I can’t prove who took my friend. The whole operation is built so that no one ever can.
In late 2023, a few weeks after October 7, my husband and I had dinner with our friend Jeremy. He is British, mid-thirties, with a decent job and the kind of progressive politics that used to mean food banks and climate marches. He asked about my family in Israel by name. He wanted to know if my mother was sleeping. He paid for dinner and hugged us both on the street, and on the walk home my husband said what I was thinking, that we were lucky to have friends like him.
Over the following year I watched his feed change. First it was the accounts he followed, then the language he used in his own captions. The escalation had a rhythm to it, each week slightly further than the last, the way water finds a slope. The last real conversation we had, he said this to me: “Israel’s existence is the reason antisemitism exists. Even Jews say it.”
He is no longer our friend. That was our choice as much as his. What I want to examine is how a kind man arrived at a sentence like that in under two years.
The simplest explanation deserves to go first. People watched a brutal war on their phones and drew their own conclusions. Grief and anger at images from Gaza are human responses, and holding them requires no puppeteer. Criticism of the Israeli government is legitimate; I publish it myself, in detail, under my own name. If Jeremy had told me the war was unbearable to watch, that he believed Israel’s government had lost its moral bearings, we would still be having dinner. Plenty of people I love believe exactly that.
But that is a conclusion. What Jeremy said to me was a product. “Israel’s existence causes antisemitism” reverses cause and effect with a confidence no one reasons their way into alone, and the tag at the end, “even Jews say it,” is the laundering step, the borrowed permission slip. Products have supply chains, and this one’s is documented in sanctions designations and forensic reports that almost nobody reads.
Start with Tehran. Microsoft’s threat analysts found that from October 7 onward, Iran combined targeted hacks with influence operations amplified across social media, and by late October nearly all of its influence and cyber actors had converged on Israel in what researchers called an all-hands campaign. The most damning evidence arrived by accident. When Israeli strikes hit Iran in June 2025 and the regime’s internet went down, a network of AI-generated personas embedded in ordinary British political conversation went dark for sixteen days, then came back online pushing pro-Iranian and anti-Israel content. The analysts at Cyabra who caught it called the gap a before-and-after snapshot of state interference; the fake campaign had already collected 224 million views. During the 2026 fighting, a separate analysis found that 60 percent of the most viral posts about Iran on X in the war’s first week came from accounts outside the United States that presented themselves as American voices.
Moscow’s method is different. In October 2023, blue Stars of David appeared stenciled on buildings across Paris. A Moldovan couple was arrested for painting them at the request of a pro-Russian businessman, and France’s foreign ministry formally accused the Kremlin’s Doppelganger network of artificially spreading the photos online. Moscow staged the incident and then sold the panic.
Then there is the money that never touches a bot farm because it buys the street instead. The People’s Forum, the group that co-organized a Times Square rally celebrating October 7 the day after the massacre, received over $20 million between 2017 and 2022 from Neville Roy Singham, a tech mogul based in Shanghai with documented ties to Chinese state propaganda outfits, routed through shell organizations and donor-advised funds. Congress is now investigating whether the arrangement violates the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Samidoun, a “charity” that helped energize campus encampments, was designated by the U.S. Treasury in 2024 as a sham fundraiser for the PFLP, a terrorist organization, and listed as a terrorist entity by Canada.
And Qatar, which I know from my own meetings with officials to be among the heaviest investors in this space, does most of its work in the open, the most audacious part of all. Since 2016 Doha has spent roughly a quarter of a billion dollars on 88 registered American lobbying and PR firms, and from 2021 to mid-2025 its agents logged 627 in-person meetings with U.S. political contacts, more than any other country on earth. The American arm of its flagship network, AJ+, was ordered by the Justice Department in 2020 to register as a foreign agent because it operates, in the department’s words, at the direction and control of Qatar’s leaders. Five years later it has neither registered nor stopped broadcasting. Over Thanksgiving 2025, Qatar flew a group of American conservative influencers to Doha on a luxury trip that researchers described as an influence operation wearing an educational costume. When one government’s talking points can reach both a Brooklyn leftist and a Fox News audience in the same news cycle, the word “grassroots” has stopped describing anything.
I know this terrain from the receiving end. In 2018, a newspaper reported that Israel’s Government Advertising Agency had paid my Israeli limited company roughly $3,500 a month, about $49,000 over fourteen months, for consulting on social media and LGBTQ outreach in Hebrew, and raised the question of FARA. The work was the ordinary kind a communications consultant does anywhere, lawful whoever the client, and top American lawyers I consulted found that registration did not apply. The contract ended that year, and I have taken nothing from any Israeli government agency since. Anonymous accounts still recirculate the article on schedule whenever my work reaches a new audience. A consulting contract that ended nine years ago works as a permanent weapon in the feed, while a Qatari state network spends its fifth year defying a formal Justice Department registration order without consequence.
