Every day, you scroll through a battlefield you did not enlist in. The posts that outrage you, the clips that move you, the narratives that seem to arrive from everywhere at once — some of that is organic, and some of it is a campaign. You do not have to take a critic’s word for that. In October 2019, the Israeli intelligence establishment published its own doctrine for waging war on human perception, in a 230-page volume anyone can download. It is called The Cognitive Campaign: Strategic and Intelligence Perspectives, and it was issued by the Institute for National Security Studies together with the Institute for the Research of the Methodology of Intelligence — the Israeli intelligence community’s own methodology center.
The editors are Yossi Kuperwasser, who ran the
research division of Israeli military intelligence, and David Siman-Tov. The
contributors are serving and reserve intelligence officers, diplomats, and the
analysts who built the machine. They wrote it all down. Start with their
definition, because everything else follows from it.
The editors distinguish cognition — how a person or a public perceives reality — from the cognitive campaign: the actions and tools used to influence a target audience’s cognition, or to block influence on it, so that the audience adopts, in their words, “the perception of reality held by the side wielding the effort.” This is not wartime-only. The campaign is continuous, and it reaches its peak in what Israeli doctrine calls the “campaign between wars” — which is to say, right now, in peacetime, on your phone. Intelligence agencies sit at the center of it.
Their
job, per the volume, is to map the beliefs, culture, and values of target
audiences; to produce the content and messages the
campaign needs; to run cognitive operations themselves; and to detect and
thwart the other side’s. That is the architecture, described by its architects.
Moshe Ya’alon, who served as both IDF Chief of Staff and Minister of Defense,
opens the volume with an admission that should be quoted every time this
conflict is covered.
The Palestinians,
he writes, won a decisive cognitive victory by establishing “the
occupation” as the cause of the conflict
— reversing the old David-and-Goliath image so
that the Palestinians became David and Israel became Goliath. His response, as
Chief of Staff, was industrial: a 24-hour spokesperson’s war room pushing the
Israeli version out in multiple languages; combat soldiers trained as camera
documenters; journalists embedded with the forces; databases feeding what he
calls “volunteers fighting the legitimacy war” against movements like BDS on
social media; and a standing Center for Cognitive Operations. He is equally
candid about the constraint.
A state that insists on verifying facts before
it speaks will always lose the first news cycle, because, in his words, “those
who do not hesitate to lie will always have the advantage of time.” Read that
sentence twice. It is offered as a complaint about Israel’s enemies. It is also
a description of the incentive structure the entire doctrine is built to escape
— and the reader can decide for themselves which governments, in the years
since, have chosen speed over verification.
If Ya’alon supplies
the theory, Ronen Dangoor supplies the confession. His chapter dissects
Israel’s decades-long campaign to move the world — above all Washington — against
Iran’s nuclear program, a campaign whose goal, he writes plainly, was to use
the United States as leverage, because Israel could delay the program but never
stop it alone. The methods were narrative: Iran framed relentlessly as an
existential threat; a false public choice of “bomb or bombing”; an urgency
motif in which Iranian capability was always “three to five years” away,
repeated across decades. And then Dangoor does something rare in official
literature — he grades the campaign honestly. Israeli intelligence assessments
at times contradicted the political narrative, including public assessments
that Iran had not yet decided to build a weapon. Officials who sounded moderate
were attacked at home for weakening the threat story. Mixed messages made
Israel look manipulative abroad. Holocaust imagery, he concludes, worked on
Israeli and some American audiences and had negligible effect on other Western
governments. And the campaign’s total focus on the nuclear file, he admits,
allowed Iran to build its missile and proxy networks at almost no international
cost.
That is not an
activist’s characterization of Israeli strategy. That is the Israeli strategic
community’s own after-action report. The volume’s treatment of delegitimization
completes the picture. Shahar Eilam and Shira Patael describe the fight over
Israel’s legitimacy as a campaign that “occurs, first and foremost, in the
cognitive dimension” — a contest between a pro-Israel “blue” camp and an
anti-Israel “red” camp, each a network of governments and civil-society groups,
competing for the allegiance of segmented target audiences around the world.
Note what that framing does. Under it, a student group, a church divestment
vote, a boycott call — all of it is reclassified as enemy action in a war, and
the people doing it become combatants in a campaign to be mapped, countered,
and defeated. And even here, the authors make a concession worth underlining:
their working hypothesis is that Israeli policy does influence the
delegitimization phenomenon — they simply believe it would survive any policy
change.
THE GRIEVANCE IS ACKNOWLEDGED. THE WAR OVER THE
NARRATIVE PROCEEDS ANYWAY.
None of this is secret. That is the point. The
doctrine of perception warfare — audience mapping, message production,
intelligence-run influence operations, volunteer networks, legitimacy campaigns
— was typeset, ISBN-numbered, and posted on a think tank’s website in 2019,
four years before October 7 turned every feed on earth into contested ground.
When you watch governments race to publish their version before the facts are
verified, when you watch civilian advocacy reclassified as enemy action, when
you watch the same urgency motifs recycled to sell the next confrontation, you
are not watching improvisation. You are watching a playbook being run — by
professionals who were honest enough, once, to publish it.
Sources
• YOSSI KUPERWASSER AND DAVID SIMAN-TOV, EDS., THE COGNITIVECAMPAIGN: STRATEGIC AND INTELLIGENCE
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