The internet has turned Israel into the world’s favorite conspiracy theory.

We are living through the largest propaganda environment in human history — and no country on earth is more relentlessly mythologised, demonised, and misrepresented online than the Jewish state.

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This is a guest essay by Lucy Tabrizi, who writes about politics, philosophy, religion, ethics, and history.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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Sometimes, when feeling emotionally stable and psychologically resilient, I take a cautious stroll through the “anti-Zionist” online stratosphere.

I bring water, maybe electrolytes, and a strong grip on reality.

Because within minutes, I’ve stumbled into a parallel dimension where every earthly event is reinterpreted to blame Israel. The internet has become a multiplayer conspiracy board, where any footage, from anywhere, is paired with a dramatic caption and rapidly absorbed into a narrative casting the Jewish state as uniquely monstrous and beyond redemption.

Replies are instantly flooded: “Terrorist state.” “Savages.” “Pure evil.”

The rush to judgment now habitually outpaces demands for verification, if verification even arrives. That, increasingly, is the real problem: not disagreement, which has always existed, but that vast numbers no longer seem concerned with whether the story they react to is actually true. Each new allegation simply becomes another exhibit in a trial whose outcome was decided long ago.

The appetite for the next outrage hit is simply too strong. A lurid accusation against Israel appears online and millions consume it like ideological crack cocaine before checking if the image came from Gaza, Syria, Yemen, a video game, or Midjourney (an AI photo-generating software).

While not all are fake, an astonishing number turn out to be misleading, stripped of context, recycled, digitally altered, AI-generated, exaggerated, selectively edited, or simply fabricated outright.

In the age of bots, influencers, viral outrage, and algorithmically amplified emotion, misinformation spreads at a speed and scale most people still fail to grasp. No country on earth is more relentlessly mythologised, demonised, and misrepresented online than Israel. Naturally, many swimming in this propaganda slipstream remain utterly convinced Israel uniquely controls the media, despite marinating daily in wall-to-wall anti-Israel content.

I once put this to a friend (now, a very former friend): If Israel controls the media, why is anti-Israel content suddenly everywhere? Her reply, after a moment’s thought: “Because people are starting to wake up.” This theory, you realise, could explain both the absence and abundance of evidence simultaneously. At that point, there is no mechanism for correction.

To be clear, I don’t claim Israel has never engaged in propaganda, nor do I possess perfect information. Like everyone, I decode this conflict through the internet’s fractured prism. But one thing has become obvious: An astonishing amount of what goes viral collapses the moment you investigate it for longer than the average TikTok attention span.

Let’s look at a few examples.

A few weeks ago, “Syrian Girl,” an online propagandist, shared a harrowing image claiming a Gaza girl was shot by Israel while collecting water. The post exploded, generating hundreds of thousands of shares and the now-familiar avalanche of disgust, rapidly becoming definitive evidence of Israeli barbarism.

Except the image was not from Gaza, dating years earlier to the war in Yemen and connected to Houthis violence. In other words, an image linked to Israel’s enemy was transformed into viral proof of Israeli evil.

What fascinates me is not simply that misinformation spreads, but that its subsequent debunking barely seems to matter once the emotional narrative has taken hold. The image has already fused itself into millions of people’s understanding.

Does the correction travel as far as the original lie? Almost never. Is there eventually a correction? Occasionally. Do those who shared it issue solemn retractions or reconsider how quickly they believed it? Rarely; we are well past that stage.

Indeed, I have had people openly tell me it doesn’t matter if some stories are fake, because “the overall point is still true.” Think how extraordinary that is: Once factual accuracy becomes subordinate to emotional impact, lying is no longer wrong, merely useful. This is very dangerous territory we have entered. It is how entire societies end up confidently hallucinating together.

Unfortunately, it is not just anonymous propagandists or internet personalities pushing this material. Sometimes the misinformation comes from people occupying some of the most prestigious positions in international institutions.

Recently, Francesca Albanese, United Nations Special Rapporteur for the Palestinian Territories, claimed 380,000 children under five in Gaza had been killed. This figure quickly embedded itself online, echoing across posts and articles until it acquired the appearance of common knowledge.

Yet, it should have prompted pause. Gaza’s entire pre-war population of children under five was roughly 300,000 to 320,000. The claim was mathematically impossible; the continued existence of toddlers in Gaza offers a compelling counter-argument.

When UN Watch Executive Director Hillel Neuer challenged this, Albanese declined to address the demographic impossibility. Nor, as far as I am aware, has any correction or retraction travelled through the media ecosystem that amplified the original claim.

Increasingly, numbers function less as verifiable claims and more as emotional special effects: 50,000 children killed, millions starving, 14,000 babies about to die within 48 hours — a real claim amplified globally from a distorted UN interview. The predicted apocalypse never materialised, nor did any retraction.

