JERUSALEM, Israel – A number of cyber experts claim the war for Israel's survival is, literally, in our hands. Our phones are now a major weapon in the battle over which narrative we believe.
As Israeli soldiers are fighting in the terror tunnels deep under Gaza, another war against Israel rages in cyberspace.
Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor launched Cyberwell in 2022 to create a better real-time picture of online anti-Semitism.
October 7th was a turning point.
"Since October 7th, Cyberwell tracked a massive uptake in online anti-Semitism, with a 29,000 percent increase in Arabic tweets saying 'hashtag Hitler was right,'" Cohen Montemayor stated.
She added, "Post-October 7th, I think something changed and it became very clear that social media platforms are now a matter of national security. They can be exploited by terror organizations and by foreign governments in times of war. This is now happening for Israel, but it could happen to any Western democracy that found itself in a war or under attack by a terrorist organization."
Hamas documented their atrocities on October 7th, but almost immediately came online denials.
"This conspiracy theory is acting in a very similar way, with a similar purpose, to Holocaust denial. But there's a really big difference, Holocaust denial was proliferated by these very extreme groups. If ever people were brought on to be interviewed, they'd be hung out to dry by traditional media," said Cohen Montemayor.
Social media targets the youth.
"What we've seen today is that the younger generation is more pro-Hamas, romanticizing Osama Bin Laden, being exposed to pro-Hitler content online, and I think that what we're seeing is a culmination of anti-Western, anti-Semitic content being widely believed by the 30-and-under crowd, which are using these platforms sometimes as a major news source, and are certainly engaging with content online anywhere from fifteen to even a hundred hours a week," Cohen Montemayor observed.
Cyberwell produced a video to expose the denial of the Hamas massacres.
In the video, the narrator asks, "Do you really know what happened on October 7th? You've been lied to. We all have. Palestinians didn't behead babies."
Children who were taken hostage on October 7th and later released watched that video on their phones and asked, "What? How can they even say that?," and "Yeah, we were there."
Avigdor Neumann, 93, was released as a prisoner from Auschwitz after World War II and commented on the pro-Hamas video.
He said simply, "Some things can never be erased."
Cohen Montemayor is convinced online anti-Semitism has real world consequences.
"Talk about foreign policy of the current administration, which is now currently in the process of strong-arming Israel into recognizing a Palestinian state – because they saw in the polls that their base is not happy about the current policy of supporting Israel," she stated. And I think that social media plays a huge role in that, in terms of, again, swaying opinion, and also shifting people to be openly hostile against Jewish people and Israel."
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