On Nov. 5—shortly after Israel bombed a refugee camp and multiple universities and forced the only cancer treatment hospital in Gaza to close after it ran out of fuel—its official state Twitter account shared its second tweet tagging Taylor Swift within the short span of a month.
The account first shared a misleading post in October about a security guard at one of Swift’s “Eras Tour” shows who recently joined the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), framing him as one of Swift’s personal bodyguards to insinuate a close relationship between the two that news sources weren’t able to confirm. Referencing the lyrics of Swift’s song “Me!,” the state of Israel wrote, “Hey @taylorswift13, we promise you’ll never find another like him.” And in its Nov. 5 tweet, Israel called on Swift to publicly express support for Israeli hostages as “it would mean the world” for their family members. The account made no mention of the numerous family members who have called for a ceasefire to protect hostages from Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of Gaza, which has reportedly killed at least 60 hostages. Nor did Israel’s Twitter acknowledge the more than 10,000 Palestinians held as hostages in Israeli prisons without rights or fair trials.
Since Hamas’ attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, which came after 16 years of Israel’s violent, illegal blockade of Gaza, the Israeli military has spent the last month bombing the Gaza Strip and enforcing starvation conditions on the highly dense region, killing more than 17,000 according to Euro-Med Monitor, almost half children, as of Nov. 27. (These numbers are reported amid a temporary truce with Israel to allow for the exchange of hostages with Hamas; on Nov. 27, Israel announced a two-day extension to the four-day pause.) Yet, at the same time as these military activities, Israel has managed to remain active on state social media accounts. These activities have included attacking Palestinian-American supermodel Gigi Hadid on Instagram, tagging her in a graphic photo ostensibly depicting murdered Israeli children; sassily “clapping back” at the United Nations Geneva Twitter account for daring to implore Israel to abide by international law; cyber-bullying Greta Thunberg by pointing out that the materials in Hamas’ rockets aren’t sustainable and that the “victims of the Hamas massacre could have been your friends”; sharing fanart-like graphics equating Hamas with Voldemort; and, of course, forcing its way on our social feeds (and even children’s video games) via paid ads featuring graphic images and inflammatory language about Gaza and Hamas. The language and imagery attached to the posts read as if they’re directly addressing American audiences, coming off as an almost child-like cyber-appendage of the American pro-Israel propaganda machine.
“There’s an element of impersonation going on,” Dr. Marc Owen Jones, an associate professor at Hamad Bin Khalifa University whose research focuses on social media and disinformation in the Middle East, told Prism. It’s as if Israel’s Twitter account is “masquerading as a Gen-Z [or] as a millennial,” as it engages in trolling behavior reminiscent of a 4chan or 8chan account. “The gotchas, the ‘smackdowns,’ the vulgarity to the whole thing that I find very problematic, and I think people see it. I can’t tell if people are objecting, just because they don’t like that tone, or they find the tone inappropriate, or it’s disingenuous, but it doesn’t sit right … It’s as if [Israel has] got a marketing consultant that tells them, ‘If we tweet like this, we’ll get more engagement.’”
On top of being uncomfortably juvenile for a state social media account, many of the claims made in these posts—including that Hamas is “ISIS”—are categorically untrue, Jones said, characterizing the account’s purpose as “spreading false information” as far and wide as possible to shore up global support for Israel amid its escalating attacks on Gaza.
The Israeli state Twitter account’s bizarre behavior is comparable to popular stan accounts on Twitter, Jones notes, with its online clashes with critics and commentary obfuscating the atrocities it’s committing in Gaza reading like hostile stan wars: the pageantry, the “clapbacks,” the memes. Throughout Israel’s posting, offline, the consequences of its war crimes continue to pile up: Earlier this month, eight of 39 preterm babies who relied on incubators died in al-Shifa Hospital as Israel starved Gaza of fuel. More than two dozen of the preterm babies were transported to get care in Egypt in mid-November. Surgeons in Gaza this week shared that at least 16 emergency C-sections have been performed without anesthetic. This comes amid reports of Israeli snipers targeting doctors and patients in al-Shifa Hospital earlier this month, Gazan children starved to death by the Israeli blockade, and entire family lines killed by Israeli bombardment. Even amid a temporary truce, which has seen Israeli troops fire at Palestinians attempting to return to their homes, the death toll has continued to climb as Gazans succumb to untreated injuries and more bodies of children and adults are recovered under the rubble, where thousands remain trapped.
There’s certainly a tension between tweets that end with the words “full stop” or pander to Swifties while Israel bombs and starves 2.2 million Gazans locked in one of the densest strips of land in the world. Israel’s posts increasingly emit an air of desperation to justify military activities in Gaza, desperation to out-post Palestinians crying out for their lives under bombardment and perhaps to drown out the global cries online for a ceasefire.