Albanese and countless media outlets also helped popularise the claim that 70-to-80 per cent of Gaza’s casualties were women and children, a statistic endlessly invoked as evidence of genocide and printed everywhere. Yet subsequent analyses, including revisions based on Hamas’ own casualty data, found adult male deaths substantially higher, with fighting-age men heavily overrepresented among the dead.

Quietly, the numbers changed, and equally quietly, almost nobody corrected the narrative built upon them.

Then there are stories like Hind Rajab, circulated online as a definitive case of Israeli brutality. She was a little girl allegedly trapped in a car and deliberately executed by tanks. Within weeks, the account hardened into global moral certainty. Hind Rajab became a symbolic martyr in an international narrative of Israeli cruelty, her face appearing beside Anne Frank on protest banners as charities and activist campaigns adopted her name.

The deeper problem is that the runaway narrative was never independently verified and many crucial details remained contested. Early reports of the car moving through an active combat zone contrasted with later reconstructions placing it stationary. WhatsApp exchanges reportedly omitted lines suggesting family members may have left. Audio analysis presented as proof of deliberate targeting was challenged as consistent with crossfire between Hamas and Israeli forces.

The death of a child is a tragedy. Exploiting it before the facts are known is a scandal.

This isn’t merely about omitted details; sometimes, it’s about missing crucial seconds. Just this week, two versions of the same incident circulated online. One showed Israeli soldiers shooting a Palestinian teenager, the other included the moments immediately preceding, showing him attempting to stab them first.

Guess which version went viral.

Two entirely different wars often seem to exist online. In one, Israel randomly bombs “refugees,” “aid workers,” “journalists,” hospitals, schools, and children for no discernible military purpose. In the other, Israel is routinely responding to rocket fire, stabbings, shootings, attempted attacks, and threats from groups such as Hamas, while arguing that many of the strikes generating outrage targeted fighters, commanders, weapons depots, and command infrastructure embedded within civilian areas.

This pattern was visible from the beginning: on October 7th, even while the massacre was unfolding, accounts already pumped out language of “genocide” and “famine.” The narrative did not emerge from evidence; in many cases, “evidence” was simply poured into a narrative that already existed.

And right now, there is clearly a growing social appetite for narratives involving Jewish evil, Jewish cruelty, Jewish bloodlust, Jewish deception, Jewish power, and Jewish conspiracy.

Medieval accusations about poisoned wells and murdered Christian children have evolved into polished digital propaganda and algorithmically amplified outrage. But the underlying formula remains remarkably consistent: Invent a monstrous accusation, repeat it until it feels emotionally true, and let the mob do the rest.

Which means the average social media user now approaches the internet like a medieval peasant hearing rumours about poisoned wells: “This sounds insane. Repost immediately.”

What worries me is that we are losing a cultural habit that once defined our civilisation: the ability to hold competing possibilities in our heads long enough to investigate them properly. Forget genuine inquiry. We seem increasingly incapable of summoning even a fleeting flicker of doubt before deciding we already know exactly what happened. Inconvenient facts are quickly dismissed as “hasbara” (Israel’s international PR) — as if to say: “Nice try, Zionist propagandist.”

The examples in this essay should not reassure us; they should concern us. They are merely a snapshot. If I attempted to catalogue every recycled image, impossible statistic, mistranslated quote, missing second, and collapsing narrative, this would be a book rather than a Substack article.

More importantly, these are the stories that became so viral, so implausible, or so widely circulated that their flaws were exposed. The image was misrepresented. The statistic was impossible. Yet the original narrative survives largely intact.

Sometimes the verification required is not even particularly difficult. Recently, the organization “Jewish Voice for Peace” (which is neither Jewish nor for peace) shared footage of an explosion accompanied by the claim that “the genocide isn’t over.” The video carried the watermark of the journalist who supplied it. Out of curiosity, I spent less than a minute searching his name, and found reporting linking him to Hamas and allegations of foreknowledge of the October 7th attacks.

A healthy society would respond to examples like these by becoming more sceptical. If this claim was false, what else might be? If this narrative collapsed under scrutiny, how many others have never been scrutinised at all? Instead, we increasingly dismiss each falsehood as an isolated exception and continue believing the larger story unchanged.

The reality is that we are living through the largest propaganda environment in human history. Never before have billions been able to receive, share, manipulate, and emotionally amplify information at this speed. Yet our scepticism is strangely selective, activating only when a claim threatens what we already believe.

We used to teach children critical thinking: Compare sources, ask who benefits, distinguish evidence from emotion, tolerate uncertainty. Today, many adults regard this entire process as suspiciously “Zionist.” The moment a society becomes more interested in defending narratives than discovering truth, it begins dismantling the very mechanisms that undergirded its success.

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