GUEST BENJAMIN ASHRAF: It all falls apart when you follow the logic, when you follow the money and when you listen to Palestinian voices.
HOST EZGI TOPER: You're listening to "In the Newsroom" and I'm Ezgi Toper. In this podcast, we have conversations with colleagues and experts that go beyond the headlines.
For decades, the conversation around Palestine was dominated by a powerful Israeli PR system known as "Hasbara." It was a well-funded machine that explained away occupation and framed a nuclear-armed state as the underdog.
But then came October 7th.
For two years, relentless Israeli bombing has killed over 60,0000 Palestinians and reduced much of the besieged enclave to rubble. While the fight for Palestine's freedom didn't start on that date, October 7th was a tipping point that caused a fundamental shift in Western public opinion over the conflict.
In this episode, we'll discuss how Israel's decades-old propaganda machine met its match, and how a new generation on TikTok turned the information war upside down.
So, what exactly are we talking about when we say "Hasbara"? Our first guest, Benjamin Ashraf, a London-based journalist, breaks it down:
BENJAMIN: It's a Hebrew term which directly translates to explaining. It was popularised by a man called Nahum Sokolow, who is a Polish Zionist, but in plain speak, it's essentially just propaganda. It shares many things in common with modern propaganda, but actually one of the more discerning features about hasbara is that it's kind of more granular in how Israel uses to distort and justify its actions.One of the key functions is actually to depict Israel as the victim and even the underdog.
Hasbara works externally, but it works internally. It tells the Israeli population, we don't care, we are ourselves, we are a chosen people. It's this Jewish exceptionism, supremacy, in fact, that dictates.
EZGI: There's even a book or guide on how to carry out this messaging. It's known as the "Hasbara Handbook". It rehearses specific arguments and counter-arguments for advocates of Israel. And you've definitely seen it in action, especially by so-called hasbara messengers, or hasbarists.
Like Israeli writer Hen Mazzig:
HEN MAZZIG: But they don't really call for a ceasefire, they're calling for Israel to drop its weapons because they want Israel to cease to exist and they want us to not care about the hostages.
EZGI: Or Israeli actress Noa Tishby:
NOA TISHBY: There's only one country in the world that gets attacked so severely and savagely on October 7th. But when it defends itself, people say, "Well, don't defend yourself that well!"So Israel has the right to defend itsel,f but it doesn't have the right to win?
A key part of this messaging is done through "whitewashing", meaning showing Israel as modern and liberal, compared to the rest of the region. This is language Israeli officials love to use, like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Gideon Saar
ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: I can tell you categorically, there is no army in the world that acts in a more moral fashion than the army of Israel.
ISRAEL FOREIGN MINISTER GIDEON SAAR: Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. It is Europe's strategic partner in the region. The only ally which shares the same values and challenges.
BENJAMIN: As you say, this washing is kind of endemic to Israeli society, where they need to find ways in which they can gaslight, professionally gaslight the international community. In many cases, it worked because when you speak to liberal Zionists in across the West and even people from the UK, Europe, and America, it's one of their main beating sticks to which they say, "look, this is why we need to support Israel because Israel follows a lot of the cultural norms that we do." And so this, this is what binds hasbara in many cases to the Western imagination.
The irony really is, is that, you know, the greenwashing and the whitewashing and the idea that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East falls apart as soon as you do any kind of research into, you know, the nation state law that was passed in 2018 which said that Israel is a Jewish state first and foremost, and so that that leads to the natural problem of how can it be an entirely Jewish state and a democratic one. It is therefore an occupation, it is therefore an apartheid state, because the values and the votes and the rights of one people is prioritised over the other.
EZGI: Hasbara was built for an era of broadcast news and political lobbying. But on October 7th, it collided with a different kind of media landscape. And the cracks began to show immediately as people began talking about the strategy online.
TIKTOK COMPILATION :
"Welcome to Palestine 101. Today we're going to learn about hasbara and the art of deception."
"Let's debunk some Israeli propaganda: International law edition"
"I feel like a lot of people are just starting to learn about the hasbara handbook and they're completely shocked."
