Gilad Erdan — former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, now launching a right-wing party ahead of Israel's next elections — has done something rare in Israeli politics: he's publicly diagnosed a structural failure that every government since 2009 has avoided naming.
He told The Jerusalem Post this week that Israel 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.
The diagnosis is correct. The fact that a Knesset candidate is willing to stake political capital on it matters more than the skeptics want to admit.
His Numbers Are Unimpeachable
Erdan 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 resources to run effective public campaigns.
For context: Israel's GDP is $610 billion. Qatar's is $215 billion. Qatar has invested in what Erdan calls "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.
This isn't a new observation. Everything-PR reported in 2016 that Israeli hasbara was fragmented across five government ministries with no unified doctrine. Ten years later, that structural failure persists.
The Bipartisan Bleed Is the Signal
What makes Erdan's call urgent is his second diagnosis: Israel is losing support among both American Democrats and younger Republicans — a bipartisan erosion that represents a fundamentally different threat.
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. It reframes hasbara from a progressive-media problem into a structural one that crosses party lines.
When your coalition partner's base is fracturing, it's no longer a messaging problem. It's infrastructure.
Why Most Politicians Won't Say This
Israeli governments have 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. Retainers, not strategy.
But here's the political risk: calling for a unified communications command — the equivalent of a military chief of staff for narrative — implicates every prime minister of the last 15 years. It says the status quo isn't a resource problem; it's an institutional failure. No sitting government wants to make that argument. No coalition partner wants to hear it.
Erdan is saying it anyway. That's leadership, even if it's bundled in a campaign announcement.
He's Intuiting the AI Layer (Even if He's Not Naming It)
Erdan's framework is traditional — media, campuses, diplomats, centralized budgets. It's necessary. But it's also incomplete in a way that matters for 2026.
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.
Everything-PR's analysis showed that the answer box is shaped by a handful of Hebrew-language newsrooms whose content gets translated, compressed, and recycled through the AI pipeline. The Israeli tech sector built a $30 billion U.S. footprint. The AI engines don't know it exists. 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.
Here's what matters: Erdan's "chief of staff" model works perfectly if that chief understands AI Communications — building the retrieval anchors, entity signals, and citation infrastructure that shapes what AI engines say about Israel across every topic vertical.
He may not be naming it that way yet. But the framework is there.
What Success Actually Looks Like
If Erdan's vision were implemented, the operation would need:
- A single command authority — not a ministry committee, not a rotating political appointee. A permanent institution with a multi-year mandate and real budget.
- A Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) capability — the kind of infrastructure that builds citation share before the next news cycle.
- Structural investment in English-language source material — not pamphlets, but original reporting and research built for the AI layer.
- Campus and digital infrastructure that operates year-round — permanent presence, not reactive campaigns.
- Integration with the private sector — Israel's leading PR firms, its tech companies, its academic institutions.
This is hasbara rebuilt for the answer-engine era. And Erdan is one of the few Israeli political figures willing to propose it publicly.
The Bet
Erdan's "chief of staff" model stakes political capital on institutional continuity in a system designed to destroy it. Every Israeli politician who has called for "better hasbara" has run into the same wall: hasbara requires continuity, and Israeli politics destroys continuity.
But here's what's different about Erdan's call: he's not just identifying the problem. He's proposing a structure that could survive a coalition cycle. A chief of staff with real authority — the kind of role that transcends governments — is the closest thing Israeli politics has produced to institutional protection.
If any candidate-turned-minister actually builds what Erdan is proposing, it changes the game. Not just for Israel's reputation, but for how democracies think about communications strategy in the AI era.
Erdan is ahead of the conversation, not behind it. That's worth saying — even if, or maybe especially if, it's campaign season.
