Introduction

Israel’s enemies and adversaries have long understood that they need not defeat it on the battlefield to diminish its power. They can erode its legitimacy, isolate it diplomatically, apply legal pressure, infiltrate academic and research institutions, fund organizations and campaigns, shape social media debate, and weaken its ties with friendly countries and diaspora Jewry. This is soft warfare, but the name should not mislead us: its consequences are severe, cumulative, and sometimes irreversible. Israel is fighting a war on multiple fronts, yet this theater—one of its most important—still has no headquarters, no national assessment of the situation, and no clear assignment of responsibility within the state.

The War of Redemption revealed the full extent of this shortcoming. Alongside its military and intelligence successes, Israel faced a parallel campaign in which images, claims, partial data, and timed messages generated pressure, sometimes within hours, on governments, international institutions, universities, businesses, and other audiences. In this theater, the side with the stronger factual case does not always prevail. What counts is who first recognizes the theater, brings together funding, organization, technology, and narrative, acts continuously, and can translate public influence into diplomatic, legal, or economic decisions. The “Gaza starvation” campaign in the summer of 2025 demonstrated the effectiveness of soft warfare and considerably affected the IDF’s use of force. The “settler violence” campaign likewise turned the portrayal of reality on its head and sparked debate worldwide, including among Israel’s closest friends in the United States. More recently, the mendacious documentary Collateral Damage (abbreviated NAZA in Hebrew) showed the enormous harm such campaigns cause Israel. Israel’s response, as always, came after the fact, seeking to limit damage already done. The film illustrates how ammunition is created for cognitive warfare that can shape the debate about Israel and fuel public, legal, and diplomatic pressure.

Israel’s conventional response still relies heavily on hasbara, which corrects facts, provides context, and seeks to persuade audiences. That work is important and necessary, but insufficient. Soft warfare, by contrast, requires a much broader system built on intelligence, operational capacity, the ability to trace funding, legal tools, technology, and cooperation with the security agencies. Using these capabilities, it must identify the infrastructure behind a campaign, organizations training activists, and funding that sustains activity. It must act preemptively rather than merely respond to manifestations of the threat.

This article seeks to spur the Israeli government to recognize soft warfare as a genuine combat theater requiring an operational response, and to establish a dedicated body to manage and command the campaign in this theater. It examines the full range of threats and the limits of the existing response, then proposes an operational body reporting to the prime minister that combines intelligence, operations, law, technology, funding, diplomacy, and partnerships. It concludes with implementation measures that would allow Israel to move from belated reactions to a sustained, proactive and coordinated campaign.

Threat Analysis

Israel’s principal difficulty is its tendency to examine each actor and theater separately. These divisions are bureaucratically convenient, but they obscure how the whole system works. States, organizations, and activist networks combine money, media, law, academia, technology, and politics so that each reinforces the others.

Iran combines cyber activity, efforts to shape perceptions, and the use of proxies. A digital operation can supply material for an influence operation, which can in turn deepen domestic divisions and thereby provide a basis for pressure on decision-makers in Israel and friendly countries. The Israel National Cyber Directorate has warned that foreign actors use false information and hostile content to undermine trust in democratic institutions, deepen disagreements, and influence public opinion at home and abroad. To do so they exploit real disagreements, amplifying them through false identities, bot networks, fake websites that impersonate real ones, and content designed to provoke a quick reaction.

Qatar illustrates how capital becomes influence. Its sustained investment in academic institutions, media outlets, research centers, organizations, and relationships with elites allows it to shape the agenda and public debate. U.S. Department of Education data show substantial foreign gifts and contracts in higher education.[1] The obligation in American law to report foreign funding of knowledge institutions reflects the understanding that this is not only a financial matter, but also an issue of transparency, independence, and national security.

Russia and China both target Israel as part of a broader campaign against the United States and the West, and as a target in its own right because of its strategic and technological importance. Their methods differ. Russia has spent years spreading propaganda and exerting influence through state media, websites posing as news sources, coordinated accounts, and intermediaries. Its goal is not always to persuade people to accept a particular position; it also floods the information space with noise, contradictions, and cynicism until people struggle to distinguish truth from falsehood. China works more patiently through institutions, using ties in business, technology, academia, the media, and elite circles.

