Haaretz Podcast

A disinformation war is raging online and Israel is losing, says Omer Benjakob, Haaretz cyber and technology correspondent at Haaretz.

It isn’t as if an effort isn’t being made by Israel to professionally curate and manage information about its war with Hamas in a responsible and reliable “high value content,” he told to Allison Kaplan Sommer on the Haaretz Weekly podcast. “The problem is that when you juxtapose that to what Hamas is doing.”

In today’s digital space, Benjakob explains, “highly produced graphics looks like your country hired a PR company to do PR for you, which is literally what we do and what we've always done. The whole idea of Hasbara - that you need to do professional level kind of explanation - is actually shooting us in the foot right now. Hamas is just flooding the internet with raw materials that people can then supposedly check on their own.” When it’s checked, much of it is unreliable and untrue but by then it’s too late because they have controlled the discourse for days.

Also on the podcast, 88-year-old Holocaust survivor Gidon Lev, who became a Tiktok sensation with nearly half a million followers, and his life partner Julie Gray. They explain why, with “grief and anger,” they deactivated their account this week as the platform was unwilling to confront the unprecedented wave of antisemitism that has overwhelmed Tiktok since the October 7 Hamas massacres.

When asked about his initial reaction to October 7, Lev says: "I said to my son: ‘these people that did the massacre, they must have had Nazi instructors.’ In some ways, they were even worse. I can’t describe what they did.”

Gray talked about the helplessness in the face of a wave of denialism and antisemitism that came with the Gaza War. "Our followers, who thanked us for learning [about the Holocaust], are the same people who are hating us now," she says. "They liked this little holocaust survivor with a sad sad tale. I’m used to getting hate from Nazis, the ones with the thunderbolts and swastikas, but the people that are sending us this hate now, their bios say ‘vegan’ and ‘organic fiber creators’ - they are our followers. So I feel like our three years of work have unraveled. That nothing was taught to them at all."

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.