5/6/2024–|Last updated: 6/5/202410:14 PM (Mecca time)
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz published a lengthy report on a secret influence campaign launched by Israel targeting American lawmakers in an attempt to influence global public opinion regarding the war in Gaza.
The report said that fake accounts and websites published content supportive of Israel and inciting hatred of Islam. The operation was organized by the Israeli Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and managed by a political campaign company.
She explained that the Israeli government is behind this large-scale campaign that primarily targets young black and progressive legislators in the United States and Canada.
The operation, which Haaretz first learned of its existence last March, began after the start of the war in Gaza and was intended to influence certain sectors of public opinion regarding Israel’s behavior.
Political campaign company
The influence campaign used misinformation about anti-Semitism on American campuses, and the operation was launched by a private Israeli online political campaign company called Stoic that was contracted for the project.
According to sources and information obtained by Haaretz, the operation was carried out by a different party than the Ministry of Diaspora, for fear that its disclosure would lead to Israel’s involvement in a crisis.
The campaign began by creating three fake “news websites” that copied reports from official media sources. These sites used the platforms AEX, Facebook, and Instagram, which gathered tens of thousands of followers.
At the same time, the people running the operation used hundreds of avatars to aggressively promote alleged articles that served the Israeli narrative, including alleged reports on sexual assaults by the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) and on relations between the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) and Hamas. .
The follow-up report now shows the full extent of Israel’s influence operation, which has turned into a “large-scale, well-coordinated effort to attack and discredit groups that are typically pro-Palestinian.”
These groups include citizens of Western countries, mainly the United States and Canada, of Muslim origins, using anti-Islamic and anti-immigrant content.
Arab slave traders
The analysis found four websites using the same intellectual property and promoting content designed for specific audiences. One of them was the United States Citizens for Canada website, which had multiple social media accounts and posted highly anti-Islamic material, including claims that Muslim immigrants pose a threat to Canada and demand a legitimate country.
Another site, the Arab Slave Trade Site, was almost entirely copied from Wikipedia and was targeting black Americans, in an attempt to repeat the message that Arabs were slave traders in Africa.
Another website called Serenity Now describes itself as anti-establishment, seeking to persuade young Americans to oppose the creation of a Palestinian state because “states are man-made structures” and a Palestinian state “would harm the goals of the progressive movement.”
Facebook deleted the accounts linked to these fake sites a few weeks ago. Meta and Open AI (Open Artificial Intelligence) confirmed the existence of the influence operation and attributed it to the Israeli company Stoic.
According to information obtained by Haaretz, “Stoic” has several software systems that allow identifying the characteristics of target audiences and creating tailored content for them, in addition to an influence platform called “Maasher” that was able to create fake accounts on the Internet and activate them simultaneously on several social networks.
Harm Israel
Three sources from the field of public diplomacy and influence campaigns say the revelations about the campaigns have hurt Israel and affected its ability to respond online in support of the Israeli narrative.
One of them said: “It is a shame that Facebook and OpenEye are following real-life Western campaigns aimed at convincing people and answering dangerous lies.”
Various Israeli officials say the war in Gaza has revealed a “massive failure” in Israel, or in public diplomacy. Despite massive investment in various public relations organizations over the years, Israel has been unable to effectively deal with the influx of pro-Palestinian messages on social media, which included denials of sexual violence from the October 7 attack of which it was part.
Israel lacked the digital assets needed to deal with what it called the “pro-Palestinian poison machine” and to adequately propagate Hamas’ “atrocities” and defend the war in Gaza.