None of these operations invented anger at Israel, and no honest account can pretend they did. Their work is subtler than invention. They manufacture consensus, and consensus is the one thing a decent person never thinks to verify. Jeremy could have checked a statistic. A sensation that everyone he respected had already moved is not checkable. When he saw a post with tens of thousands of likes, shared by an influencer he trusted, echoed by accounts that looked like nurses and veterans, he did what social creatures do. He assumed he was late to a truth his community had already reached, and stopped asking what the PFLP is or who funds the group organizing the march. Jeremy believed he was following his conscience through a crowd. Parts of the crowd were rented.
Here is what I cannot do, and it took me two years to understand that the inability is deliberate. I cannot point to the post that took him, or tell you whether the account that first taught him the sentence about Israel causing antisemitism belonged to a man in Manchester or a shift worker in a Tehran content farm. Neither could any investigator on earth. Attribution dies at the level of the individual, and the entire enterprise is built on that grave. Missiles have return addresses and memes do not. Every Jeremy reads as organic. Every friendship dissolves as if by weather. Anyone who says the word campaign out loud sounds paranoid at exactly the moment the evidence is strongest, and I spent months doubting my own eyes about a man I loved. That doubt was somebody’s deliverable.
The output is now measurable in people, and in power. A survey released this week found that 29 percent of Americans aged 18 to 44 view Jews as a threat to the unity of American society, against 13 percent of those over 60. The same polling shows the share of respondents whose answers mark them as openly prejudiced against Jews more than doubled since June 2023, while the share of informed allies collapsed from 15 percent to 6. Those are the numbers of a campaign that worked. The same survey carries the feed’s other signature: 53 percent of Americans were unfamiliar with the murder of 15 Jews celebrating Hanukkah at Bondi Beach, and 66 percent with the arson of Mississippi’s largest synagogue. An information environment that hands a fake campaign 224 million views leaves an actual massacre unseen. And electorates produce politicians. In Britain, the Green Party has organized much of its identity around Palestine. Across Democratic primaries in the United States, candidates who once led with healthcare now lead with Gaza, and the ones who don’t are learning what the algorithm does to their fundraising.
This week, New York's mayor spent much of a Times interview on Gaza, and I read the comments under the clip as they arrived. Real New Yorkers arguing about buses and rent, and braided through them, accounts with stock phrases and no history, until the commenters began accusing one another of being bots. Nobody could tell. He won office with real votes; the information environment those voters live inside is another matter, and both things are true at once.
To believe every one of those politicians is a foreign asset would be its own conspiracy theory, and I don’t believe it. They are responding rationally to a public opinion environment that four governments spent years and fortunes helping to build. A democracy that cannot tell organic opinion from purchased opinion has lost something it needs to function.
There are moments when a state finally acts, and the shape of Britain’s is instructive. Beginning in March, proxies directed by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard attacked British citizens on British streets: arson at a synagogue and at a Jewish ambulance charity, the stabbing of two men in Golders Green. The ban on supporting the IRGC came on July 13, four months later. For those four months, a political class that finds time to condemn Israel from a far, week after week, could barely bring itself to name the state whose agents were setting fires in London. Israel poses no threat to Britain and asks nothing of it, yet it occupies British politics as a permanent emergency, while the government that actually exported violence to British soil enjoyed the presumption of complexity until the smoke made denial embarrassing. The information war is engineered to produce this distortion. Its design is deniability, an ocean of content with no single author, so that naming the arsonist feels reckless and blaming the familiar villain feels safe.
So the response has to happen without the fire. FARA should be enforced against every state broadcaster that defies it, starting with the one that has ignored a Justice Department order for five years. Platforms can label state-linked amplification the way they already label a paid ad; it is the same transaction. Britain’s new law against state-backed organizations deserves use at home and imitation abroad. The forensic researchers at firms like Cyabra, whose findings reach a fraction of the audience of a single fake account, need funding and distribution. And the billions flowing from Doha into Western schools and universities without meaningful disclosure belong in the same ledger as the lobbying money.
And there is a second audience, the one the analysts’ reports never mention. The campaign that runs at people like Jeremy also delivers something to people like me. It taught me to read my friends the way a security officer reads a crowd. A slow reply, or a friend who never mentioned my wedding, now arrives with a question attached that I hate and cannot stop asking: is this a life being busy, or is this the operation reaching someone else I love? Jews across the West are living inside that question. The suspicion corrodes from both directions, and the corrosion is part of the design. A people taught to suspect its friends, and friends taught there is virtue in walking away, will separate on their own. Nobody has to order it.
I used to frame this as a choice we would eventually face. I no longer think the choice is ahead of us. The 29 percent are already voting, and some of them are already teaching. My fear, the one I carry into places where I am told to be optimistic, is that we are past the point where exposure alone fixes anything, because the generation that was farmed does not remember a feed that wasn’t.
Somewhere in London or New York this week, a dinner like ours in 2023 is happening. Someone kind is asking someone Jewish about their family, and meaning it. Whether that friendship survives the next two years is being decided partly by the two of them, and partly by people neither of them will ever meet, working from Tehran and Moscow and Shanghai and Doha. Jeremy never met them either.
My friend’s name has been changed.
