Cars burn in a street during a protest over the collapse of the currency’s value, in Tehran, Iran, Jan. 8, 2026. Photo: Stringer/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS

The lie that raced across social media during Argentina’s recent Patagonia wildfires was not just grotesque. It was revealing.

Within hours, recycled images and viral posts blamed Israelis for igniting the fires. The language was familiar: vague references to “foreign states,” insinuations of coordination, and the ritual refrain that “the media” was covering it up. Argentine journalists documented how quickly the fires became a vehicle for antisemitic conspiracy theories, including false claims involving an “IDF grenade” in Patagonia.

Days later, a seemingly unrelated anomaly appeared in Europe. A cluster of pro-Scottish independence accounts on X, previously prolific, fell abruptly silent. Their disappearance coincided precisely with Iran’s imposition of a nationwide Internet shutdown amid domestic anti-regime protests. British reporting and independent researchers had already identified many of these accounts as part of an Iranian-linked influence operation masquerading as Scottish voices. When Tehran pulled the plug at home, the “Scots” abroad went quiet too.

Two continents. Two narratives. One underlying mechanism.

Authoritarian regimes — and the ecosystem of state media, proxy outlets, and cutout accounts they cultivate — are pushing democratic societies along their fault lines. Increasingly, Israel is authoritarian regimes’ accelerant of choice.

Influence operations are often exposed by sloppy tradecraft: recycled phrasing, unnatural engagement patterns, or accounts created in batches. But recent platform transparency has added a more revealing diagnostic: origin.

As researchers gained better tools to determine where accounts actually operate, a striking pattern emerged. Accounts branding themselves as “MAGA,” hyper-focused on American culture-war issues, were frequently traced to Bangladesh. Accounts claiming to post from Gaza — offering supposedly raw, on-the-ground testimony during the war — were often operating from Pakistan or Indonesia.

This matters because it punctures a central illusion of the online age: that what feels like organic, local outrage usually isn’t. Much of it is, in fact, geographically divorced from the societies it claims to represent.

Iran’s January 2026 Internet shutdown and its cyber iron curtain made this impossible to ignore. When Tehran cut connectivity nationwide, clusters of supposedly local voices in Western democracies stopped posting. The blackout did not merely suppress dissent inside Iran; it exposed the scaffolding of external influence operations. When the lights go out at headquarters, the field offices go dark too.

Once you see the pattern, the choice of disguises stops looking random.

Democracies argue in public. That is not a flaw. It is the point, and it is precisely what authoritarian systems exploit.

Separatist politics, immigration debates, populist movements, and foreign conflicts provide ready-made content pipelines. Operators do not need to invent controversies; they need only to impersonate participants and intensify the most divisive frames through distortion, omission, and outright falsehood.

The Scottish case is illustrative, not exceptional. The same architecture animates accounts posing as Midwestern Americans furious about election integrity, or as desperate Gazans posting emotionally fluent English from thousands of miles away. The objective is not persuasion in any classical sense. It is erosion — of trust, cohesion, and confidence that democratic disagreement reflects real people rather than staged performance.

So why did an environmental disaster in Argentina metastasize so quickly into an “Israeli plot”?

Because Israel is uniquely useful to anti-Western authoritarians.

Israel sits at the convergence of several propaganda imperatives. It is framed as a Western-aligned democracy in a region hostile to that model — making it a proxy target for liberal democracy itself. It allows classic antisemitic conspiracies — hidden power, omnipresent influence, coordinated deception — to be laundered through the more respectable language of “anti-Zionism.” And it offers moral intoxication: if Israel is cast as a singular source of global evil, then every crisis, anywhere, can be folded into a pre-existing narrative of resistance to that evil.

Coverage of the Patagonia fires demonstrated this dynamic precisely. Israel was inserted reflexively into an unrelated catastrophe because audiences had already been conditioned to accept Israel-blame as plausible background noise. The speed was the point.

These narratives are not born on social media alone. They move through a supply chain.