"Keep an eye out for what I think might be a new hasbara propaganda strategy on social media."
EZGI STUDIO: Early in the war, the Israeli army released a video claiming it had uncovered a Hamas tunnel under Al-Rantisi children's hospital. They claimed they found Hamas weapons, and of course, the infamous "list of terrorist names."
ISRAELI SOLDIER: There is a list! This list in Arabic - in Arabic - says "We are in operation. The operation against Israel started on 7th of October." This is a guardian list where every terrorist writes his name and every terrorist has his own shift.
EZGI: But this was an attempt to justify Israeli attacks on hospitals, and social media was quick to call it out. Translations spread, showing the document was just a calendar, as Palestinian activist Subhi Taha explains:
SUBHI TAHA: When he was pointing, making it seem like he was reading it, he was reading it left to right. Arabic is right-to-left. It's a calendar, y'all. It's literally the days of the week calendar. Monday. الاثنين Tuesday. يوم الثلاثاء.
EZGI: This was one of the first dominoes to fall. Suddenly, the polished Hasbara narrative was being fact-checked in real-time by a global audience. And public opinion began to turn. There was a dramatic collapse in support for Israel, especially among younger generations who get their news from social media. But this all had slowly begun before October 7th. As Benjamin points out:
BENJAMIN: Many people, many millennials in particular. They were, they were energised by the Sheikh Jarrah expulsions, and I think that in many ways was a turning point where social media was used.
EZGI: To understand how this narrative shifted after October 7th, you have to look back to Sheikh Jarrah. In 2021, as Palestinian families in East Jerusalem faced forced expulsion, activists used smartphones to live-stream the crisis directly to the world. They bypassed traditional media gatekeepers, creating a raw, first-person narrative of dispossession that went viral. This flashpoint trained a new generation in digital resistance.
BENJAMIN: For the first time, there was a real energy around the pro-Palestinian movement because we could see, and we had Palestinian content creators on the ground, and there was a real ecosystem being built. We were also aware of some of the challenges that social media can provide with, with the algorithm and shadow banning and these kind of, I guess, institutional means of shutting Palestinian voices down. However, that has been one of the, that's been one of the positive legacies of the 11 - the 10 or 11 - day war in 2021 has been that the Palestinian movement has adapted itself to work and to spread its message in a more compact, modern way by using social media.
EZGI: So, how did this counter-narrative break through this time? Benjamin points to one platform in particular:
BENJAMIN: TikTok, is out of all the social media platforms, the one where pro-Palestinian voices are most visible and sustained, because as we know, if you're on Instagram, or Facebook, for example, you're unlikely after if you post a certain amount or quantity of Palestinian content, you're likely to have your or or X in particular now after Elon Musk take over, you're likely to have your content relegated. However, TikTok was one where you could, especially the American public, were able to express their pro-Palestinian support.
EZGI: One of the young content creators on TikTok is Noor Saleh from California. She runs an aid organisation in Palestine and regularly publishes videos to her over 40,000 followers.
NOOR: Palestinians have been working on getting our voices out for so so long. We are finally in positions now where we're able to be heard by people.
Online, I tend to do a lot of TikTok lives. I tend to make a lot of videos, just trying to educate as many people and reach as many people as I can about what's happening in Gaza and not just in Gaza, in East Jerusalem and the West Bank as well.
TikTok's algorithm was like no other. The one that was provided by ByteDance, was unlike anything that we have seen before. I have gone viral on TikTok many, many times. My lives have gone viral, my videos have gone viral. And so it's allowed me to reach a larger audience, just trying to spread the message.
I have met so many amazing activists on TikTok, and because of the way the algorithm worked, it almost pushed us all together. If your interest is activism, you're more than likely doing it outside. It's pushed us basically all together in the same echo chambers.
EZGI: Unlike Instagram or Facebook, TikTok does not rely as heavily on your existing social network. Instead, it pushes content based on behavioural signals - so things like how long you watch a video, or if you interact with it. In fact, people who don't have TikTok accounts themselves can still access the public content easily.
