutions but in the very idea of a shared national reality. When citizens cannot agree on basic facts, democratic deliberation becomes impossible, and social solidarity weakens at precisely the moment it is needed most.
What is working so far, the analysis concedes, is not the product of government planning but of small, resilient civil society initiatives. FakeReporter and similar monitors find fake networks faster than any ministry does, and their researchers have documented the mechanisms of radicalization and amplification that make these campaigns effective. Newsrooms that have adopted rigorous verification practices before amplifying online material have started to close the laundering route that one in five campaigns depended on. And the individual habit of pausing before sharing something engineered to provoke remains a more powerful defense than it is often credited for. Readers who want to check what they are forwarding can use verified reference material instead of the feed that served them the fake. But the analysis warns of a next stage that could make all of these defenses obsolete: data contamination. Siman-Tov describes a future in which hostile actors pollute the information that artificial intelligence models are trained on, embedding falsehoods directly into the tools people trust for answers. The goal of such contamination is not necessarily to change how people vote; it is enough to plant the idea that the election is rigged, that the media is lying, and that the entire system is fraudulent. When false statistics and forged documents are seeded 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 who asks a chatbot about an Israeli election incident could receive, in confident and fluent prose, an invented event that traces back to a foreign fabrication mill, with no alert sounding and no warning label attached. The lie has been laundered not through a newsroom but through the archive itself, and correcting it means chasing copies of a training corpus that 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 answers to billions of people.
There is a quiet precedent for fixing this, and the analysis argues that Israel should follow its own history. Once, cybersecurity was treated 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 must now arrive for the cognitive layer. Every month without verification standards, every newsroom that publishes first and checks later, and every AI model trained on unexamined material makes the next campaign cheaper for the adversary and dearer for the defense. The cost of delay compounds quietly, and the river keeps rising whether or not anyone agrees it is a flood. Israel built its defenses for an ocean of missiles, with Iron Dome systems and missile interceptors designed to stop physical threats from crossing the border. But the country is now facing a river that never stops flowing, in its own language, carried not through the air but through the phones in every citizen’s pocket. The seawall was designed for a different sea. Without a national authority responsible for cognitive defense, without coordinated verification standards across media, and without public education that treats digital literacy as a security requirement, Israel will remain exposed to adversaries who have already learned that the most effective weapon is not a bomb but a believable lie. The political debate may remain focused on military and diplomatic crises, but the analysis concludes that the decisive battles of the coming decade are increasingly being fought in the invisible space between what is real and what is manufactured, and Israel is not yet winning that fight.