Israeli gov-led Zoom calls, WhatsApp chat logs, and other docs provide a window into the massive…

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Inside the Pro-Israel Information War

Israeli gov-led Zoom calls, WhatsApp chat logs, and other docs provide a window into the massive effort to shape online discourse and silence pro-Palestinian voices.

As the Israel-Hamas war began to heat up in late October, Courtney Carey, a Dublin-based employee of the Israeli website building company Wix, posted the Irish words “SAOIRSE DON PHALAISTIN” – “Freedom for Palestine” – on her LinkedIn page.

Within 24 hours of Carey’s LinkedIn post appearing, Alon Ozer, a Miami-based investor, took a screenshot of the post and shared it with a WhatsApp group of more than 300 like-minded investors, tech executives, activists, and at least one senior Israeli government official. Ozer took care to note that Carey worked for Wix.

Oded Hermoni, a tech journalist-turned-venture capitalist, piped up to assure everyone that Batsheva Moshe, Wix’s general manager for Israel and a member of the group chat, had been “on it since Sat[urday] night.”

Moshe then chimed in to assure her peers that the issue with Carey had been “taken care of since it was published.”

“I believe there will be an announcement soon re our reaction,” she added.

Wix terminated Carey the following day.

Read the whole article as it’s an investigation into Israel’s information war

bullet points for notes/excerpts:

• a loose network of pro-Israel investors, tech executives, activists, and Israeli government officials. various independent players in Silicon Valley’s pro-Israel community swap ideas, identify enemies, and collaborate on ways to defend Israel in the media, academia, and the business world. 
• And the tactics that these wealthy individuals, advocates, and groups use – hounding Israel critics on social media; firing pro-Palestine employees and canceling speaking engagements; smearing Palestinian journalists; and attempting to ship military-grade equipment to the IDF – are often heavy-handed and controversial.
• “President Biden seems incapable of using the one policy tool that may actually produce a change in Israel’s actions that might limit civilian deaths, which would be to condition military aid that the United States provides to Israel,” Clifton added. He partially attributed the inability of the U.S. government to rein in Israel’s war actions to the “lobbying and advocacy efforts underway.”
• Schwarzbard instructed participants on the call to use certain hashtags when discussing the conflict, such as #HamasIsISIS, #IStandwithIsrael, and #IsraelUnderAttack. The strategy would boost engagement and bring a large audience to the pro-Israel cause, she explained.
• stressed the need to refocus attention on Israeli civilian deaths. “Try to use names and ages whenever you can,” she said. Don’t refer to statistics of the dead, use stories. “Say something like, ‘Noah, age 26, was celebrating with her friends at a music festival on the holiest day of the week, Shabbat. Imagine if your daughter was at Coachella.’”
• But Fisher also emphasized the importance of an occasional soft touch on social media that is appropriate for defusing more mild critics and harnessing potential allies. 
• Fisher repeatedly noted the need to offer accurate and nuanced information to rebut critics of Israel’s actions. Yet at times, he offered his own misinformation, such as his claim that "anti-Israel” human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch “didn’t condemn the October 7th massacre.”
• Other fundraising efforts from J-Ventures included an emergency fund to provide direct support for IDF units, including the naval commando unit Shayetet-13. 

they identify three groups that have the potential for pro-israeli sentiment:

• “the impressionables,” who are “typically young people, they reflexively support the weak, oppose the oppressor,” but “are not really knowledgeable.” For this category of people, the goal is not to “convince them of anything,” but to “show them that it’s much more complicated than it seems.” Seeding doubt, he said, would make certain audiences think twice before attending a protest.
• “uncomfortable sympathizer,” a group that “wants to support Israel – they’re typically more liberal,” but opposes the current government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. These types can be won over, Fisher said, by pointing out “that we are a multi-ethnic, diverse, democratic liberal society with rotten apples.”
• “reflexively pro-Israel, kind of ‘Israel, right or wrong.’” Members of this group “are not actually very knowledgeable,” so they needed to be equipped with the right facts to make them “more effective in advocating for Israel,” Fisher said.

technological efforts to suppress pro-palestinian voices:

• Gadi Hutt, senior director of business development at Amazon-owned subsidiary Annapurna Labs, has helped the J-Ventures team pressure the Amazon online marketplace to remove t-shirts and other merchandise that feature the slogan, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” – a campaign that was ultimately successful, he announced to the WhatsApp group.
• Hutt also informed the WhatsApp group that he was leading “a group of technologists to implement multiple projects aiding the war effort.” One of the J-Ventures documents lists Hutt as the point person for Canary Mission, a controversial group that blacklists pro-Palestinian figures on college campuses, to help the group train "AI models to classify antisemitic posts from Twitter.”
• J-Ventures donated $19,531 to DigitalDome.io, an initiative that promotes itself as an online version of Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system, promising that “offensive and malicious content is intercepted here.”
• J-Ventures also promoted IronTruthBot, a bot that automates the process of removing “inflammatory, false, and defamatory posts against Israel from all platforms.” The project was described as being developed by a group of volunteers, receiving 700 reports a day and succeeding in removing “hundreds of inappropriate posts.”

other interesting tidbits:

The little-known DigitalDome.io website is labeled by J-Ventures as part of its hasbara, or pro-Israel public relations efforts, and is run in partnership with the Israeli fact-checking website FakeReporter, which was founded by Achiya Schatz, a veteran of the IDF’s undercover commando unit, Duvdevan. Schatz has had a curious career trajectory, however; prior to founding FakeReporter, he served as communications director for the left-wing Israeli group Breaking the Silence.

But the advocacy group’s “just asking questions”-style report mostly backfired. Reuters, AP, the New York Times, and CNN denied any prior knowledge of Eslaiah or other freelancers coordinating with Hamas. Some of the outlets went further, condemning HonestReporting’s work for jeopardizing the safety of freelance journalists working in a war zone. The New York Times, for example, said in a statement, “We are gravely concerned that unsupported accusations and threats to freelancers endangers them and undermines work that serves the public interest.” 
HonestReporting ended up on the defensive. Rather than apologize though, the lead author of the report, Gil Hoffman, a former Jerusalem Post reporter who is now executive director of HonestReporting, deflected criticism by asserting that his organization had “raised questions” without providing definitive answers. Hoffman told Reuters that he accepted the news organizations’ denials and was “so relieved” to hear them. He also condemned Israeli government officials for what he saw as taking liberties with the report.