TikTok's short-video format is also optimised for short attention spans, making content easily consumable and addictive. So it's no wonder that studies show it has some of the highest average daily use times. It can be up to 95 minutes per day in some markets, higher than Instagram or YouTube. But this wide reach does have repercussions for Noor and fellow activists.
NOOR: I have been doxed many, many times. I get daily death threats, daily hate comments. I do get, I have a 5-year ban currently from the state of Israel as well. I have had a lot of my family reach out to me as well, family that's still in Philistine, telling me that they've been getting targeted, that the state is coming after them because of what I'm saying. We have faced quite a bit of backlash, but it's still not deterring us. We are still going.
EZGI: Faced with this organic content and grassroots movement, the Hasbara machine has responded in one of the ways it knows how: spending money on propaganda. In 2025 alone, Israel set aside $150 million for hasbara. And now, new reports reveal Google signed a $45 million contract with Netanyahu's office to run campaigns denying famine in Gaza, even as the Health Ministry reports record starvation deaths. But Noor says despite all this spending, hasbara narratives are no longer resonating with the general public.
NOOR: If they have to spend $45 million to go up against a bunch of online and in-person activists, right? They're failing and they're failing bad. So I don't think it's working. I think that personally, 45 million, sure, you can reach people, but there's always two sides to everything, and any person who has any empathetic bone in their body will take one look at what's happening in Gaza and be like, this is unacceptable. Completely unacceptable. Starving children is completely unacceptable, no ands, ifs or buts.
EZGI: Following the money, Derek Bowler and his team at the Eurovision News Spotlight fact-checking network have been tracking hasbara operations for months. Their latest investigation sheds light on just how far this influence stretches.
DEREK: It's usually centred around Lapam - Israeli Government Advertising Agency in Israel. We had been tracking their activities for a number of months because back in May, we saw a concerted attempt by the agency to influence the outcome of the Eurovision Song Contest, which was another collaboration that we published findings on and what we saw there in that instance was that there was advertising to influence voters in different countries. Targeted ads, we could see very clearly through the Google Ads Transparency Centre that there was countries specifically targeted with numerous ads at different times. And what we saw as well as we moved into this investigation was a similar system.
To break it down very simply, when someone says something against Tel Aviv or someone disputes the narrative that's been presented by the Israeli government, what we see is an immediate response. What we saw was the digital attack, and what we saw was the emergence of fact-checking articles by the Israeli government or discrediting articles against UN officials.
EZGI: One recent example in their reporting occurred in August 2025 when the UN declared famine in Gaza. Israel rejected the report, calling it fabricated, and launched an ad campaign claiming the findings were politically motivated. The campaign, run by Lapam, included titles like "Politics Disguised as Science" and pushed ads across Google, YouTube, X, and other platforms showing crowded markets, restaurants, and aid trucks.
DEREK: What we saw was a large publication of videos in different languages. So we saw Italian, French, German and English, and what we then saw was a huge engagement on those ads from their YouTube account in particular, which was the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. So what we would see is as soon as a narrative was presented, Israel would dispute that with a digital attack and due to the payments of those adverts, those adverts would get huge engagement. So you're talking anywhere between 500,000 to 3 million views in a short space of time.
DEREK: It brings into question what checks are actually happening at these platforms in terms of the output that's there. There are mechanisms, of course, in place in both META and Google for reporting of ads and their content, but that's a slow process. That's not something that happens within minutes or within days. The priority for platforms seems to be around gratuitous violence and content that is very graphic in nature, whereas when it comes to ads or things that can be quite subjective, and you know, Google and Meta can take a very lenient view and require a lot of pressure to get those kinds of ads taken down.
EZGI: Beyond running its own ads, hasbara also recruits influencers. In August, the Israeli Foreign Ministry funded trips coordinated by advocacy group Israel365 -- paying about $70,000 to push the message that "there is food in Gaza."
INFLUENCER JAYNE ZIRKLE: I'm here in Israel with Israel365, and we are on the border in Israel. Behind me, over there, is Syria, and this is actually the gate where all the humanitarian aid goes in and out of.
