Israel Is the Weapon

By Abe Greenwald

Tuesday, May 12, 2026

 

There’s a pervasive misconception about the so-called information war that erupted after the Hamas massacre of October 7, 2023. The misconception is that Israel constitutes one of the war’s two fighting sides.

 

The truth is that anti-Semites launched the information war as an attack on global Jewry and settled on Israel as their weapon of choice.

 

Once you understand that, much else becomes clear. You can look back on the past two and a half years and discern exactly how the propaganda campaign achieved its aims. What began merely as supposed criticism of the Jewish state has arrived at a very different place. Those who’ve been captured have largely shifted their focus from Israel to Jews—along with Jewish history, Jewish belief, and Jewish organizations.

 

The anti-Semites waging the information war advanced provably false claims of Israeli war crimes, from forced starvation to targeting civilians to genocide. On the left, this set in motion a war on “Zios,” who support Israel and therefore stand accused of vicious chauvinism, bigotry, and unquenchable bloodlust.
 
Another key piece of the anti-Israel propaganda operation has to do with the large amounts of aid that Israel receives from America. Never mind that virtually all of the aid must be spent on American-manufactured weapons and equipment. And never mind that it gives Washington what is arguably an intrusive degree of influence over Israel. On the populist right, the anti-aid offensive aroused a movement obsessed with Jewish control of the government and disloyalty to country. That movement immediately expanded its indictment of Jews to include falsifying history, censoring speech, committing assassination, and practicing black magic.

 

There’s increasing overlap between the left and right dupes on all these issues. The point is that anti-Semites merely used Israel to turn them into their anti-Jewish foot soldiers. They’ve been recruited to dehumanize Jews online, disrupt Jewish events, and attack Jews around the world. Not Israel—Jews.

 

Because the aim of the information war is not merely to turn public opinion against Israel—although it’s certainly done that. The idea is to alchemize anti-Zionism into kinetic Jew-hatred in the real world, to instigate a war against the Jews of the Diaspora parallel to the one that Hamas launched against the Jews of Israel.

 

Many American Jews say that Israel should do a better job fighting the information war—without understanding that war was declared against them. Israel has done an astounding job of fighting its war. We are the ones who’ve been under attack from anti-Israel propaganda this whole time.

 

We still are, and it’s getting ever worse. No longer do the propagandists bother to sprinkle meager crumbs of credibility over their work. There’s no incentive for them to cover their tracks and every incentive to prevaricate. Photographs of the Gaza famine that never happened earn Pulitzer Prizes. The New York Times now publishes horror stories about Israel that are not only impossible to verify but impossible period—literally impossible. When Nicolas Kristof writes a story about IDF-trained rape-dogs, he’s sending the mob after all of us—including those liberal American Jews who then denounce Israel. What they don’t realize is that accusing Jews of committing impossible crimes is the oldest, most primitive category of anti-Semitic propaganda. It takes us out of the realm of the human, no matter where we are on this planet.

 

It would be hard for a famous journalist simply to assert that Jews, as a people, have dark powers that defy the laws of nature. But when Israel is your weapon, you never hold your fire.