Israel takes its war on Palestine into the AI age

The battle over Palestine has never been fought only on the ground. For decades, Israel and its powerful political, lobbying and public-relations networks have devoted enormous resources to shaping how the conflict is understood in Washington and across the Western world. But an investigation into an Israeli-funded influence operation suggests that this campaign has entered a new and potentially more consequential arena: the artificial intelligence systems increasingly used by millions of people to determine what is true.Recent investigations exposed the Hanover Institute for Public Policy as a purported American think tank that appeared to have no real offices, identifiable scholars or meaningful institutional presence. Instead, the institute appears to have been created as a sophisticated propaganda operation aimed at shaping search engine results and influencing the answers generated by AI chatbots.Documents filed under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) trace the operation’s funding through advertising and public-relations firms to LaPam, Israel’s state advertising agency. Piro Inc, the New York advertising firm involved, was operating under a $900,000 digital communica...