In light of the prevalent narratives on Israel’s social media accounts, Susan Brewer, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point and author of “Why America Fights: Patriotism and War Propaganda from the Philippines to Iraq,” is reminded of what we saw in the U.S. at the onset of the Iraq War. That is, “a very deliberate campaign” in mass media—cable news, radio, ad campaigns—that “was made to look as though [the invasion of Iraq] was in response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11,” Brewer told Prism. The U.S. created a propaganda campaign to address public doubt and push back on critics who questioned the U.S. government’s true motives to rush into its war on Iraq because “there were many doubters and critics, so there had to be a steady march of ratcheting up the need to do this,” she said. Israeli state social media places a similar emphasis on the supposed necessity of its massacring of Gazans, framing it as justified retaliation for Oct. 7.
Wartime propaganda in mass media has historically followed many of the same patterns, Brewer says. The dehumanization of the supposed enemy is paramount, and nothing dehumanizes a population of people more than narratives about them butchering babies—an accusation levied by the U.S. against Saddam Hussein in the 2000s and levied by pro-Israel advocates against Hamas today. (However, the IDF eventually ceded that viral claims that Hamas had beheaded Israeli babies were unsubstantiated.) According to Brewer, pithy slogans are also essential: The Israeli Twitter has repeatedly accused people calling for a ceasefire of having “short-term memory” by supposedly forgetting Oct. 7—some users have reported seeing these posts as paid ads in their feeds. To counter these posts, supporters of Palestine have started a trend of sharing videos, photos, and posts from years ago depicting the brutalities of life under Israeli military occupation with the caption, “This did not start on Oct. 7.”
Israel’s digital presence reflects the historical wartime propaganda playbook for a social media age, Brewer notes. Social media presents a new medium for dissenting to war and combating the propaganda pushed by politicians and legacy media that didn’t exist during the Iraq War or World War II. In the face of Gazans sharing their lived experiences with the world to widespread support from people all around the world, Israel is visibly scrambling to respond in kind with its own digital presence. Posting aggressively, utilizing shock factor and sensationalism—the account’s tweets reflect the hysteria and intensity of radio hits and posters across the U.S. during the Cold War. And all of this, ostensibly, is a tactic to combat a high volume of pro-Palestinian outcry and dissent in real time.
Jones refers to this as “attention hacking,” a strategy he teaches to his students as firing off memes, videos, and other content to “speedily access people’s attention and get them to [share] stuff.” It’s this emphasis on sheer volume, he says, this significant investment in social media from Israel’s government that’s meant “to try and outpace the legitimate, genuine content” coming directly from Palestinians and those who support them.
David Saranga, the director of the digital diplomacy bureau in Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who oversees Israel’s social media presence, told Rolling Stone earlier this month that his team “is comprised of about 30 individuals, ranging from department heads to seasoned digital consultants, language managers, interns, and graphic designers.” He manages “more than 20 accounts in six languages” and estimates these accounts have “reached 2 billion people in the past month.”
A trained propagandist knows their audience: As Israel relies on Western nations for military aid and political validation, its social media posts cater to Western sympathy by mirroring our social consumption—recall the Israeli state’s tweets appealing to Swifties. “The demographic that they generally want to target, if you look at the paid ads they’ve done, is the West, 100%. That’s where they know the power is, the demographic they have to appeal to in order to sustain the military funding that enables Israel,” Jones said. “They’ve lost the Middle East. That’s not going to happen.”
Saranga confirmed to Rolling Stone that appealing to the West is, indeed, his strategy: “We have put out more than 2,500 posts in the last month that have reached over a billion English speakers,” he said. Through social media, Saranga explained, many users “finally understand the barbaric enemy we are fighting,” referring to Palestinians.
The targeted ads from Israel’s social media accounts, Jones notes, also appear to target Western audiences. Though based in Qatar, he recently visited Canada and saw ads he hadn’t seen before from the Israeli military on YouTube as well as his Twitter feed—highly graphic, “manipulative and emotive” ads. “It feels like exceptions are being made by the tech companies to allow Israel to do this,” Jones said, “exceptions that they wouldn’t allow for any other organization. And they certainly wouldn’t want Hamas to do it.”
