- Netanyahu is urging allies to prioritise TikTok as the key front in today’s information war.
- UN debates curbing US veto power, a step towards weakening Israel’s protection despite its digital campaigns.
Netanyahu Urges Focus on TikTok
On 25 September 2025, during a visit to the United States for the UN General Assembly in New York, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed a gathering of pro-Israel influencers at Israel’s Consulate General. He laid out his strategy for the information war, attacking what he called “the woke right”, labelling them as “The Woke Reich” and claiming they were no different from “the woke left”. He urged his loyalists to escalate online efforts in defence of Israel.
“You can’t fight today with swords… we have to fight with weapons that apply to the battlefield with which we engage. And the most important ones are on social media. And the most important purchase that is going on right now is… TikTok, number one”.
He singled out TikTok as the crucial arena where Israel is struggling to hold ground. Netanyahu openly conceded that Israel is “not winning” the propaganda battle. Netanyahu blamed hostile algorithms and an onslaught of automated accounts, citing advisers who told him that “about 60%” of the responses on social media are bots.
TikTok itself is undergoing a major shift. Under intense pressure from the US government, the company has agreed to transfer control of its American services to Oracle and its partners. Oracle’s founder, Larry Ellison, is one of Israel’s most significant private backers, donating $16.6 million in 2017 to Friends of the Israel Defence Forces. This development has sparked fears that the platform could be reshaped to align more closely with pro-Israel interests, undermining the very openness that made it a hub for dissenting voices.
Netanyahu then turned to the second platform he considers vital – X (formerly Twitter). Referring to its owner, he told his team of content creators: “Elon Musk is a friend, we should talk to him. Now if we get those two things, we get a lot”. One attendee, Elizabeth Savetsky, declared “this is my life.. this is what I eat, sleep and breathe… we need to find a path forward because our enemies want to destroy all of us”.
Seizing the Next Generation
The strategy is not confined to social media. Pro-Israel advocacy groups already operate in school systems. For example, StandWithUs runs educational programmes in middle and high schools, presenting pro-Israel material directly to students. Similarly, the Choices Program developed by Brown University has been scrutinised for alleged bias and foreign influence, with researchers warning that primary and secondary school curricula can be vulnerable to political agendas.
In the UK, critics have pointed out that teacher training kits like Sides Not Solutions package themselves as “neutral” while being tied to Zionist funding networks, subtly shaping how the conflict is taught in classrooms (Ebb Magazine).
The push into education isn’t just theoretical. In the comment section of a Times of Israel article, one supporter proposed arranging talks in schools about Israel and Gaza – specifically highlighting her access to Danish boarding schools. Such institutions cater to families with wealth and influence, meaning their students are disproportionately likely to become decision-makers in politics, business or media. Winning sympathy there is a long-term investment and one that Israelis are already targeting.
Together, these examples show that classrooms are being drawn into the information war. The transition from TikTok feeds to elite boarding schools underscores how every space where young minds are shaped – online or offline – is being treated as part of the battlefield.
The Online Arsenal Already in Play
Netanyahu’s call lands alongside documented takedowns of Israeli-linked influence networks. Meta removed a network tied to the Tel Aviv firm STOIC that used AI-generated comments and impersonated Jewish students, African Americans and other “locals” to push pro-Israel messages at US and Canadian audiences.
Independent investigations, including by FakeReporter and Haaretz, detail coordinated accounts driving traffic to fabricated news sites, with hundreds of avatars created on the same dates and posting near-identical content. Meta’s broader reporting, along with tech press coverage, shows this was part of a wave of covert operations using generative AI to flood comment threads during the Gaza genocide.
Adding to this operation, a recent Foreign Agents Registration Act filing revealed that SKDKnickerbocker, a top Democratic Party-aligned PR firm, signed a $600,000 contract with Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs to run a “bot-based program” aimed at “flooding the zone” with pro-Israel narratives across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn. The deal, brokered through Havas and overseen by SKDK’s parent company Stagwell Global, also tasked the firm with coaching Israeli spokespeople and arranging outreach to outlets like BBC, CNN, Fox and the Associated Press. The programe mirrors tactics already documented by Al Jazeera, in which AI-driven “superbots” swamp pro-Palestinian accounts with counter-messaging.
