The biggest threat to Israel is mass cognitive warfare - opinion

Hamas is an Islamist extremist organization whose ideology and governance are openly hostile to homosexuality. This is not a matter of narrative framing or political interpretation. It is an observable reality. Yet across Western capitals and elite campuses, many activists who define themselves as champions of LGBTQ rights have aligned themselves publicly with Hamas – often with absolute moral certainty.

This is not merely hypocrisy. It is evidence of a mass cognitive failure in which emotional reward has displaced reality testing. When people can no longer process an obvious contradiction that directly threatens their own identity and safety, the issue moves beyond political disagreement. It is clear evidence of mind control when the cognitive and emotional processing have been dominated or hijacked.

The most consequential battlefield is no longer confined to borders, terrain, or the sky. It is neurochemical and psychological – an arena in which attention, identity, and moral reasoning can be engineered at scale.

Addiction specialists have increasingly used analogies such as hypodermic needles and drug dealers to describe mobile phones, illustrating how digital stimuli and algorithmic feedback loops hijack the brain’s reward pathways over time. Israel is now confronting not only rockets, terror cells, and diplomatic pressure but a form of cognitive warfare aimed primarily at younger Western audiences.

The objective is not disagreement with Israeli policy. It is the delegitimization of Israel’s existence by conditioning millions to experience Israel as uniquely malevolent –instinctively, emotionally, and reflexively.

The most effective weapon deployed against Israel today is not a missile. It is a dopamine-driven narrative ecosystem that hijacks attention and moral judgment. While Israel possesses some of the world’s most advanced missile defense systems, it has no comparable defense – and little institutional commitment to developing one – against sophisticated global cognitive warfare.

Social platforms are not neutral distributors of information. They are engagement engines optimized for frequent, high-salience rewards, particularly, outrage, tribal affirmation, and moral performance. These behaviors are neurologically reinforcing. Nuance is not.

Lembke identifies a defining feature of addiction: impaired self-observation. As she puts it, “Denial is not knowing you’re lying.” That insight extends far beyond clinical addiction. We have constructed mass-scale environments that mimic addictive reinforcement loops – endless novelty, constant social feedback, and algorithmically amplified grievance.

The result is a culture trained to confuse emotional intensity with truth. Once the reward circuit is captured, reality becomes optional.

These neurochemical vulnerabilities are being exploited deliberately and strategically.

In a dopamine-optimized ecosystem, the most addictive narrative wins, not the most accurate one.

This cognitive war does not operate only through anonymous accounts or viral clips. It moves through trusted institutions.

Political leaders have learned that repeating anti-Israel narratives guarantees exposure and applause. Entertainment and celebrity culture normalize grievance through repetition. Storytelling bypasses analysis; audiences are trained to feel first and evaluate later – if at all.

Legacy media, constrained by speed and imagery, privileges moral simplicity over complexity. In a constant-content environment, the camera frame becomes the argument. Horrifying images of destruction outperform explanations of causality, legal obligation, or operational restraint.

Social media is the decisive arena because it converts outrage into a reward loop. Algorithms privilege content that produces instant emotional spikes: victimhood imagery, rage framing, and binary morality. Israel’s reality – historically complex, morally layered, legally nuanced – does not compress well into dopamine triggers. Hamas slogans do.

Israel’s challenge is that truth in the Middle East is complicated. Israel is an open democracy with courts, intense internal dissent, investigative journalism, and ethical debate – even during wartime. That complexity becomes a liability in an information environment that actively punishes complexity.

In dopamine-driven systems, “explaining” is interpreted as “making excuses.” Context is framed as “deflection.” The more Israel explains, the more it is placed on the defensive – because explanation does not generate the neurochemical payoff that outrage does.

This is why Netanyahu’s “chickens for KFC” joke matters. It reveals that, for some activists, identity has become performance, and performance has become chemically rewarded. Cogito, ergo sum – “I think, therefore I am” – has quietly morphed into “I protest against Israel, therefore I am.”

When the brain is chasing reinforcement, it can hold mutually exclusive beliefs without discomfort – because discomfort is precisely what the system trains people to avoid.

This is not a hasbara failure. It is not a branding issue. It cannot be solved by better slogans or more articulate spokespeople.

It is a failure – across the democratic world– to understand the neuro-informational domain of modern conflict. Israel is being targeted not only because it is strategically important, but because it is the ideal test case: a morally complex democracy confronting jihadist enemies within an algorithmic environment that rewards moral simplicity and punishes complexity.

If neurotransmitters can be weaponized to detach a generation from obvious realities – such as the fact that Hamas would brutalize the very protesters who celebrate it – then no democracy is safe from this method. Israel is not the end target. It is the proving ground.

The war against Israel is being fought not only with rockets and resolutions, but synapse by synapse – inside the minds of the next generation.