2014: Israel Pays Students For Pro-Israeli Social Media Propaganda

Remembering the time when Israel launched a campaign to improve its image abroad.

2014: The Israeli government provided scholarships to hundreds of students at its seven universities in exchange for their making pro-Israel Facebook posts and tweets to foreign audiences.

The students making the posts wouldn’t reveal online that they are funded by the Israeli government, according to correspondence about the plan revealed in the Haaretz newspaper.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office, which will oversaw the programme, confirmed its launch and wrote that its aim was to “strengthen Israeli public diplomacy and make it fit the changes in the means of information consumption”.

Netanyahu’s aides said the main topics the units would address related to political and security issues, combating calls to boycott Israel and combating efforts to question Israel’s legitimacy. The officials said the students would stress Israeli democratic values, freedom of religion and pluralism.

But Alon Liel, the doveish former director-general of the Israeli foreign ministry, criticised the plan as “quite disgusting”. “University students should be educated to think freely. When you buy the mind of a student, he becomes a puppet of the Israeli government grant,” he said. “You can give a grant to do social work or teach but not to do propaganda on controversial issues for the government.”

In the meantime, the program director Daniel Seaman’s own social media posts became the subject of unwanted scrutiny, creating a diplomatic incident between Israel and Japan.

Seaman’s posts on Facebook eventually got him suspended.

These types of tactics were not anomalous but rather formed—and continue to form—a systematic and well-established practice within Israel’s information and public diplomacy apparatus. The hasbara programs, when examined collectively, reveal far more than a routine effort at strategic communication: they expose a state acutely aware that it was losing the battle for international public opinion and therefore compelled to invest vast financial, institutional, and human resources into rehabilitating and managing its global image.

Crucially, the involvement of Israeli academic institutions in these initiatives underscores a deeper structural problem. Rather than functioning as autonomous spaces committed to critical inquiry, intellectual honesty, and academic freedom, these institutions were mobilised as instruments of state policy.

Fast-forwarding to 2026, the legacy of these tactics has only become more visible. Israeli hasbara programs continue to operate, now increasingly sophisticated, leveraging AI-driven social media campaigns and global influencer networks to shape narratives. The persistent reliance on state-aligned academic institutions illustrates a continuity: these universities remain complicit in advancing governmental agendas, often at the expense of independent scholarship. Far from being relics of the past, these strategies reveal a state still grappling with international criticism, prioritizing image management over genuine dialogue or accountability.

©TNPP