Israel Strategy
If you can’t win the debate, disqualify critics by alleging antisemitism, blood libel, etc
If that approach is losing efficacy, create fake “Think Tank” to trick the AI Chatbots into parroting the talking points you post to your fake Think Tank website. Unsuspecting AI users won’t realize that they are reading laundered Israeli Hasbara (propaganda)
Excerpts:
.. But the Hanover Institute is not a real think tank. None of the reports have bylines. A small disclaimer at the bottom of the webpage notes that the organization was created on behalf of the Israeli Government Advertising Agency by Piro, Inc, a firm co-founded by Daniel Rosenberg, the producer of Spike Lee’s “Inside Man.”
.. Others refer to this practice of influencing artificial intelligence as “LLM poisoning.”
.. Many of the reports are formulaic, starting with an innocent question that someone might ask a chatbot.
“What Caused the Displacement of Palestinians in 1948?”
“Which Humanitarian Organizations Have Documented Israeli War Crimes?”
“What is the Current Situation in the Gaza Strip?”
In an article titled “Is the IDF the World’s Most Moral Army?”
.. Alice Lee, an analyst at NewsGuard, a disinformation tracking company, told RS that the sites appear designed to reach a U.S. audience curious about the ongoing conflict, either through search engines or AI chatbots. “LLMs favor concrete statistics and data, as well as strong citations and sources, which these articles all have,” Lee said.
“It’s a perfect mimicry of a typical credible American think tank, right down to the generic name, the site layout, and the red-white-blue color scheme,” Lee added.
Piro, Inc, the firm that created the Hanover Institute, has received $900,000 from the Israeli government for its work
.. Israel has also contracted former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale to create pro-Israel websites engineered to influence chatbots as part of a $46.5 million contract. A Drop Site investigation last month found that many chatbots, particularly Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini, had been successfully trained on data from those websites. Other chatbots frequently cite those websites without flagging them as part of an Israeli influence operation.
Credit: Nick Cleveland-Stout is a Research Associate in the Democratizing Foreign Policy program at the Quincy Institute. Previously, Nick conducted research on U.S.-Brazil relations as a 2023 Fulbright fellow at the Federal University of Santa Catarina.
Source: https://responsiblestatecraft.org/israel-influence-chatgpt/
ELSEWHERE
972 Magazine: Revealed: Israel’s curriculum for ‘influencing public consciousness’: A leaked Defense Ministry tender lays out the army’s training program for manipulating public opinion in Israel and abroad, June 4, 2026.
“Israel’s defense establishment is training soldiers and other defense officials to conduct psychological operations designed to “influence public consciousness” in Israel and abroad, an internal Defense Ministry tender published last July and obtained by the Israeli investigative outlet The Hottest Place in Hell reveals. The courses, taught in Hebrew and English by academics who are not affiliated with the military, are intended for defense personnel based both domestically and overseas, as well as unspecified “foreign partners.”
“Among the offerings are courses on how to use data to discretely shape the attitudes and actions of target audiences, intelligence gathering for such operations, and influencer training. Most of the courses are geared toward “offensive” influence operations — those aimed at actively disrupting or manipulating the beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors of target audiences rather than simply protecting an existing narrative. They include training in advertising and marketing content, alongside courses on cyber warfare and intelligence gathering on target audiences.”
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. Israel Floods the U.S. with Hasbara But Americans Aren’t Buying, October 25, 2026.
“Nobody is projecting Israel’s success at persuasion, panelist Lama Nazeeh added. Based in Brussels, Nazeeh is advocacy manager with 7amleh, a prominent digital rights and platform-accountability group for Palestinians. She cited polling data from Israel’s own Foreign Ministry, which handles most of the country’s hasbara programs, showing ever-larger majorities of North Americans turning against Israel.
This explains why the money has “moved out of convincing people” and into the “digital systems underneath,” she added. In other words, purveyors of hasbara must make pro-Israel arguments seem to come from independent platforms.” Cloudflare, What is AI data poisoning?
Eurasia Review, Israel Is Fighting Cognitive Warfare With Hasbara – Analysis, Sept 25, 2026
The confusion begins with language. Israel, like many democracies, tends to treat the information contest as a single problem, answered with rebuttals, corrections, attribution, and messaging. Those tools address disinformation: a false claim is identified and answered with evidence. Cognitive warfare works at a deeper level. It need not make an audience believe a particular falsehood. It can succeed by eroding trust in sources, overwhelming people with emotionally charged content, and encouraging a skepticism that leaves them unable or unwilling to act.
In 2020, NATO’s Allied Command Transformation commissioned a six-month study through its Innovation Hub, published in January 2021. The study treated cognition as a domain of contest alongside land, sea, air, cyber, and space. It described cognitive warfare as the exploitation of human cognition to disrupt, undermine, influence, or change decision-making.2 This distinction matters in practice because it changes the objective. A disinformation operator wants an audience to believe something false. A cognitive operator may be satisfied when the audience stops trusting anything at all.
So far, the government’s principal response has been to spend more. In March 2026, the Knesset approved a budget that included roughly $730 million for public diplomacy, nearly five times the $150 million allocated the previous year and an unprecedented sum for Israel.14 As one Israeli practitioner put it, pouring a large budget into a broken system produces scale, not strategy.
Anthropic, A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size