The run-up to next year’s Israeli election will be the first in which artificial intelligence tools to create images and videos and rapidly compose texts are easily accessible, and experts are raising red flags over the technology’s ability to influence voters and campaigns and the lack of regulations around its use. 

Israeli politicians have long been early adopters of technological tools to boost their campaigns, from bypassing traditional media through Facebook to using social media data to target key demographics before most liberal democracies were doing so, and AI will likely be no different.

Tehilla Shwartz Altshuler, head of the Democracy in the Digital Age program at the Israel Democracy Institute, told Jewish Insider that Israel is one of the countries with the largest market penetration of AI in the world — 85% of Israelis have used ChatGPT and 76% use it frequently, according to a study by the Israeli Internet Association published in October  — so it is only a matter of time before politicians use it in their campaigns.

(National elections are legally required to take place on Oct. 26, 2026, at the latest, but political tensions make an earlier date possible.)

“AI chatbots have significant penetration in the public,” Shwartz Altshuler said. “They will be used to ask whether to vote and for whom to vote. We have not seen anything like this before. … People use chatbots as a companion for emotional support. The concern over the great influence of chatbots on voter behavior is significant.”

Shwartz Altshuler said that there have already been attempts to “give poison injections” to AI models, such as creating fake news sites and positions on subreddits to manipulate the bots into giving more pro-Israel responses to users abroad, and those tools can be turned inward, toward Israeli voters.

She also pointed out that Israel does not have any laws requiring machine-generated content to be labeled.

“This is the first time we have an election in which we are unable to differentiate between authentic and machine-generated photos and videos,” she said. “There is a fear that the perception of reality is being undermined. People can forge documents and make deepfakes of politicians. … Machine-generated content can create an alternative reality, a very dangerous prospect when the content is very emotionally attractive.”

Yuval Dror, the former dean of media studies in Israel’s College of Management Studies, who hosts a popular technology podcast in Hebrew, was skeptical that computer-generated photos and videos will have a major impact on the next election.

“With photos, sometimes we can tell if it’s AI or not. With video, people usually know that it’s AI,” he told JI. “The impact of [AI-generated] video will mostly be economic, because it will be much easier to produce. In the past, you needed an ad agency, actors, post-production work. Now it’s much easier, so [campaigns will] save money.”

“You can create a false presentation in which masses of people say this or that and look like a grassroots movement,” Yuval Dror, the former dean of media studies in Israel’s College of Management Studies, said. “There is [already] an army of bots echoing a few people on social media.”

Dror was more concerned about AI-generated texts, which he noted can be much harder to detect. 

AI may be used in upcoming political campaigns to flood social networks with content, making a candidate, message or policy appear to have more support than it does in reality. This already happens on X, where much of the political discourse in Israel takes place, but also in more closed networks like WhatsApp and Telegram, Dror said.

“You can create a false presentation in which masses of people say this or that and look like a grassroots movement,” Dror said. “There is [already] an army of bots echoing a few people on social media.”

“We’ve seen this for years. It will just get more and more convincing,” he added.

Shwartz Altshuler said that social media companies have difficulty stemming mass-bot content. “Generative AI can create a lot of versions of the same content, so the result is inauthentic, coordinated behavior on social media,” she said. “If there are slightly different versions of the same content, the social networks don’t detect” that it comes from bots.

“Most of these [AI tools] are not mentioned in the law or by past Central Election Committee decisions. They are in a grey area. [Campaigns] will do what they want,” Tehilla Shwartz Altshuler, head of the Democracy in the Digital Age program at the Israel Democracy Institute, predicted. 

In addition, developments in AI since the last Israeli election, in 2022, can help politicians use data even more effectively to target potential voters with different kinds of messages and ads, she said.

Shwartz Altshuler recounted speaking with a prominent Israeli political strategist who told her, “First we win elections, and then we see if what we did is legal or not.” 

“Most of these [AI tools] are not mentioned in the law or by past Central Election Committee decisions. They are in a grey area. [Campaigns] will do what they want,” she predicted. 

