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Comment by throwaway27448 | Hacker News Reader

I imagine Israel's various hasbara operation dwarfs its relevance and funding by multiple orders of magnitude. I don't see much evidence it plays a role outside of being useful to blame for inconvenient discourse.

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Sure, but that's a good example. They obviously push pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian and probably a good deal of outright anti-Muslim positions.

But do you think they push random divisive issues, unrelated to their own interests, just to destabilize countries they don't like? I think the evidence for that is much weaker.

That wouldn't really make sense for Israel. They don't want America to be destabilised. They want it stable and supporting them. Same for European countries. They want Palestine and Iran unstable, but they've already achieved that through other means.

They certainly benefit from the division in the states. A large majority of AIPAC funding comes from American Evangelical groups. Why wouldn't they?

There's no doubt in my mind that there's a constant effort to keep it that way.

There's entire apps designed to organize brigading efforts online: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/01/24/gaza-is...

Israel? No. Russia? Absolutely; a country preoccupied with domestic conflict is less likely to interfere with others.

For a country of 8 million to "dwarf by multiple orders of magnitude" a country of 140 million in almost anything requires very lively imagination indeed.

Soft power operations are hard to measure. You cannot measure the impact of Israeli activities either.

Why would you even need to measure? There are precedents.

VKomtakte social network was blocked because owners were russian, and there could interfere in internal affairs.

Why not block facebook? Its ownership has clear ties to Israel and it DOES interfere in elections and democratic process!

> For a country of 8 million to "dwarf by multiple orders of magnitude" a country of 140 million in almost anything requires very lively imagination indeed.

I see you've never heard of Hasbara.

Anyway, there's little reason to think that influence scales with the size of the population as opposed to the number of people involved in active influence and funding, especially with Russia locking down access to the global internet. Israel simply has much, much, much, much more to gain from interfering in american culture than russia does (despite its being scapegoated by the least capable of our politicians).

Russia has its own Great Power status to lose, which they worked on since the 16th century. If they cannot defeat Ukraine and be seen as clear winners of this long war, no amount of nuclear weapons will help them regain their clout. Even their own heavily Muslim regions like Caucasus may well secede.

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