We’re not just losing the PR war. We’re being obliterated. They come at us with altered images of decapitated babies. We answer, “We invented cherry tomatoes.” We’re not even playing the same sport.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said as much in a recent CNN interview, warning that TikTok alone is flooding the world with anti-Israel content at a ratio of roughly a thousand to one.
Qatar, China, Russia, and Iran are pouring resources into a propaganda machine built to isolate Israel and fracture its alliance with the United States.
Meanwhile, our own response too often looks like a dozen well-meaning organizations shouting into the wind, each with its own slogans, its own hashtags, its own outdated website.
There is one country that has been fighting successfully on the 8th front, and that is Taiwan, a country very similar to ours – a small democracy in a very hostile region. Taiwan has important lessons for Israel to fight propaganda and disinformation on the 8th front.
At our recent “Middle East Summit” in Jerusalem, Ambassador Abby Lee, head of the Taiwan Mission to Israel, described disinformation as a “smokeless bullet.” You don’t feel it strike. There’s no bullet hole, but it accumulates: quietly eroding a society’s trust in its institutions, its allies, and eventually in itself. Unlike a bullet, it leaves no broken glass. It just leaves a population that no longer can recognize what is true.
Taiwan has lived with this threat far longer than Israel has taken it seriously. Facing an estimated 2.5 million cyberattacks a day – many originating in China, some in Russia – Taipei didn’t respond with scattered volunteer efforts.
Taiwan built a national infrastructure: a government rapid-response mechanism, systematic sharing of threat indicators, and a standing playbook for how China, Iran, and Russia coordinate disinformation campaigns against democracies.
Israeli leaders turn to Taiwan
Notably, Ambassador Lee revealed that Israeli lawmakers, security officials, and civil society leaders are already quietly turning to Taiwan for guidance on countering cognitive warfare. We are, in effect, already recognizing that Taiwan is ahead of us. The question is whether we’re prepared to actually learn from it.
Israel’s problem on the eighth front isn’t primarily a numbers problem, and it certainly isn’t a talent problem. Israel has no shortage of brilliant advocates, good-looking influencers, and viral moments. What it lacks is a state-backed system.
Prime Minister Netanyahu is right to call this the eighth front of the war – but unlike the other seven, Israel does not fund, coordinate, or defend it the way it does the rest. A country that invests billions in Iron Dome has not built an equivalent shield for its narrative. A single influencer with a compelling video can still get more real traction than the state’s official channels, not because the state lacks resources, but because it lacks coordination.
Taiwan’s model to win the Eighth Front information war offers three lessons Israel can act on immediately.
First, treat disinformation as critical infrastructure, not hasbara (public diplomacy). Taiwan protects its information space the way it protects its electrical grid and water systems – because it understands that a population that has lost trust in its own reality is as vulnerable as one that has lost its power supply.
Israel’s government should fund a real rapid-response apparatus, not leave the job to nonprofits and individual influencers operating on goodwill and donations.
Second, build the playbook before the crisis, not during it. Taiwan doesn’t scramble to respond to each new wave of Chinese disinformation from scratch. It has pre-built threat indicators and response protocols, refined over years of daily attacks.
Israel, by contrast, tends to relearn the same lessons after every escalation, because the last campaign’s tools and personnel scatter once the news cycle moves on.
Third, share the burden with allied democracies. Taiwan doesn’t fight alone. It exchanges intelligence and countermeasures with partner nations facing the same authoritarian playbook – recognizing that China, Iran, and Russia are running coordinated, not isolated, campaigns against multiple democracies simultaneously.
Israel’s natural allies in this fight – Taiwan among them – are small, technologically capable democracies who understand exactly what it means to be targeted by a much larger adversary’s information machine. That is a partnership waiting to be formalized, not merely discussed on a conference stage.
Israel and Taiwan are, as Ambassador Lee put it, geopolitical mirrors: small democracies with outsized enemies, forced to punch above their weight to survive. On seven fronts, Israel has shown the world what that looks like. On the eighth, it’s time to admit that Taiwan has already written the playbook – let’s start adopting it.
The writer is the founder of Israel365, which recently hosted the Middle East Summit in Jerusalem and runs the Israel Truth Network that fights fake news every day.