The effort includes artificial intelligence, fake social media accounts and a spike in state-sponsored Russian propaganda.
By Dan De Luce
Russia is seeking to exploit America’s divisive debate over Israel’s offensive in Gaza through overt and covert propaganda, with the aim of aggravating political tensions in the U.S. and tarnishing Washington’s global image, according to two sources familiar with U.S. intelligence on the matter.
In its ongoing information war against the United States, Russia has shifted its focus in recent months to the Israel-Hamas conflict, seeking to inflame existing divisions in the West and to portray Washington as fueling the violence, the sources said.
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A favorite theme of Russian information operations is to paint America as a failing democratic state, according to U.S. officials and researchers.
At an event last week in Washington, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said Russia works to denigrate America’s standing in the world, to undermine democratic institutions and processes and to exploit social, political and economic divisions “in our culture and in our society.”
The Animus is real, but the way they have pulled an uncomfortable form of anti-zionism into otherwise legitimate concerns about apartheid in the Levant is hard to look past. There are serious academic conversations to be had about how Israel is the original sin of the modern nation-state, but that cat is out of the bag at this point. Russia has unambiguously worked to amplify the voices of violent extremists and racists, at the expense of measured and educated voices on this issue, and they have used youthful naivety towards some very concerning rhetoric as a conduit for this information warfare.
The shame here is that this has become a distraction over real criticism and has impeded geopolitical consensus on the way Israel has approached this conflict. Most people who are paying attention believe Israel is way over the line, but are not willing to support a form of anti-zionist messaging which openly calls for throwing ten million Israeli Jews to the wolves.