Despite the fertile ground for election fraud using AI, Shwartz Altshuler said it is unlikely that new laws will be passed before the next election. “This coalition has no motivation to pass such laws [and] usually the courts say laws [regarding elections] can only be applied after the next election.”

She also pointed out that the current Central Election Committee chairman, Noam Solberg, is a conservative Supreme Court justice, and therefore would be unlikely to instruct the Knesset to pass laws addressing the issue.

Despite all the advances in AI, it may not be enough to cover for a weak candidate. 

Dror said that Israeli politicians are already using AI to write texts for social media or speeches: “Some politicians are not capable of stringing together two sentences, so they let AI do it, but the result is no less awkward.” 

They have also generated all kinds of pictures to post online, which Dror said “makes [them] look stupid,” using Israeli Environmental Protection Minister Idit Silman, who posted a picture earlier this year depicting French President Emmanuel Macron kissing Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, as an example. Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz frequently posted AI-generated images ridiculing Israel’s enemies when he was foreign minister last year. 

“I don’t know that there’s an audience for this stupidity,” Dror said.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s influence has become increasingly pervasive in the United States, according to a new report by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, titled “The Muslim Brotherhood’s Strategic Entryism into the United States: A Systemic Analysis.”

President Donald Trump’s recent instruction to Secretary of State Marco Rubio to take steps toward banning Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated organizations came soon after ISGAP briefed policymakers from both parties and national security professionals, including Trump administration officials, in Washington and beyond about the study.

“For decades now, we’ve known that Islamism has been a problem within our liberal secular democracies,” ISGAP Vice President Haras Rafiq told the Misgav Mideast Horizons podcast. (Jewish Insider’s Lahav Harkov co-hosts the podcast.)  

The new ISGAP report cites authenticated Muslim Brotherhood documents describing the group’s strategy – called tamkeen, which loosely translates to “empowerment” – of entrenching itself in the institutions of Western democracies.

“It was a 100-year plan, and they’re 43 years into it,” Rafiq said. “We looked at the who, why, what, where … and then analyzed how well we’re doing against it.”

The Muslim Brotherhood’s basic goals, he said, are “to set up a utopian Islamist state and enforce their vision of Sharia-based law on the whole state, and secondly, to spread that around the world. … [Their] tactic, the opium of the masses, is to wipe Israel off the map.” 

In liberal democracies, one of the major elements of the plan is “figuring out a way to persuade Muslims, if you’re living in the West, that the Islam that your parents practice … is actually wrong and it fits into … innovation, false association with a deity, [and] haram, which means not allowed,” Rafiq said. “So first of all, change the Islam that’s practiced from within.”

The way the Muslim Brotherhood relates to non-Muslim societies, Rafiq said, is to “try to persuade others by using a faith-based identity politics which aligns with what they believe — that they are the proper Muslims. And over time, there are four key areas where they focus: One is political infiltration and legislation, the second is controlling the narrative, the media, the third is how they can increase the capacity [of those steps], and looking at Muslims and changing from within.”

Rafiq said that Muslim Brotherhood-sympathetic organizations latched onto the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to increase their influence.

“It was a time when there was a lot of confusion,” he recounted. “What organizations like CAIR [the Council on American-Islamic Relations] and others were able to do was to latch onto people who wanted to understand who were these Muslims, why did people want to fly planes into the Twin Towers … and they actually were very quick to latch onto the media, the politicians, the people within civil society who were hungry to know more, and become one of the main voices.” 

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, recently declared both the Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR to be foreign terrorist organizations banned from the state. Rafiq pointed out, however, that the state has not seized any assets or taken any concrete action against the organization.

The difference between CAIR, which presents itself as an advocacy group for a minority population, and other organizations that aim to do the same, Rafiq said, is that “ultimately, at the end of the day, the people who set up the organization actually are part of the Muslim Brotherhood Islamist worldview, and ultimately are trying to … use entrenchment to change the liberal democracy from within.”

