Israel Is Fighting Cognitive Warfare with Hasbara

In July 2024, an Iranian cyber group compromised a French company that operated digital displays and tried to use them to show montages condemning Israeli athletes’ participation in the Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games. The group also planted a fabricated news story on a French collaborative media site and sent threats to Israeli athletes and people close to them. Those messages purported to come from “Regiment GUD,” a fictitious group whose name evoked GUD, a real French far-right organization.

This was part of a wider pattern. Under a separate persona, the same group had previously tried to contact the families of Israeli hostages held in Gaza, likely to inflict further psychological harm. In an October 2024 joint advisory, the FBI, the U.S. Treasury Department, and Israel’s National Cyber Directorate attributed the activity to Emennet Pasargad, which had used the Iranian company name Aria Sepehr Ayandehsazan as a cover. The advisory identified “Cyber Flood” and “Contact-HSTG” among the personas the group had used since October 2023.¹

Viewed separately, these incidents look like a burst of hacking and propaganda. Viewed together, they form a single operation. Intrusion, fabrication, impersonation, and psychological pressure worked toward the same end: changing the audience’s emotional state and its ability to judge what it was seeing, rather than establishing any particular claim as true.

The impersonation of a French far-right group was not simply an attack on Israel’s image. Its documented purpose was false attribution: to make the threats appear to come from a French domestic actor. It may also have weakened French citizens’ trust in their own political system, whether or not that was the intended effect. Despite its technological strength, Israel has yet to organize its institutions to recognize and respond to this kind of integrated operation.

Cognitive Warfare Is Not Disinformation

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. The Iranian operation surrounding the Olympics was not primarily trying to persuade the world of a false claim. It sought to frighten athletes, traumatize families, and signal to the public that no place, not even a sporting arena, was safe. Fact-checking could do little to answer a threat that was never chiefly about the truth of a claim.

The mechanism deserves a name. A cognitive operation works on the conditions in which people assess information. It captures and floods attention until judgment becomes harder. It stirs fear or anger to encourage reaction over reflection. It undermines trust in sources, making reliable information harder to recognize. And it turns questions of evidence into tests of identity, so that considering a contrary view can feel like betrayal. These methods exploit ordinary features of human cognition; education or sophistication offers no automatic protection. The target is not simply what people know, but how they decide what to believe.

The Olympics operation also shows how such campaigns manufacture the appearance of authenticity. Under the persona “Cyber Court,” the Iranian actor promoted a roster of purported hacktivist groups that it had created itself, making a coordinated operation look like a spontaneous movement. The aim was to obscure who was speaking. When citizens cannot readily tell an independent voice from a disguised state operation, they lose a basis for judging what they hear. That erosion of trust, rather than any single false story, is the strategic prize.

One Word, Five Missions

If a threat operates on several layers at once, the defense must be able to distinguish among them. For any act of state communication, four questions matter: Who is the audience? Who is authorized to act? What counts as success? And where are the legal and democratic limits? The answers define five distinct functions.

Respond to the daily press, and the function is public affairs. It serves domestic and foreign journalists through official spokespeople and is judged chiefly by accuracy and clarity. Build relationships with foreign publics, and the function is public diplomacy. It works over years rather than news cycles, speaks openly in the state’s name, and is judged by credibility and standing. Align what a state does with what it says, and the function is strategic communication. It spans audiences and agencies, and its test is coherence.

Influencing a hostile audience abroad is a different task. Psychological and influence operations are conducted by military or intelligence services under specific legal authority and are judged by their effect on behavior. Defending a society’s own discourse against foreign manipulation is different again. This fifth function faces the strictest limits: detecting and exposing foreign interference while strengthening the public’s ability to recognize it.³

The five functions are not different names for the same task. Each requires its own expertise, legal authority, and standards of evidence. Combine them in one undifferentiated operation, and each suffers. The framework also helps identify where an adversary is acting and where Israel has left a gap in its defenses. Iran alone operates across all five layers, making it the most difficult of the four cases. Qatar builds influence through public diplomacy and the narratives carried by its media. Russia erodes trust within domestic discourse. China shapes the information environment in which all these efforts are received. Seen through this framework, the adversaries’ methods and Israel’s blind spots come into focus together.

