Israel is set to recruit students to work undercover in "covert units" at universities. The students will post messages on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube on the Israeli government’s behalf – without identifying themselves as government agents.
The students participating in the project will be part of the
public diplomacy arm of Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu’s
office. Leaders of the “covert units” will receive full
scholarships in return for their online public diplomacy
(hasbara).
The Prime Minister’s Office is looking to invest up to 3 million
shekels ($840,000) to recruit, organize and fund the activities
of hundreds of university students, Haaretz reported.
Sources in the Prime Minister’s Office told the newspaper that
the main subjects that the campus-based units will deal with are
diplomatic- and security-related issues, efforts to combat
boycotts of Israel, anti-Semitism and the de-legitimization of
Israel. The students will focus on Israel’s democratic values,
freedom of religion, pluralism and “other subjects that give
expression to the Israeli government’s public diplomacy
policy.”
A member of the Israeli Knesset, Dov Lipman, and the Prime
Minister’s Office’s director for interactive media, Danny Seaman,
revealed the new initiative during a meeting of the Knesset’s
Diaspora Affairs Committee last month.
The Prime Minister’s Office is planning to have Israel's student
union recruit up to 550 students with knowledge of foreign
languages from Israel’s seven universities. The student union is
to publicize the project among tens of thousands of students, and
is to provide computers and work space for a project headquarters
at all university campuses.
“With social media, you can’t wait,” an unnamed official
involved in the effort told the Jerusalem Post.
“We will get authoritative information out and make sure it goes
viral,” the official said. “We won’t leave negative
stories out there online without a response, and we will spread
positive messages. What we are doing is revolutionary. We are
putting public diplomacy in the hands of the public.”
The covert units will be set up at each university and structured
in a semi-military fashion. While groups will take directions
from staff at the Prime Minister’s Office, the government says
that officially they will be politically independent.
“The idea requires that the state’s role not be highlighted and
therefore it is necessary to insist on major involvement by the
students themselves without any political link [or]
affiliation,” Seaman said.
Leaders of covert units will receive full scholarships from the
Prime Minister’s Office, which will fund a total of 2.78 million
shekels ($780,000) in scholarships for the program in the
upcoming academic year, Haaretz reported.
“The national public diplomacy unit in the PMO places an emphasis
on social network activity,” the Prime Minister’s Office said
in a statement. “As part of this, a new pro-Israel public
diplomacy infrastructure of students on Israeli campuses is being
established that will assist in advancing and disseminating
content on the social networks, particularly to international
audiences.”
According to details provided to Israeli media, a government
liaison officer for Israel advocacy will oversee the
dissemination of “rapid responses” from Israeli officials
to respond to news events, and coordinate with other government
bodies that deal with public diplomacy, including the Israeli
Defense Force.
The IDF has recently asserted a stronger, at times controversial
presence on social media with mixed results. The new program may
well seek to address perceived deficiencies in the way that
Israel communicates with the world online.
Last year, during Israel’s eight-day Operation Pillar of Defense,
an incursion launched into the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip in
response to rocket attacks, the Palestinian group was widely seen
as having won the war of words on online media.
Haaretz reported that in the fallout of the military operation,
the hashtag #GazaUnderAttack with 170,000 mentions easily
surpassed Israel’s own #IsraelUnderFire, with a comparably meager
25,000 mentions.
"The perception dominating the online discourse was that the IDF
had embarked on an unjustified attack,” said Tomer Simon, an
Israeli researcher who studied social networking activity during
the conflict.