The Palestinian arena brings legal and institutional pressure to the campaign. Actions at the United Nations, international tribunals, human rights organizations, and campuses produce headlines, decisions, investigations, and personal risks for senior officials. Even proceedings that yield no practical result have a cumulative effect simply because they exist: they supply material for the media, restrict travel, and entrench the portrayal of Israel as a suspect state. Law thus turns from a means of establishing facts into a tool in the broader struggle over legitimacy and freedom of action.

Turkey occupies a distinctive position as a state actor and NATO member with regional influence, media infrastructure, large diaspora communities in Europe, and ideological ties to movements within political Islam. Ankara leverages the Palestinian issue and the dispute over Jerusalem to establish regional leadership, support actors associated with Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, give them operational latitude, and enable them to disseminate anti-Israel messages in multiple languages.

The result of all this is an environment that brings together money, religious and political identity, media, charities, and activist networks, even when no central authority directs them all.

Hamas and other extremist Islamic organizations act as terrorist organizations and at the same time as narrative producers. They seek to turn military damage into cognitive leverage, to portray Israel as the sole aggressor, obscure their own responsibility for civilian harm, and use images and messages to attract sympathy, money, and activists. Organizations, student associations, religious groups, and nonprofits allow these messages to spread far beyond the front lines. When terrorism and ostensibly lawful public activity work hand in hand, democracies struggle to distinguish protest and humanitarian support from the operation of hostile infrastructure.

Elements of the left, especially the radical left, become part of this system by cooperating with Islamist organizations in the red-green alliance. Together, anti-Western, anticapitalist, Islamist, and anti-Zionist movements embed hostility toward Israel in broader struggles over colonialism, racism, climate, and identity. Israel is thus reduced from a nation engaged in a complex national struggle to an abstract symbol of oppression and occupation. This framing offers a major advantage to Israel’s enemies: it enables them to recruit young people and organizations that have no real knowledge of the Middle East but are familiar with the vocabulary of local social struggles.

Funding networks make the entire system possible. States, foundations, private donors, religious institutions, nonprofits, aid organizations, and educational initiatives transfer resources directly or through chains of grants and intermediaries. The money pays for research, activist training, legal advice, content production, conferences, campus activity, and digital infrastructure. One actor funds research, another turns it into a campaign, a third uses it in a petition, and a fourth distributes the result online. The challenge therefore is not just to trace the source of funds but to understand how funding that appears civilian and separate coalesces into a single system.

The threat cuts across multiple theaters. Online activity uses bots, false identities, news sites that impersonate real sites, audience-specific content, and artificial intelligence; traditional media carry repeated framing, leaks, and one-sided investigations. In academia and education, influence extends to the next generation, professional language, and sources of authority. At the United Nations and other international institutions, narratives become reports, committees, and decisions, while in the legal arena proceedings restrict freedom of action and put senior officials at risk. Elected officials and parties face political pressure; businesses are targeted through boycotts, investment decisions, and moves to sever ties. As we have seen recently, pressure on Jewish communities weakens their connection to Israel and increases both their sense of threat and the actual threat they face.

These activities form an ecosystem rather than a collection of isolated actions. A military incident supplies raw material that a digital network distributes. A research body supplies the professional language, a civil society organization turns it into a campaign, a media outlet amplifies it, and lawyers turn it into a proceeding. Funding keeps the cycle going. An effective Israeli response must therefore identify connection points and principal hubs of influence, then act against them over both short and long time frames.

Limits of the Current Response

Israel has skilled professionals, excellent intelligence units, advanced cyber capabilities, experienced diplomats, lawyers, network researchers, civil society organizations, and Jewish communities around the world. Yet, its capabilities are scattered; each organization sees only part of the picture, works under different authority, holds different information, and is judged against its own objectives. With no single body responsible for the campaign, setting priorities, and connecting intelligence collection to action, the result is unnecessary duplication of work in some areas while other areas go unaddressed.