Reading the Four Adversaries by Function

Iran operates across all five layers. The Olympics operation offered a glimpse of a broader system that combines cyber intrusion, fabricated media, physical intimidation, and organized lobbying. In November 2025, a website calling itself the Punishment for Justice Movement published a list of hundreds of Israeli academics, including their home addresses and contact details, alongside bounties of up to $100,000 for murder. The site presented itself as an independent international movement, disclosed no connection to Tehran, and was taken offline within hours. Analysts nevertheless see it as part of a broader pattern of Iranian regime activity. Its design brought the elements together in one place: incitement, personal data, and the threat of violence.⁴ For Tehran, these are parts of a single instrument. The Iranian group behind the Olympics operation, which has been separately and formally attributed, has also obtained footage from Israeli IP cameras and incorporated generative AI into its operations. This is the mark of a mature system: each capability reinforces the others, producing operations that no agency organized around a single function is equipped to counter.⁵ A defender that leaves these layers to separate, uncoordinated agencies gives up the coherence its attacker already possesses.

Qatar operates in a sphere Israel scarcely defends. It presents itself as a mediator and partner rather than an adversary, building influence through public diplomacy and soft power over decades, often in the language of philanthropy. As of February 2026, Qatar was reportedly the largest foreign source of gifts and contracts disclosed by American universities, at roughly $8.8 billion, much of it channeled through state-linked entities.⁶ Its lobbying presence in Washington exceeds that of any other government by several measures. Since September 2025, it has held an American security guarantee unprecedented for any Arab state.⁷ In the media sphere, the U.S. Justice Department determined in September 2020 that AJ+, the U.S.-based arm of Qatar-funded Al Jazeera, acted under the direction and control of the Qatari government and was required to register as a foreign agent. A House oversight committee reported in February 2024 that AJ+ had not done so.⁸ None of this is a cyberattack. It is influence, directed at a space where Israel has no dedicated means of response.

Russia’s aim is neither to win admiration nor to persuade. It seeks to erode trust in institutions, elections, and evidence until doubt becomes the default. Its Doppelganger operation creates lookalikes of legitimate news outlets, while its Storm-1516 network produces fabricated videos and channels them through Western influencers.⁹ Its broader effort to flood the open web with coordinated content now extends to influencing the AI systems through which people increasingly seek information, although the scale of that influence remains disputed.¹⁰ This is cognitive warfare in its purest form. It attacks not the fact but the faculty of judgment itself.

China presents the most complex case because Israel is rarely its primary target. Israeli research suggests that Beijing amplifies anti-Israel narratives chiefly to undermine the United States. Israel bears the consequences of that rivalry, and the amplification has become increasingly visible since the war began.¹¹ Its reach extends from state media and covert networks such as Spamouflage to the recommendation systems of platforms where a growing share of Americans, especially younger adults, get their news.¹² China does not need to write every hostile message. Shaping the conditions under which some messages spread while others disappear may be enough. In the twentieth century, states fought over broadcast towers. In the twenty-first, they contest the systems that determine what people discover and what remains unseen.

Generative AI amplifies the capabilities of all four adversaries. It allows a small team to create convincing personas, multilingual content, and synthetic media at low cost, lowering the barriers to every kind of operation described here. The extent to which AI has contaminated the information supply remains disputed and should not be overstated. The direction, however, is clear: producing a convincing falsehood is becoming cheaper faster than detecting one. That favors defenders who have prepared in advance over those forced to improvise during an attack.

Why Israel Cannot Answer

Israel meets this five-layered assault with a single word: *hasbara*. The term has become a conceptual trap, grouping distinct missions together without giving each its own structure, authority, or professional standards. The same body, staff, and budget cannot be expected to persuade a hostile European government, counter an Iranian influence operation, protect Israeli citizens from Russian manipulation, and engage a skeptical American campus. These tasks call for strategic communication, information warfare, psychological defense, and public diplomacy, respectively. Treating them as one function makes it harder to perform any of them well.

The failure is structural, rather than a failure of talent or the fault of any single government. It has three dimensions. First, authority is scattered across ministries, with no empowered center to coordinate them. The short-lived Public Diplomacy Ministry illustrates the problem. Established when the government took office at the end of 2022, it lost its minister five days into the war and was closed by the cabinet in October 2023.¹³ Conceptually, collapsing five distinct functions into one leaves Israel responding to an attack on the foundations of trust and judgment with messages aimed at changing opinions. It is the wrong tool for the level under attack. Politically, once these instruments are seen as serving a party or leader, they lose the credibility on which they depend.