Rafiq also cited ties between CAIR and unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land Foundation trial, the largest terrorism finance trial in the U.S., which shut down an organization that was funding Hamas.

“I guess other non-Islamist organizations that represent Muslims and other organizations don’t want those objectives and are not involved in these kinds of criminal activities,” he said.

CAIR has “been able to persuade and fool people that they’re actually representing Islam and Muslims and they’re the correct voices,” he said. Still, Rafiq cited polling that out of 1.9 billion Muslims worldwide, 1.4 billion reject Islamism, which includes the Muslim Brotherhood. 

“The good news is still that the majority of Muslims around the world reject Islamism,” Rafiq said, while noting that he did not have specific data about the U.S.

However, Rafiq said that the Muslim Brotherhood has successfully inculcated young Muslims in the West with antisemitism.

“Antisemitism is a key tool that they use in the guise of being anti-Israel or anti-Zionist, etc., to recruit people to their worldview,” he said.

Rafiq called Qatar “the last man standing” in the Sunni Arab world, in that its regime supports the Muslim Brotherhood. 

“Muslim Brotherhood Islamist ideology is deeply entrenched within all parts of [Qatar’s] civil society, all the way to the top,” he said. “As a result of this entrenchment … they’ve used tamkeen successfully across the board, from educating children all the way up to civil society organizations and the leadership. One can say the Muslim Brotherhood has a funding arm, which is directly the Emir and the institution, the country, the economy and the corporation that is Qatar.”

ISGAP has estimated that Qatar’s soft power assets worldwide are worth $1 trillion. The Gulf state is the largest state donor to universities in the U.S., and much of those donations are undocumented.

Qatar spreads the Muslim Brotherhood’s messages via Al Jazeera in Arabic and English.

“The English one will be a lot more palatable, but still pushing the Islamist narrative. The Arabic is downright nasty – and they get away with it, because what they’ve done is set up Al Jazeera as a corporation,” Rafiq said. “But they are 100% owned by the Qatari royal family. Therefore, in my view, when they operate in the U.S., they should [register] under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.” 

Rafiq said the West can do more to make support for the Muslim Brotherhood more costly for Qatar and discourage its leadership from continuing. One example he gave is an ISGAP report exposing Qatari funding for Texas A&M, including a contract that said all of the research projects are property of the Qatar Foundation – including those with dual-use purposes that could be used to develop weapons. After initially denying the links, the president of the university pulled it out of Education City in Doha.

“That really hurt [Qatar],” Rafiq said. “The reason I know it hurt them was that we are constantly besmirched and lies are told about us and we are targeted by the Qatari government.”

Another win, Rafiq argued, was the Israeli strike on Doha in September.

“That was the key moment in which they realized that even though they have a defense agreement with the U.S., they can’t really hide. But the downside was that rather than actually use that and push on the advantage, what the U.S. government has done is create the situation with the ceasefire in Gaza … and pushed out countries like Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. … and decided to bring in Qatar and Turkey, and that’s a problem.”

“We need more support from [the Trump administration] in terms of Qatar, and not to be taken in by geopolitics,” he added. 

Rafiq compared fighting the Muslim Brotherhood without taking on Qatar to taking aspirin when you have cancer.

“Islamism is a virus or a cancer … which is spreading rapidly, and unless we deal with it, the root cause, and we persuade Qatar to stop funding it … it won’t really make a difference,” Rafiq said.

One of the challenges in combating Islamism, Rafiq said, is that “we don’t make it easy to recognize Islamism in the same way that we recognize fascism and communism … [because] they’ve been able to push this narrative so effectively of Islamophobia.”

“Islam is a set of ideas, a set of values. In a liberal democracy, no set of ideas should be beyond critique, satire or even parody, even if they are ideas that I believe – and I’m a Muslim,” he said. “The people who are intolerant have persuaded us that these concepts are intolerant; therefore, we fall in line.”