The Foreign Ministry engages governments and media outlets, but it is not an intelligence agency and lacks tools to thwart hostile activity. Hasbara teams can develop messages, but they are not designed to map finances, enforce the law, or conduct long-term influence operations. Government ministries address diaspora affairs, academia, law, economics, and regulation. The security agencies can collect intelligence and conduct operations but rightly devote most of their attention to military threats, terrorism, and cyber threats. All of these bodies work on separate issues, and no single headquarters brings them together to fight an orchestrated campaign.

Israel consequently reacts after the fact, trying to limit damage. A defamatory film circulates or an organization publishes a damaging report; only then does the response begin. A university adopts a hostile resolution, but alumni and donors are mobilized only after the fact. Legal proceedings are opened, and only then does the race to assemble the facts begin. Each response may be professional, but the adversary has already chosen the timing, the framing, and the field of action.

The problem runs deeper than coordination: Israel needs a body with permanent responsibility. An interministerial committee, a forum of directors general, or a situation room can improve information sharing, but cannot replace such a body. Coordination leaves each participating organization pursuing its own goals. Command means being able to define a mission, allocate resources, demand information, deploy tools, measure results, and change course.

The test is simple: can any state operational body give the prime minister a unified picture of the influence and funding networks working against Israel? Can it prioritize targets, collect intelligence itself and task collection agencies, establish task forces, and deploy operational, technological, legal, economic, diplomatic, and digital tools? Can it determine within a set period whether the desired result was achieved? The Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism and Delegitimization is the body nominally in charge of this effort, yet the scale and nature of its work appear inadequate and in practice this responsibility is divided among numerous offices: the Foreign Ministry, the National Hasbara Headquarters in the Prime Minister’s Office, the IDF Spokesperson, the Justice Ministry, and others. As long as these conditions remain, Israel will continue to fall short in combatting the threat.

The first shortfall is in coverage: some threats receive only narrow attention, while others receive none. Security agencies may detect cyber activity or terrorism, the Foreign Ministry may identify diplomatic pressure, and the Justice Ministry may assist with a legal proceeding. There is not, however, any one single body that connects these findings and recognizes them as parts of a unified campaign. Without a shared picture, it is difficult to identify the center of gravity, decide what needs immediate attention, and distinguish diversionary efforts.

The second shortfall is in intelligence: Israel excels at collecting information on military capabilities and enemy intentions but has yet to develop a full intelligence discipline covering influence networks, funding, knowledge institutions, front organizations, target audiences, and distribution channels. The problem persists despite the wealth of information available in open sources, company and nonprofit databases, university publications, financial reports, and social media. That knowledge remains fragmented and never develops into target dossiers because no single body asks the questions, coordinates data analysis, and combines open-source and classified information.

The third shortfall is operational: Israel lacks a permanent means of turning intelligence into coordinated action in both the digital and physical worlds. The enemy builds influence over years, cultivates personnel, invests in institutions, and develops a vocabulary. Ministries, by contrast, organize their work around administrative cycles, terms of office, and events; civil society organizations depend on donors and shifting priorities; and security agencies concentrate on threats within their remit.

The fourth shortfall is the failure to measure results and learn. Success is sometimes judged by the number of publications, views, or meetings rather than by changes in adversary behavior or decision-making. Unless the intended effect is defined beforehand, there is no way to know whether an action achieved its objective, whether it should continue, or whether it caused collateral harm. The result is that resources are depleted, lessons remain confined to individual organizations, and the responses are repeated.

Proposed Response

Israel needs an operational headquarters that treats soft warfare as a distinct theater with its own objectives, enemies, infrastructure, resources, and operational cycles. It would bring together intelligence, operations, law, funding, technology, diplomacy, and civil society partnerships. Its purpose would be to identify threat infrastructure in advance, disrupt it and thwart its activity, and also initiate actions that strengthen Israel’s freedom of action and legitimacy.