INFLUENCER Xaviaer DuRousseau: If I were Israel, I wouldn't even provide matching socks to Gaza, but here's all the aid that y'all claim doesn't exist.
EZGI: But as Derek notes, this expensive, top-down approach of advertising and influencing is failing where it counts: winning over the public. Do you think from what you guys have seen that this system of Hasbara actually works in shaping, especially the Western opinion on what's happening in Palestine?
DEREK: That's a very good question. I think there'll be a certain Ideological factor that people will identify with, obviously, in different countries across the world, there's a lot of pro-Israel sentiment that we're seeing, and I think that the influencers and the adverts might appeal to a certain demographic in particular. Does it work in the long term? No, I don't think so. I think we saw short-term gains in this instance for the adverts. I think the public outcry as well. Given that the IPC report came out, Israel were critical of it, but a lot of countries who were in support of the IPC doubled down on this, and I think that actually showed the ineffectiveness and the reach of Hasbara in this instance because I don't believe that with so many countries backing the IPC report and a lot of pro-Gaza information out there and also coupled with the likes of investigators like ourselves and other people who've investigated this topic. I think that it shows the limitations of it outside of the friends of Israel.
EZGI: So, the old playbook isn't working. And now, the battle is moving to a new, more dangerous phase. Having lost the narrative on a level playing field, they are now trying to go after the platform itself, as Netanyahu says:
NETANYAHU: We have to fight with the weapons that apply to the battlefields in which we're engaged. And the most important ones are on social media. And the most important purchase that is going on right now is TikTok. Number one.
BENJAMIN: Now, as of today, there is a consortium as part of Trump's carve out of TikTok that threatens that status because, in particular, you have someone like Larry Eros Ellison, who is the well, the founder of Oracle, and he happens to be the single largest private donor to the Israeli military.
So we now face a real threat; in fact, even Netanyahu mentioned in response to this bill that social media is Israel's biggest weapon. So this is the kind of new terrain that Hasbara is on. I do think that the pro-Palestinian support far outweighs any kind of institutional backing. The question is how do we as a movement adapt ourselves to kind of deal with some of the, the stress points that we're going to inevitably have to face?
EZGI: With the rise of artificial intelligence, hasbara is now also utilising new tools to push out its messaging. Israel reportedly hired US firm Clock Tower X on a $6 million contract to run Gen Z-targeted campaigns across TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and more -- aiming for 50 million monthly impressions. The firm will also build websites to sway AI models like ChatGPT to boost pro-Israel narratives.
So in this new landscape, how can we discern hasbara messaging? What would you recommend for listeners, or anybody that's coming across content that could be hasbara messaging and they're not aware of it? How can we discern the lies from the truth?
BENJAMIN: Firstly, I think we look at how the language used.Are Palestinians, are there, is their humanity afforded to them? Is it that the Palestinians are humanised? You know, you can tell if a bit of subtle hasbara coming in from something as simple as "Hamas-ran Health Ministry". You're looking at that framing as to say, well, that whilst you're trying to be or you purport to be neutral, that in and of itself is a distortion of the facts. Is there a hierarchy of importance? Is the Israeli narrative being prioritised over the Palestinian one?
And the final thing I would say is just to, to follow the source, to look where the piece is coming from, is it from a reputable outlet? Can you follow the hyperlink? Does the numbers match up?
You know, there was a particularly revealing thing on Piers Morgan's show a couple of weeks ago where a hasbarist from Manchester, I think, was saying, firstly, don't believe the Hamas were death toll, but then said that his ratio was 1 to 2, which actually meant his death toll was 90,000 instead of 60,000. So it all falls apart when you follow the logic, when you follow the money and when you listen to Palestinian voices.
EZGI: This is the most documented genocide in history, with social media exposing bombed neighbourhoods, famine, and mass civilian deaths. Hasbara efforts are failing to sway global opinion because no amount of PR can cover up the reality, especially with younger generations around the world.
Thanks for tuning in. Until next time, I'm Ezgi Toper, and this was "In the Newsroom".