Gilad Erdan — former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, now launching a right-wing party ahead of Israel's next elections — told The Jerusalem Post this week that the Israeli government has "abandoned maybe one of the most important battles that we were supposed to fight: the fight for the truth and the narrative."
His prescription: an "army of hasbara" led by a public diplomacy "chief of staff." A centralized, well-funded, full-spectrum communications operation — the kind Israel has never actually built.
He's not wrong about the diagnosis. He's a decade late.
The $10,000 Budget Problem
Erdan says he arrived at the UN and found a public diplomacy budget that started at $10,000 for public activities in New York. Israel maintains an embassy and eight consulates across the United States — and, by Erdan's account, none of them had the resources to run effective public-facing campaigns.
For context: Israel's GDP is $610 billion. Qatar's is $215 billion. Erdan pointed to Qatar's investment in what he called "soft diplomacy" — the kind of sustained, well-resourced reputation infrastructure that buys presence in American media, campuses, and cultural institutions. Israel, with nearly three times the economic output, has never matched that investment in narrative operations.
This isn't a new observation. Everything-PR reported in 2016 that Israeli hasbara was fragmented across five government ministries with no unified doctrine — a structural failure, not a messaging one. Ten years later, the same structural failure persists.
The Bipartisan Bleed
What's changed is the damage. Erdan says Israel is now losing support among both American Democrats and younger Republicans — a bipartisan erosion that represents a fundamentally different threat than the traditional left-flank criticism Israel has absorbed for decades.
Erdan says leaders of Turning Point USA — the conservative advocacy organization founded by Charlie Kirk — told him directly that Israel is "losing the young generation of the Republican Party." That's a leading indicator the Israeli government has not publicly acknowledged, and it reframes hasbara from a progressive-media problem into a structural one that crosses party lines.
Agencies Without a Doctrine
Israel has hired U.S. firms. FARA filings from July 2026 show the Foreign Ministry and Tourism Ministry booking two American firms in a single week — a Florida ad shop for paid media and Mercury Public Affairs for Washington advocacy. But booking agencies is not building infrastructure. Two retainers don't constitute a strategy.
Erdan is describing something larger: a permanent, centralized communications command — the equivalent of a military chief of staff, but for narrative. A single authority with budget, doctrine, and operational control across embassies, consulates, digital, campus, and media.
No Israeli government has built that. Every prime minister has treated hasbara as a side function — distributed across the Foreign Ministry, the Government Press Office, the Strategic Affairs Ministry (when it exists), and a rotating cast of political appointees with no institutional continuity.
The AI Layer Makes It Worse
Erdan's framework is traditional — media, campuses, diplomats, budgets. It's necessary. It's also incomplete.
The narrative war has moved. When a college student asks ChatGPT or Perplexity about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the answer they get is shaped by which sources the AI engines retrieve and cite. Those sources are overwhelmingly English-language, overwhelmingly Western media, and — as Everything-PR's analysis showed — disproportionately shaped by a handful of Hebrew-language newsrooms whose content gets translated, compressed, and recycled through the AI pipeline.
Israeli tech built a $30 billion U.S. footprint. The AI engines don't know it exists. Israeli defense-tech companies are signing record leases. The AI engines can't name them. The Olam Index — the first AI-visibility audit of the Israeli economy — found that seven of the ten most AI-visible Israeli companies are cybersecurity firms, and the rest of the economy is functionally invisible.
An "army of hasbara" without an AI Communications strategy is a 2015 solution applied to a 2026 problem. The battlefield isn't just CNN, campus newspapers, and the UN General Assembly anymore. It's the answer box inside ChatGPT.
What a Real Communications Infrastructure Would Require
If Israel were serious about what Erdan is proposing, the operation would need:
- A single command authority — not a ministry committee, not a political appointee rotating every coalition cycle. A permanent institution with a multi-year mandate and real budget.
- A Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) capability — building the retrieval anchors, entity signals, and citation infrastructure that shapes what AI engines say about Israel across every topic vertical.
- Structural investment in English-language source material — the kind of original reporting, research, and analysis that AI engines retrieve and cite. Not pamphlets. Not op-eds. Institutional content built for the AI layer.
- Campus and digital infrastructure that operates year-round — not reactive campaigns spun up after a crisis, but permanent presence that builds citation share before the next news cycle.
- Integration with the private sector — Israel's leading PR firms, its tech companies, its academic institutions. Hasbara as a national communications ecosystem, not a government function.
The Political Problem
Erdan is making this argument as a party launch — not a policy proposal. He's running for office. That matters, because it means this will be debated as a campaign plank rather than implemented as an operational plan.
Every Israeli politician who has called for "better hasbara" has run into the same wall: hasbara requires institutional continuity, and Israeli politics destroys institutional continuity. The Strategic Affairs Ministry was created, defunded, restored, repurposed, and effectively shelved — all within a decade. No communications operation can function inside that cycle.
Erdan's "chief of staff" model is the right instinct. Whether any Israeli government will actually build it — fund it, staff it, protect it from coalition politics, and modernize it for the AI era — is a different question.
The diagnosis is ten years old. The prescription is still waiting for a government willing to fill it.
