Israel is entering an election year, and the campaigns of the various parties and candidates are already underway. Election propaganda has always included smear tactics, lies, and attempts at delegitimization. But in the current era, these are increasingly  taking over political discourse and posing a real and concrete threat to the possibility of genuine democratic elections. They are accompanied by a murky stream of illegitimate views, seeping from the margins of public discourse into its center.

As early as 2024, the World Economic Forum defined the spread of disinformation and conspiracy theories as “the foremost threat to democratic societies.” “Information detached from facts, and from any conception of truth, changes the fate of states and their citizens,” it warned. In the UN’s 2024 Global Risks Report, disinformation and misinformation ranked as the third risk - just above natural disasters.

Disinformation and falsification have become a global epidemic in the post-truth era, and the assault on facts is in full swing. Yet while there is a broad agreement on “truth” and “falsehood”, another fierce assault is taking place in an even more fragile human domain: that of views and opinions.

In the age of social media, a broad scholarly and institutional consensus has emerged that not only disinformation has become a central threat to democratic spaces, but so has the dissemination and normalization of illegitimate views - such as racism, misogyny, exclusion, and hate speech. International organizations have pointed out that the digital sphere enables such content to spread at unprecedented speed, while weakening traditional gatekeeping mechanisms and deepening social and political polarization.

Research bodies emphasize that these processes are part of broader trends of democratic erosion, in which views which were once regarded as marginal or illegitimate are penetrating mainstream public discourse and even gaining political representation.

Recognition of these phenomena as a major threat to society and democracy has led to various attempts to confront them. Researchers in social psychology have shown that debunking lies after they have already spread - as done by  fact-checking organizations, for example - is not sufficiently effective. Once a false narrative has been absorbed into public consciousness, any repetition will simply  deepen its hold, even when the intent is refutation.

Additional studies have found that it is preferable not to focus on refuting the lie or the illegitimate position, but rather on framing it as such as early as possible. According to ‘inoculation theory’, exposing people to examples of fake news while clearly framing them as false, and explaining the lie, the manipulation, and the interests behind their dissemination, is the most effective way to deal with fake news, disinformation, and conspiracy theories.

In inoculation theory, this move is known as ‘prebunking’, and research has found it more effective than later attempts to refute falsehoods, known as ‘debunking’. This is the same logic behind exposing healthy people to a weakened virus, so that the immune system will develop antibodies for any future encounters with a real virus.

Of course, it is difficult to ‘catch’ a lie before it gets underway. But it is possible to identify and characterize the lies, illegitimate views, and misleading claims that are likely to be circulated during an election campaign. On the basis of this approach, and with the aim of protecting the Israeli public from lies, manipulations, conspiracies, and illegitimate election propaganda, The Seventh Eye is launching a special project for the election period.

Using The Seventh Eye’s Sub-Text system, we monitored and categorized hundreds of hours of news and current-affairs broadcasts on Israeli television channels, as well as political speeches and statements. This was followed by an in-depth analysis of the findings, forming the basis for writing the Narrative Handbook, in order to characterize the false, misleading, and illegitimate election propaganda expected to be hurled at Israeli citizens ahead of the elections to the 26th Knesset.

This handbook, excerpts of which we share here and which will be published in full later, offers a dynamic and evolving list of false narratives expected to be disseminated by various politicians and candidates through the major media outlets and familiar propaganda platforms. These are not the false publications themselves - which, of course, are already being circulated vigorously - but rather their prototypes in the context of the election campaign.

It is important to note: election propaganda is not illegitimate in itself. On the contrary, the presentation of positions and views by political parties and politicians is the lifeblood of democracy. But the moment propaganda relies on disinformation, lies, conspiracies, racism, hate speech, and incitement, it becomes a stranglehold around democracy’s neck.

One should note that the desire to hold fair and clean elections, and to maintain a decent and fact-based public sphere, is not limited to one of the political camps. Unfortunately, the comprehensive review we conducted found that the ruling party, Likud, is the most dominant force in the dissemination of false and illegitimate propaganda. This finding is not surprising in the current Israeli context, in which the government and in particular Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wields greater control and influence on the Israeli media than any other party or politician, by many orders of magnitude.

A recent review conducted by The Seventh Eye and covering all broadcasts on the major television news channels, found that Netanyahu’s coalition parties receive clear and consistent overrepresentation, and that Netanyahu himself receives exposure ranging from hundreds to thousands of percent greater than any other politician.

The aim of the Narrative Handbook project is to inoculate the general public, and especially media outlets, journalists, and editors, against false propaganda. It seeks to do so by presenting these false narratives as such, refuting them, and exposing the interests behind them. This exposure is meant to accompany readers as they consume information through both the media and social networks, helping them independently identify new narratives as false and avoid becoming ‘infected’.

Throughout the election period, we will continue to track these false narratives, warn against them, and update the database of narratives and their refutations in light of changing circumstances and developments in public life.

Below is a summary of several false and illegitimate narratives expected to accompany us during the coming election campaign.

Delegitimizing Arab Citizens

One dominant group of narratives expected to shape the election discourse concerns efforts to delegitimize the political participation of Arab citizens of Israel in general, and Arab candidates and parties in particular. This false narrative takes many forms, including false and racist claims that Arab parties and candidates support terrorism, act as a ‘fifth column’ within the state, and pose a danger to the security of the State of Israel and its citizens.

