Yuri Bezmenov, the Soviet defector, is usually quoted by people who have watched four minutes of a grainy interview and decided they cracked the Cold War.
Strip away the exaggeration, and he was right about what counts: hostile powers don’t invent a nation’s weaknesses; they find the ones it already has, fund them, give them prestige, and push them through the institutions that decide how a society sees itself.
Most of it is legal. That is the trap of an open society, where its own freedoms become the delivery system for the people who want it gone. As Shakespeare wrote, “there is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.” Subversion is knowledge of that tide, using its pull to achieve state policy without firing a shot.
Bezmenov estimated that the KGB spent roughly 85% of its effort not on stealing secrets but on subversion, propaganda, and “active measures.”
The model runs in four stages. First, a hostile power demoralizes a society until it can’t tell the truth from propaganda, and the enemy’s ideology looks like a desirable substitute – a project of 15 to 20 years, a full generation. Then it destabilizes the core institutions and pushes the country into crisis. Finally, it imposes a new order, by force if necessary, and brands resistance as extremism.
History never runs the formula cleanly, but the rhythm repeats. Iran is the cleanest case. The Shah didn’t fall overnight; for years, his legitimacy was hollowed out by an unlikely coalition of clerics, Marxists, students, and Western critics, all calling the monarchy corrupt and foreign-owned.
Then came the strikes, the cassette sermons, the paralysis. The crisis broke out in 1979; the Shah left, Khomeini returned, and the liberals and leftists who had helped bring him down were jailed, exiled, or shot. They were useful for destroying the old order, but dangerous to the new one. Delegitimize, destabilize, break, replace. That is the playbook.
Iran wasn’t even the Soviets’ best work. That same year, they ran the live version themselves, and Afghanistan shows the stage everyone forgets: normalization. A communist party grabbed power in 1978, spent the next year butchering its own factions, and lost control so completely that Moscow sent tanks that December to install a more obedient client over the body of the man it replaced.
That is normalization with the mask off. When the proxies fail, the sponsor stops pretending and imposes the new order by force. Bezmenov took the word from the Soviet line on Czechoslovakia in 1968. Once the tanks were parked, the situation had been “normalized.”
Grenada ran the same arc, faster. Maurice Bishop’s New JEWEL Movement took the island in 1979 and pulled it into Soviet and Cuban orbit; four years later, its own hardliners stood Bishop against a wall and shot him.
The difference is the ending. In this instance, the Americans, seeing a Soviet foothold take root just off their coast, tore out the new order before it settled. These tides can be turned; they just never turn themselves.
The same playbook is now aimed at Israel, from a different source. Not Soviet communism, but a loose Islamist ecosystem running on anti-Zionism and anti-Western resentment, with Qatar as its banker. It now plays the role the USSR once did: the chief state financier of the West’s war on itself.
What it does is structural and built to last: it funds the universities, builds the cultural centers, buys prestige through football clubs, cultivates elites, sponsors conferences, lobbies governments, and deploys a sovereign wealth fund. When a state pours money for generations into the places that train journalists, diplomats, and judges, it isn’t buying buildings; it is buying the ideological framework of the next Western elites.
Demoralization doesn’t need tanks. It needs access, prestige, repetition, and time.
And the goal is bigger than us. Qatar’s deeper target is the West itself; it hates Israel in its own right, marked for isolation and eventual destruction. The genius, from Doha’s side, is getting both at once. Turning the West against Israel does more than weaken Israel; it turns Western campuses, courts, and streets against their own democracies.
Israel is the wedge that splits the West – two birds, one stone. The protest wave after October 7 was the proof of concept: not spontaneous, not grassroots, but organized, lawyered, funded, and on-message from day one.
Here is the problem: Israel still treats this as a public relations issue. It is not. It is a war about legitimacy, and our hasbara (public diplomacy) model is hopelessly outmatched: reactive, sentimental, amateur, aimed too often at people who already agree.
The instinctive demand is simply “more Hasbara,” more spokespeople, more explainers, more clips posted after the narrative has hardened. But what I am advocating is not hasbara-with-a-budget. A serious country does not fight ideological subversion with scattered influencers and emotional clips.
Instead, it fights a coordinated, multi-decade campaign across the cultural nerves of society, its universities, media, courts, NGOs, platforms, and donor networks, built to go on the offensive rather than only defend.
HEADING
So, concretely: Israel needs a counter-subversion body that is legal, transparent, professional, and built to last. Government-coordinated (but not necessarily government-run), sitting at arm’s length as a quasi-independent agency, or coordinating the NGOs and private actors already fighting in scattered, underfunded pockets.
Not secret, but operating in plain sight, by legal means, with the seriousness of a national security agency, because that is what this is. Its job is narrow: cut Israel’s diplomatic isolation, defend its legitimacy in the West and especially the US, and buy the IDF the political time it needs to win.
What it does is not mysterious, because our enemies already do it. A real international broadcaster, not another government-funded YouTube channel, an answer to Al Jazeera. A funding arm for the writers, filmmakers, YouTubers, podcasters, and academics already on the front lines defending Western civilization.
An investigative branch that exposes the foreign money, donor networks, fake charities, and the pipelines from a campus slogan to the regime that profits: names, money, links. A legal arm, because lawfare is already used against us, and we keep showing up only as the defendant; a false atrocity story should cost more than a quiet correction three weeks later.
It should litigate, and it need not even win: the process is the punishment, and a suit that drags an outlet through two years of lawyers and discovery makes lying expensive. And a platform operation run by people who understand the machinery, the ranking signals, the coordinated posting, the timing, and volume that decide what trends and what dies.
The other side runs bot networks, hashtag floods, and SEO that bury the correction under the lie. Truth loses when it is badly organized, and the lie is professionally distributed.
None of this needs a fantasy budget. A few hundred million over several years is nothing next to one prolonged war or diplomatic rupture. What it needs is coordination and persistence: the same networks, researchers, and legal strategy, tracked year after year, because influence compounds.
This alone will not eliminate the pressure, but it can disrupt, slow, and make it expensive for the enemy to sustain it unpunished. The campaign against Israel is not a mood that will fade after one war; it is part of a multi-generational civilizational subversion project.
Decades of subversion have contributed to turning large parts of US public opinion against Israel, a sacrosanct pillar of American politics only a decade ago. And the trend is steepening. Without a serious anti-subversion strategy of its own, Israel’s future looks ever more arduous. So perhaps it is time to turn the tide and finally levy our battalions.