This would replace fragmented, local reactions with a proactive, continuous campaign across multiple theaters. Ministries would no longer face hostile articles, boycott campaigns, legal proceedings, campus demonstrations, suspicious funding, or online attacks alone. The headquarters would develop a unified assessment of the threat, set priorities, and coordinate action against the adversary’s infrastructure. It would also promote a relevant Israeli and Jewish narrative tailored to its audiences and theaters of operation

The Israeli government should pursue two complementary lines of action: defense and preemptive disruption, and proactive offense. The first would seek to identify infrastructure, connections, funding sources, handlers, distribution channels, and target audiences early, before the activity causes harm. The second would seek to make it harder for the adversary to operate, expose its connections, increase its costs, strengthen partners, and shape the operating environment rather than merely reacting.

Every serious military organization takes a regular operational cycle for granted, yet such a cycle is almost entirely absent from today’s influence theater. The proposed body would follow one in every theater: detect and define the problem, assemble an intelligence picture and map the network, then specify the intended effect, choose a course of action, and select partners. After execution, it would measure results, draw lessons, and decide whether to continue, expand, or change course.

Intelligence for soft warfare must become a discipline in its own right. Identifying the enemy and its intentions is not sufficient. Analysts must establish who provides funding, serves as an intermediary, confers legitimacy, and creates content; trace how that content spreads and identify its intended audience; and determine how overt and covert activity connect and which vulnerabilities could be exploited to change the system. The product is more than a report: it is a target dossier that enables exposure, enforcement, pressure, disruption, or action by partners.

An operations division should work alongside intelligence, fielding both permanent teams and teams assembled for specific targets. A campus campaign may require a network researcher, a lawyer, a funding expert, a media professional, a language specialist, and a liaison with the local community. A state influence network may require expertise in cyber, economics, regulation, and diplomacy. Each assignment should have one team, one mission leader, one target, and performance metrics defined in advance, thus establishing responsibility for the result.

The headquarters also needs its own technological capacity, integrated into intelligence and operational work rather than functioning as a separate system. Artificial intelligence and automation now make it possible to generate thousands of profiles, messages, videos, and replies rapidly. The same technologies can detect coordinated behavior, analyze networks, identify anomalies, map information flows, and measure influence.

Israel  can draw on an advantage that many countries lack: a strong intelligence community, technology and cyber industries, an advanced legal system, Jewish communities around the world, and a broad network of partners. Nevertheless, without a body able to deploy these resources as a system, that advantage is purely on paper. The new body should establish three spheres of action: government and security; civilian and technological; and an international sphere of friendly countries, communities, and organizations.

Cooperation with partners outside government is essential but must be executed with care. A local organization in the United States or Europe sometimes has credibility, access, and freedom of action unavailable to an Israeli body. The state’s role is to provide reliable information and tools and enable the organization to act, preserving its independence and respecting local law rather than turning it into an arm of the state. A well-managed partnership increases legitimacy.

A national body must be able to state what it sought to achieve, what it did, what changed, and what it learned. Success requires performance indexes, and the number of posts, interviews, or impressions does not necessarily indicate an achievement. The measures should track changes in a target organization’s behavior, the cutoff of a funding source, a reduction in a campaign’s reach, a change in a regulatory decision, the prevention of legal action, the strengthening of a partner, or a shorter response time. Imperfect as these measures are, without them it is all too easy to confuse activity with influence.

The headquarters should report to the prime minister, giving it authority to make decisions, access to information, and the ability to task the relevant bodies when needed. Only at that level can the intelligence community, Foreign Ministry, Justice Ministry, hasbara teams, enforcement agencies, government ministries, and civil society partners be brought together.

The body should be established in stages. The first would aim to demonstrate capacity, learn, and refine the division of responsibility. A core professional team would define how the body operates, map all actors and theaters, set intelligence questions, and produce an initial national assessment. Several test cases would be selected in parallel where results could be achieved within a reasonable period—for example, a funding network, a coordinated digital campaign, or an emerging legal effort.