This false smear campaign - amounting to incitement - will also be directed at any candidate who says they do not rule out including Arab parties in a future coalition (“not loyal to Israel”), as well as against candidates who declare that they will not cooperate with them but will nevertheless be portrayed as though they had done so (“they will form a government with the ‘Muslim Brotherhood’”), in order to smear their reputation.

This narrative is especially important for Likud and Netanyahu’s coalition because the polls consistently suggest that opposition parties will not be able to form a coalition without some form of Jewish-Arab political partnership.

Another false narrative expected to surface ahead of the elections is the claim that election results in Arab society are unreliable, despite the lack of evidence to support this claim. This false narrative is intended to suppress voting in Arab society.

The ‘Deep State’ Conspiracy

Another group of false narratives branches off from the ‘deep state’ conspiracy, imported from the world of the American alt-right. According to this conspiracy theory - which serves as a cornerstone for authoritarian leaders around the world - a shadow government of officials prevents the elected government from governing in practice.

Under this dark umbrella, campaigns are constantly launched to delegitimize every aspect of the system of checks and balances in a democratic regime: the judiciary, rival parties and candidates (usually from the opposition), the security establishment (especially those at its helm), the civil service, civil society organizations, protest activists, and more. All of them are accused, collectively or individually, of being subversive, traitorous, and worse.

Under cover of this false narrative, campaigns are also carried out to undermine trust in the election system itself - for example, by spreading false propaganda against the Central Elections Committee, the body responsible for safeguarding the integrity of elections in Israel.

Another major target of this false narrative is the media, the fourth estate in a democratic state. In this central sub-narrative, media outlets that do not support the candidate or the political party promoting the narrative are cast as political, biased, and mobilized; enemies of the ‘real’ people and ‘real’ Judaism; and part of that same malicious ’deep state’.

The harm caused by this false narrative is especially severe because it disrupts the functioning of the central gatekeeper of public discourse. Corrupting that gatekeeper is what allows all the other narratives to spread successfully. Undermining trust in the institution of the press destroys the very possibility of holding fair elections based on informed judgment by citizens receiving news through journalism, and strengthens the power of propaganda platforms whose very purpose is the spread of false narratives.

The Demons of Ethnicity and Gender

Another group of false narratives employs existing fault lines in society in order to deepen them for narrow political ends. Such narratives are especially popular among foreign-influence actors interfering in elections in democratic countries, and they characterise populist leaders and parties.

In Israel, this narrative focuses in part on ethnic divisions, seeking to associate certain candidates and parties with a particular camp or an ethnic group in ways that will damage them. One example is the false narrative that left-wing and centrist parties represent an Ashkenazi and secular elite, seeking to oppress Mizrahi and religious Israelis and undermine the country’s traditional and Jewish character.

Another example from this group, though not uniquely Israeli, rides on chauvinistic and misogynistic sentiments, claiming  that equality between women and men is not a basic and agreed democratic value, but rather a scheme of the “woke,” the “progressives,” and “the left,” designed to dismantle the Jewish character of the State of Israel. According to this narrative, promoting such equality between genders will result in discrimination against the religious-traditional sector and harm state security.

You Are Not Loyal to Israel

Another central false narrative revolves around branding people as traitors, drawing on populist nationalist sentiment in order to delegitimize candidates and parties and accuse them of subversion and betrayal of the state.

Candidates, for example, will be accused of supporting refusal to serve in the IDF, or of ties to protest organizations (against which, as noted, a separate delegitimization campaign is being waged), of harming the state’s security or international interests, of responsibility for the 7 October massacre, of undermining victory in the war, of collaborating with the ‘deep state’, or of preserving an elitist hegemony seeking to ‘replace the people’, and so on.

Within this group of narratives one can identify an element that promotes violent nationalism and barbaric conduct (often, ironically, labelled “Jewish morality”) using the code terms ‘loyal to Israel’ and ‘not loyal to Israel’, as a continuation of, or parallel to, the post-October-7 discourse of revenge, which normalized calls for war crimes and incitement to violence against civilians.

This narrative is also linked to the normalization of ‘eternal war’, and to framing any opposition to war, or to the exclusivity of violent solutions, as defeatism and treason.

Netanyahu Didn’t Know

An entire cluster of false narratives revolves around Netanyahu himself, his failures, and his entanglements with the law. One example is the long-running conspiracy theory that the criminal cases against him were trumped up - a mutation of the ‘deep state’ conspiracy.

Another false narrative will be the purported need to cancel the trial because it interferes with Netanyahu’s functioning as prime minister, whether because of the war, matters of policy, or the burden of governing in general. This is a reversal of reality: Netanyahu repeatedly pledged that managing his criminal defense would not interfere with his work as prime minister. Apart from its falseness, this narrative in all its forms endangers the rule of law by placing one particular individual above the law.

Alongside this, we expect to see false narratives aimed at rewriting history in Netanyahu’s favor: that he bears no blame and no responsibility for the October 7 massacre (because no one woke him up that night, or because the army or the left deceived him); that he was the architect of the total victory; and that he is the mastermind behind the so-called ‘War of Resurrection’.

Toward the 2026 Elections

The Seventh Eye will publish the full Narrative Handbook and continue updating it throughout the election campaign.

The publication and updating of the handbook will be accompanied by frequent current-affairs pieces on The Seventh Eye website, based on monitoring and analysis by the “Sub-Text” system, in order to present on an ongoing basis the various manifestations of the false narratives intended to benefit one candidate or another.

The Seventh Eye will continue to track, monitor, and report on the illegitimate use of false narratives, and will remain on guard to identify and warn against new ones.