Consider the operation surrounding the Olympics. When an Iranian actor threatened Israeli athletes, fabricated a French news report, and sent messages to the families of hostages, which Israeli body was responsible for the response? No single body was. Technical attribution worked: Israel’s National Cyber Directorate co-signed a joint advisory with its American counterparts. But responsibility for the other parts of the response was unclear. The threats to citizens called for a psychological defense function Israel has never built. The fabricated news report called for a detection and exposure function of the kind found in France and Sweden, but not in Israel. Strategic framing fell to a coordinating center without the authority to direct the ministries it nominally leads. The operation struck four layers. One had a clear owner; three did not.

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. In spring 2026, the government took two steps in the right direction. It appointed a head of the National Public Diplomacy Directorate, a post that had been vacant for two years.¹⁵ And it approved a dedicated public diplomacy unit inside the Foreign Ministry, headed at a rank equal to the ministry’s senior political post.¹⁶ Both are genuine improvements, but they also show the limits of this approach. Consolidation gives a ministry control over its own operations. It does not give it authority over the Prime Minister’s Office, the Diaspora Affairs Ministry, the Government Press Office, or the military.

Two of the five functions cannot sit within a foreign ministry at all. Operations that must not be attributed to Israel cannot be run by an institution whose purpose is to speak openly on Israel’s behalf. Once a foreign ministry is suspected of covert influence, the credibility of its official communications is at risk.

Detecting foreign manipulation is also a data task, not a messaging task. It requires network forensics, signature analysis, and comparison with intelligence holdings. Those capabilities belong in the cyber and intelligence services; rebuilding them inside a diplomatic service would make little sense. France places its detection unit under its national defense and security secretariat. Sweden has a standalone psychological defense agency. Britain’s communication service sits in the Cabinet Office, above individual ministries.

The mismatch goes beyond institutional authority. A foreign ministry’s craft is explanation. It speaks in its own name through attributed channels and judges its work by whether it is understood and trusted. Influence is a different discipline. It seeks to change a target audience’s behavior, sometimes without that audience knowing the source, and is judged by its effects. Excellence at one does not confer expertise in the other.

Nor is a foreign ministry equipped to coordinate the whole effort. It lacks the command structure to direct several arms in real time and has no authority over the military or intelligence services. Coordinating all five functions requires an institution with authority across them, rather than a ministry operating alongside them.¹⁷

Separation Is the Safeguard

An obvious objection arises, and it deserves a direct answer: Would a state that builds a psychological defense capability risk creating a “ministry of truth” that a government could turn against its own citizens and the press? The concern is legitimate. It is precisely why these functions must be kept separate.

Of the five functions, the one that touches domestic discourse—defense against foreign manipulation—must face the strictest limits. Its mandate must cover foreign states and their proxies, never the lawful speech of citizens. Its role must be to detect, disclose, and publicly expose manipulation, never to suppress speech. It must rely on open sources rather than covert collection and operate under independent legal and scientific oversight. France’s VIGINUM operates within such limits.

The greater danger lies in the fusion of functions Israel practices today. An apparatus that both explains the state to the world and seeks to shape opinion at home is far closer to a ministry of truth. Drawing clear boundaries is how Israel prevents one.

The Wrong Tool for the Real War

For anyone who has worked in this field, the conclusion is practical. Offensive psychological operations, public diplomacy, and the protection of citizens cannot be managed by the same people, under the same authority, from the same desk. These distinctions are more than bureaucratic formalities. They determine whether a defender can recognize an attack as it unfolds.

The separation required is straightforward. Israel needs a professional body spanning ministries to coordinate strategic communication, insulated from day-to-day political demands. It needs clear legal boundaries between legitimate influence abroad, communication with the Israeli public, and offensive operations against an enemy. It also needs a civilian unit, modeled on France’s, to detect foreign influence within strict legal limits. Allied democracies already have these tools. Israel lacks the decision to adopt them.

Israel’s adversaries operate as integrated systems, striking across multiple layers at once. Israel still responds chiefly by correcting facts and pushing messages. The deeper contest is over trust, judgment, and the will to act. Until Israel establishes clear boundaries between its own functions, it will keep bringing a message to a battle that is about much more than messaging.

* * *

Notes