In the months immediately following Hamas’s October 7, 2023 massacre, British-born Eylon Levy became one of the most recognizable faces as a key spokesperson for the State of Israel.
With degrees from the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, Levy, who moved to Israel in 2014 and served in the IDF, previously served as the international spokesman for Israeli President Isaac Herzog, following a career as a television news anchor.
Now heading Spokesoffice, a civil society initiative to advocate for Israel and the Jewish people in international media, Levy is also a professional translator, working most recently on the New York Times bestseller, Hostage, Eli Sharabi’s compelling memoir of his captivity by Hamas.
We spoke to Levy recently to discuss the information war Israel is now facing. This interview has been edited and condensed for space and clarity:
Why has Israel failed to get its message across during the past two years of war?
First of all, we have to be honest that Israel is fighting on an uneven battlefield.
The odds are absolutely stacked against us because of the demographics of the world, because of long-term ideological trends on the Left and the Right, and because of the way social media algorithms function.
One of the problems we have encountered in this war is that many people genuinely want to believe the worst about Jews and Israel. Therefore, the battle is often not a debate between well-intentioned sides. Some have a very clear goal of painting Israel as being worse than Nazi Germany, to legitimize its eventual destruction.
This has to be treated as an information war and as a threat to our national security, but Israel has never defined the battle for global public opinion as a matter of national security.
Historically, this front has been underfunded and sabotaged at every opportunity – and that is before we get on to a total lack of message discipline within the Israeli government and to politicians making statements, geared toward their base, that end up doing tremendous damage to us internationally.
In the end, it’s a combination of things: a vicious and premeditated information war against Israel designed to delegitimize it, and a state apparatus that is basically ignorant of the threat and hasn’t dedicated the necessary resources to it.
And all of this must be put into a context where it becomes harder day by day,because global opinion has been against Israel.
How do fake images/information and AI play a role?
When I look at what is poisoning global public opinion, it’s got nothing to do with the technological revolution and much more to do with good old-fashioned political information warfare being waged by people with an agenda.
How can social media influencers contribute to effectively spreading Israel’s message?
I hate the term ‘influencer.’ I think it is much more accurate to say, as Elon Musk says, ‘You are the media now.’ People increasingly rely on trusted individuals to be sources of information, not necessarily establishment organizations.
People can use that to different effects, and different ‘influencers’ will have different crafts. Some will be preaching to the choir, but that’s critical because the choir, the base, the pro-Israel audience, is hungry for information and to know how to contend with the allegations that are being made against Israel.
They want talking points and ideas, and that’s where the whole host of podcasts and content creators are critical.
And then there is using social media to appeal to a broader global audience as well – people who are not necessarily persuaded but are being bombarded with information on all sides.
Is there any legitimacy left in more established, so-called legacy media?
Legacy media is critical because individuals may be their own media outlets, but that doesn’t make them journalists. It doesn’t mean that they are committed to basic standards of interrogating a story and getting the necessary responses.
They’re [influencers] activists; therefore, there is a huge amount of weight to what is in the legacy media story that will be published in the New York Times, for example, and in its own right, having evidentiary value because it’s been through that process and all those pairs of eyes, and it’s not whatever one influencer decides to push on X/Twitter.
So it is important that it reaches policymakers and will underpin their decisions, and it cannot be neglected in favor of social media. You have to appeal to both.
What is an effective way for making Israel’s case?
We’re talking about Israel fighting a war. The framing is absolutely critical.
There is an impression around the world that October 7 was a terror attack, maybe a very big terror attack, and that consequently, Israel declared war against ghosts or an innocent population in Gaza.
They do not understand that October 7 was a premeditated act of war by a jihadist terrorist army that had an open policy of sacrificing its own civilians on the battlefield, or that October 7 was genocide in its own right, and that it was the opening shot of a regional war that was intended to suck Iran’s proxies into a war of annihilation.
So it’s important to remind people of the big picture of what is happening and why it is happening, and to help people navigate the images they are seeing, and to blame Hamas for the destruction that came on because of the way they were fighting.
Now I think Israel is actually in the strongest public diplomacy position it’s been in for two years because Israel’s message is that we are demanding the full implementation of the American peace plan that the whole world has signed off on.
It is not Israel against the world. It is Israel urging the world to get a move on and deliver on its own policies.
What is the goal of Spokesoffice?
Since I was unceremoniously forced out of the Prime Minister’s Office, I have been leading a civil society initiative to get Israel and the Jewish people’s most talented advocates from civil society into international media.
Since the beginning of this year, we have placed over 700 interviews in the global media, either [from] myself or a whole talented cast of mostly former officials who want to volunteer their time to speak up for Israel in the international media because they see it as their civic duty.
We know that there are so many news channels where people are talking about Israel, often without an Israeli perspective, and we’re trying to go out there and conquer the screen time of the Jewish people to make sure that the lies against us don’t go unchallenged.
And with that, social media is crucial as well because there is a large following of people who look to me as one of their sources of information on how to fight back.■