A week and a half ago, a Hamas rocket fired from Gaza – one of 10,500 launched into Israel since the current conflict began – scored a direct hit on a house less than 300 meters from mine in the outskirts of Tel Aviv.
Fortunately, as soon as the sirens sounded, the residents headed for their shelter and escaped unharmed. But it was a salutary reminder of our vulnerability.
Living, like us, six miles from Ben Gurion Airport – one of the main targets of Palestinian terrorists – we have become accustomed to the daily blare of air raid sirens when incoming missiles are detected and to the deafening sound of explosions while Israel’s Iron Dome air defense system has been activated.
I have three daughters, the youngest of whom is ten, and my wife and I lead them to our shelter – every new home in Israel must have one by law – once, if not twice a day.
Apart from the trauma this brings, they do not receive any significant training because their teachers are called on reserve duty.
An AI-generated image related to the Israel-Hamas conflict is shared, showing a boy, covered in dust and blood, standing next to his deceased mother
Seeing my girls undergo such an ordeal only fuels my anger at the way so many people in the West, especially among the younger generation, have taken up the Palestinian cause and view Israel with such baseless hostility.
The situation is all the more tragic because so much of this poison stems from ignorance.
This was recently vividly illustrated by an exercise that Jewish-American comedian Mikey Greenblatt performed on the streets of New York.
He randomly approached people asking them to sign a petition in support of Hamas and the liberation of Palestine.
Once they agreed, he insisted on quoting them the fine print, which included the slaughter of every Jew, Christian and non-Muslim in the world, making homosexuality a capital crime, and the implementation of a system of sharia law. legislation that would ban women from showing their knees or hair, exercising in public or traveling without a man’s permission.
Naturally, all his potential backers responded by executing abrupt U-turns.
But this grotesque level of ignorance about the true nature of Hamas means that many in the West are susceptible to the terrorists’ propaganda.
The truth is that Israel, for all its economic power and social sophistication, as well as the support of the leaders of the free world, is losing the battle for the hearts and minds on the streets.
Another AI-generated image shows a baby trapped in rubble during a multimedia campaign based on a combination of fake news and fake images
And this is thanks in large part to a multimedia campaign based on a combination of fake news, fake images and a sinister manipulation of social media.
When it comes to online propaganda, Hamas has a huge built-in advantage. While the world’s Jewish population is 15.3 million – 0.2 percent of the global total – there are no fewer than 1.9 billion Muslims – 24 percent.
Obviously, not every Muslim is a supporter of the psychopathic Hamas, but many are broadly sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, often because they are unfamiliar with the history of the conflict.
This means Israeli influencers face an uphill battle to make headway on sites like TikTok.
In the last week of October, the hashtag #standwithpalestine was viewed 251 million times on the video hosting site, while #standwithisrael only received 65 million views.
This is an AI-generated image of a toddler standing in the rubble and witnessing a fiery explosion due to aerial bombardment
Not content with this numerical advantage, Hamas and its allies, likely funded by Iran, are resorting to increasingly sophisticated dirty tricks to press their advantage. Cyber companies are being hired to use bots – automated software programs – to bombard pro-Israel posts with hundreds of pro-Palestinian messages.
Bots are also used to file fake reports with moderators of Facebook, to suicide or suicide. -harmful.
If a moderator receives 500 notifications within minutes or hours, he or she can take the path of least resistance and suspend the targeted account indefinitely.
Another danger of social media is that it is essentially designed as an echo chamber. Users who view or search for a particular topic are then presented with more of the same type of content, a process that only serves to confirm their biases.
And there’s plenty of content. Since the advent of the smartphone, everyone has been a photographer and, thanks to Photoshop, also a special effects expert. One digitally edited photo of a giant Palestinian flag being unfurled during a football match has been viewed millions of times.
Israeli influencers face an uphill battle to make headway on sites like TikTok
That said, in the age of AI (artificial intelligence), there is no need to even bother taking a photo. AI tools such as DALL-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion are capable of creating eerily realistic images based on textual descriptions.
As Israel’s largest news website reported earlier this month, “Anyone can write a sentence like ‘Two Palestinian children covered in blood standing next to their mother’s body among the rubble of a building in the Gaza Strip’ and the generator will do what it tells it to do.” want. .’
But the disinformation is not limited to the online world. The mainstream media is also guilty and yes, BBC, I’m talking about you.
Hamas’ talent for malicious fabrication has rarely been used to more damaging effect than in the now infamous case of the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital bombing.
It is now widely recognized that the bombing of al-Ahli Arab Hospital was caused by a missile launched by Islamic Jihad that failed to comply.
The terrorists’ claim that the Gaza City medical facility was bombed by the Israelis, killing 500 Palestinians, was rejected in its entirety by the BBC.
But it is now widely accepted that this was caused by a missile launched by Islamic Jihad that failed to comply.
Another example of the BBC’s bias only emerged last week when its international editor, Jeremy Bowen, refused to accept that a stockpile of Kalashnikovs had been seized by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) at Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital taken, constituted compelling evidence that Hamas had a base there. . He even suggested that the weapons might belong to the “security department,” an absurd claim that directly echoed the words of a senior Hamas terrorist on Al Jazeera two days earlier.
The relentless barrage of anti-Israel propaganda has had a horrific effect on environments such as college campuses. When I studied in Britain in the mid-1990s, I was greeted with nothing but kindness and was not afraid to reveal that I was Israeli.
But times have clearly changed. Late last month, Jewish peer Lord Wolfson told the House of Lords that he was more concerned about the safety of his daughter, who wears a Star of David in London, than that of his son, who is in the IDF.
The BBC’s international editor Jeremy Bowen refused to accept that a cache of Kalashnikovs seized by the IDF from al-Shifa hospital was evidence that Hamas had a base there.
A generation of young people has been brainwashed by a specific narrative, which is reinforced by an endless series of demonstrations.
In this mirror world, where truth and untruth become increasingly indistinguishable, it has never been more important for the media to exercise the utmost accuracy in defense of the values and principles cherished by freedom-loving peoples around the world .
Ami H. Orkaby is a prominent lawyer and former senior advisor to the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office.