The second stage would establish permanent desks covering actors and theaters: Iran and its proxies, Qatar, Turkey, China, Russia, Palestinian actors, political Islam, funding networks, academia, law, and international institutions. Divisions working alongside them would build capacity in intelligence and research, operations and influence, law and regulation, funding, technology and data, external relations, and measurement. This structure would combine long-term expertise with the ability to assemble a task force rapidly around a defined target.

The third stage would establish a routine for managing the campaign. The body would produce periodic assessments, maintain a target database, set priorities, and allocate resources. Each operation would begin by defining the problem and the intended effect, proceed through collection and integrated planning, and conclude by measuring results and drawing lessons. Periodic reviews at the prime ministerial level would ensure that work remains focused on important threats rather than being drawn into reactions to passing events.

The body must build its technological capacity from the outset. It will require secure data infrastructure that combines open-source information with government information authorized for use, along with tools to analyze networks and connections, detect coordinated activity, track funding flows, analyze debate in different languages, and assess influence. It will also require mechanisms for working quickly with technology companies, researchers, and research institutes while complying with information security requirements and the law.

Personnel will be the most important factor in implementing this new framework. Transferring staff from existing ministries will not suffice and the new body will require something that does not currently exist under one roof: a combination of intelligence officers, network researchers, lawyers, economists, funding specialists, technology and cyber professionals, diplomats, language and cultural specialists, media professionals, and operations managers. Israel must build a new discipline with a common professional vocabulary and conduct dedicated training for soft warfare. Alongside operational capabilities, the government must establish oversight and control arrangements in advance, specifying who authorizes the use of sensitive information, how to work with nongovernmental partners, and which actions require legal or political approval.

Conclusion

Establishing this national body will not solve delegitimization overnight or end hostility toward Israel. Even the best organization cannot prevent every campaign, legal proceeding, or hostile decision. But it would put Israel on a better footing. Instead of reactive frameworks, the state would have the ability to identify threats, give warning, and act. It would have a complete picture rather than scattered knowledge, short-lived efforts would give way to sustained work, and one body would be accountable for the result rather than responsibility remaining a subject of continual dispute.

Time is working against Israel. Influence networks take years to build: they train activists, cultivate experts, fund research, establish ties with journalists and decision-makers, build digital infrastructure, and develop a vocabulary that gradually enters mainstream debate. A weeklong campaign or a press conference cannot dismantle such a system. Patient, professional, and sustained force buildup is required.

The enemy is learning too. Every incident reveals Israeli response patterns, preparation times, disagreements between organizations, and areas where there is no response. Artificial intelligence further shortens the operational cycle and allows messages to be adapted rapidly to different audiences. The gap will widen unless Israel establishes its own constantly updating mechanism.

The Israeli government must decide to treat soft warfare as a national security theater rather than an adjunct to hasbara. It must assign clear responsibility to a state operational body with access to information, the capacity to plan and act, binding arrangements for cooperation with other bodies, and oversight. The priority is to start building capacity and break the cycle; perfect agreement on every detail is not a prerequisite.

Those seeking to restrict Israel’s freedom of action no longer need a tank or a missile. They can work through a university, a court, a foundation, a digital platform, a media outlet, or a front organization. Israel needs a state-run, lawful counterpart that takes the initiative and conducts operations against such a system. The decision to establish it would be more than another reorganization: it would declare that Israel understands the nature of the war being waged against it.

Israel has often been late to recognize threats that drew little attention at first but eventually became major concerns. Once it recognized those threats it established headquarters, developed professional disciplines and technology, and changed the balance of power. It did so in military fields and in cyber warfare. Now it must make the same leap in soft warfare.

The government cannot choose whether this war will take place—it is already underway. It can only choose whether to continue to fight with divided efforts, late responses and a reactive policy, or to finally establish a body that can see the whole picture, plan its campaign, and achieve victory.
Israel has in the past confronted large, complex threats and developed effective, groundbreaking solutions. Now it must do so again.

[1] U.S. Department of Education, “U.S. Department of Education Releases Latest Foreign Funding Disclosures from Federally Funded American Universities,” 11.2.2026.