Decades of Dominance in the Media Sphere
Israel’s heavy investment in public diplomacy, commonly referred to as hasbara, predates social media by decades and involved government units and civil-society partners shaping foreign opinion through press, TV and culture. For years, this strategy benefited from sympathetic coverage and powerful patrons in Western media and entertainment. The late casino magnate Sheldon Adelson bankrolled Israel Hayom, a free daily, widely seen as pro-Netanyahu, that rapidly overtook rivals after its 2007 launch. A former Netanyahu aide later testified that the Prime Minister encouraged Adelson to found the paper to “take down” a competitor.
Media mogul Haim Saban has described himself as a “one-issue” figure, that issue being Israel, while funding policy shops like the Saban Center in Washington and maintaining deep Hollywood ties. Rupert Murdoch has been honoured for pro-Israel advocacy, including at American Jewish Committee events, where he praised Israel and pledged his media empire’s continued support.
This ecosystem was formidable in the broadcast era. Today, however, the gatekeepers are weaker. Raw frontline footage and youth-driven feeds bypass traditional editorial control and Zionist influence. It is this loss of control that explains why Netanyahu has fixed his sights on platforms like TikTok as the new front of the information war.
Netanyahu’s Islamophobia Project
Netanyahu’s current push is not just about defending Israel’s reputation – it reflects a decades-long project of tying Islam to terrorism. After his brother Yonatan was killed during the Entebbe raid in 1976, Netanyahu established the Jonathan Institute in 1979. The institute’s conferences in Jerusalem (1979) and Washington (1984) were among the first high-profile forums to frame terrorism as an Islamic threat, despite the fact that much of global terrorism at the time was secular or nationalist.
The 1984 conference produced a volume edited by Netanyahu himself, Terrorism: How the West Can Win, which circulated widely among US policymakers. Scholars note this helped entrench the association between Islam and terrorism in Western discourse – a framing that has dominated for decades. Seen in this light, the current information war is merely an evolution of Netanyahu’s ongoing campaign.
The Diplomatic Counteroffensive
Even as Israel intensifies online operations, momentum is shifting against it. Right-wing influencers who once stood firmly in Israel’s corner are now questioning its actions, sharing raw footage from Gaza and amplifying criticism once confined to the margins.
At the diplomatic level, various member states have long called for reforms to the Security Council’s veto power, urging that it be limited in cases of mass atrocities. In September 2025, Colombia initiated an effort at the UN General Assembly to directly challenge America’s use of the veto, which has repeatedly shielded Israel from accountability during the Gaza war. Since October 2023, the United States has cast six vetoes against Security Council resolutions that sought to halt the assault or hold Israel responsible for war crimes. If Colombia’s initiative gains traction and veto power is curbed or bypassed, Israel could face resolutions it cannot block. Yet amending the UN Charter to remove veto rights remains a formidable hurdle, since any change must be approved by all five permanent members, including those most invested in preserving their own veto.
At the same time, Jordan’s Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi told the UN that a committee of 57 Arab and Muslim countries is ready to guarantee Israel’s security. The condition, he said, is an end to the occupation and the creation of a Palestinian state. Safadi stressed that the Arab world is prepared for peace, but Israel continues to reject these terms.
War of Lies Against Unfiltered Truth
International watchdogs and technology firms continue to dismantle Israeli-linked influence networks while debate over US veto reform at the UN remains unresolved. At the same time, social media feeds are filled with raw, unedited footage from Gaza. Israel and its supporters have repeatedly attempted to reframe images of the atrocities as “Pallywood” or “Gazawood”, but the sheer scale of real-time, verifiable evidence has made those claims far less credible. The circulation of such videos is reshaping public opinion, exposing the conflict in stark detail. Netanyahu’s call to escalate digital campaigning underlines how important the information front has become to Israel’s strategy.