Where the primary Israel Twitter account delivers slogans and memes, other Israeli state media accounts—namely Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s—say the quiet part aloud: Netanyahu has at varying points compared Israel’s genocide of Palestinians to a “struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness,” between “the forces of civilization” and “monstrous barbarians.” According to Jones, the range of social media posts from appeals to Swift to Netanyahu’s blatantly racist comparisons reflect “a multi-layered strategy designed to try and appeal to as many demographics as possible”—whether it’s young Swifties or older users who are particularly mobilized by narratives that Palestinians are barbaric and uncivilized. In both cases, Jones says, through two completely different tonal approaches, Israel is trying to justify and build support for slaughtering civilians in Gaza, especially “as it’s clear they’re killing so many civilians—I think they feel they have to ramp up this behavior because it’s clear they’re only going to lose more favor.”
But, truthfully, it’s hard to tweet anything more salient than a viciously endless timeline of images of mass Palestinian graves, parents holding the remains of their dead children in separate bags, children crying for a ceasefire, and recent graduation photos side by side with death announcements.
A hyperactive social media presence isn’t new for Israel. In 2013, USA Today reported that Israel hires university students specifically to defend its government and the occupation of Palestine on social media. Netanyahu’s office called the initiative “a groundbreaking project aimed at strengthening Israeli national diplomacy and adapting it to changes in information consumption.” The USA Today report from a decade ago remains relevant: Online influencers caping for Israel are struggling, to put it mildly. “Comedian” Amy Schumer’s Instagram posts referring to all Gazans as rapists and accusing Black Americans of not standing with Jewish people have, if anything, seemingly hurt public support for Israel in the U.S., telling on Zionism’s fundamental racism. “Stranger Things” lead actor Noah Schnapp’s posts calling supporters of Palestine supporters of terrorists have appeared to have a similar effect—as have Sarah Silverman’s posts justifying Israel’s blockade, starving Gaza of food, water, electricity, and other basic needs. Sen. John Fetterman’s (D-PA) frequent, aggressively enthusiastic tweets supporting Israel unconditionally through its actions in Gaza are met with an endless scroll of replies demanding a ceasefire and shaming the senator.
Curiously enough, despite Israel’s widely unpopular social media voice and the continued backlash against its famous surrogates, a spokesperson for Israel has emphasized that social media activity is actually central—even existential—to the government’s identity. Last December, when Jewish Insider introduced Saranga, he stressed social media’s prominent role in Israeli diplomacy. Saranga told the outlet that he instructs Israeli envoys to get active on all social platforms “to prepare for the future, in case something happens” and raised that Israel recently joined TikTok at the time to reach Gen Z.
When Saranga was asked about the IDF’s killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh and a 16-year-old Palestinian girl named Jana Zakarneh, both in 2022, he stressed the importance of social media “to put it all in the right context,” explaining, “The right context is the fact that it’s a war zone and there are terrorists there who are fighting with Israeli forces and are trying to penetrate Israel, to spread violence. It’s our duty to protect our citizens.”
All world governments propagandize—but of course, not all plead with Swift for a shout-out while bombing children’s hospitals weeks after trying to feud with Swift’s close friend Hadid.
Pro-Israel propaganda extends beyond the influx of online content being force-fed to social media users by Israeli state accounts. “The flip side of propaganda is censorship and shutting down debate and questions,” Brewer told Prism. Dissent to the Iraq War, for instance, was met with condemnation, loss of work, surveillance, and state punishment. Over the last few weeks, law firms and numerous Wall Street CEOs have stated refusal to employ students who protest for Palestinian human rights, several of whom have lost job offers. On top of this, numerous social media users and activists who have shared content critical of Israel and supportive of Palestine on social media report being shadow-banned, or having the reach of their content limited by social media companies; some have accused Meta and other social platforms of arbitrarily removing pro-Palestine content for violating unspecified “community guidelines.” Last month, Instagram apologized for adding the word “terrorist” to English translations of some users’ bios; these auto-translations read, “Praise be to god, Palestinian terrorists are fighting for their freedom.”
The punishment and diminishing of pro-Palestine voices offline and online, Jones notes, comes as Israel continues to flood social media timelines without an end in sight: “[For Israel], it’s about muddying the waters—at some point, it becomes effective when people don’t know what’s true anymore,” he told Prism, because there’s just too much content, too much stimulation, too much confusion. Social media users “become skeptical of everything,” Jones said. “They don’t know what to believe. And that inevitably benefits the attacker, the aggressor.”
That Israel “feels the need to” post in the way that it does on social media could be telling, Brewer says. In the U.S., which is the top contributor of military aid to Israel, 66% of all voters—including 80% of Democrats, 56% of Republicans, and 57% of Independents—support a ceasefire. Referencing Israeli social media tactics, she said, “If you feel that everyone’s already convinced, you don’t need to do this.’”