At one end are state broadcasters and aligned outlets — Tehran, Moscow, Doha, Beijing — each with its own tone but a shared objective: undermine trust in Western institutions and normalize cynicism or outright hostility toward democratic governance. At the other end are social platforms, where content is stripped of provenance and redistributed as “what ordinary people are saying.”

These regimes often fit a familiar pattern: control information distribution at home, and export confusion abroad. When regimes clamp down domestically, they often compensate by escalating external information warfare. Destabilizing other societies becomes a way to offset internal fragility.

If the volume of Israel-related falsehoods feels overwhelming, that sensation is intentional.

The Scottish accounts that vanished, the Bangladesh-based “MAGA” profiles, the Pakistan- and Indonesia-based “Gaza voices,” and the Patagonia wildfire conspiracy are not separate scandals. They are iterations of the same method: impersonation, amplification, moral outrage, repeat.

The temptation is to treat each viral lie as a discrete incident: debunk it, move on.

But the pattern is systemic.

Israel is not merely a target in this ecosystem. It is a tool — the tip of the spear in a broader campaign designed to erode confidence not only in Israel, but in the legitimacy of democratic societies themselves.

Israel is the test case — but free societies are the ultimate target.

Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, Zionism, antisemitism, and Jewish history. He serves on the board of Herut North America.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian attends a press conference in Beijing, China, April 10, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Tingshu Wang

Just one day after China defied and alarmed the US and the West by surrounding Taiwan with a military air and sea blockade simulation, including threats that the “reunification” of Taiwan and China is “inevitable,” the Palestinian Authority (PA) again showed its allegiance to the anti-US axis by declaring its support for the “One China policy”:

The State of Palestine re-emphasized its full commitment to the One China policy … to maintain its [China’s] territorial unity and also emphasized its opposition to [America/Western] interference in China’s internal affairs.

[WAFA, official PA news agency, Dec. 31, 2025]

China’s drills simulated a blockade of key ports and airspace control, involving army, navy, air force, and rocket units with live-fire as a rehearsal for isolating Taiwan in a conflict scenario.

Taiwan’s independence is not just a minor American interest, but is critical for the West. Taiwan’s semiconductor industry is vital to Western economic and technological security. Taiwan produces over 60% of the world’s semiconductors and more than 90% of the most advanced chips, and manufactures the vast majority of leading edge logic chips that power today’s AI data centers.

The West’s ability to survive and advance technologically is dependent on Taiwan remaining free. China, on the other hand, pledges to seize the free and democratic island and subjugate its people under its dictatorial Communist rule. This would enable China to appropriate its technology and achieve the global economic and military supremacy it seeks.

Incredibly, even while the US and the West’s billions of dollars in funding have kept the PA viable, the PA, as a consistent policy, has turned its back on its supporters to embrace China’s goal of seizing Taiwan.

Just a week after the PA’s statement above, Mahmoud Abbas received China’s Special Envoy to the Middle East, Zhai Jun, and repeated the anti-Western policy:

The president re-emphasized the State of Palestine’s support for the “One China” policy adopted by the People’s Republic of China in maintaining its territorial integrity and its opposition to interference in China’s internal affairs.

[Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Jan. 8, 2026]

The PA has supported what it called “reunification” for years:

Reaffirming its commitment to the one-China principle, the Palestinian Presidency underlined the significance of preserving China’s territorial integrity, including the status of Taiwan … The Presidency further voiced its firm support for China’s right to defend its sovereignty and territorial integrity, endorsing the reunification of the entire land of China, which includes Taiwan.” [emphasis added]

[WAFA, official PA news agency, English edition, Jan. 13, 2024]

President Mahmoud Abbas and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping [met] today … [Abbas] reiterated Palestine’s unwavering support to the one-China policy, recognizing Taiwan as an integral part of China. [emphasis added]

[WAFA, official PA news agency, English edition, June 14, 2023]

Abbas Zaki, PLO/Fatah Commissioner for Relations with Arab States and China:

I express the stable and well-rooted position of Fatah in its support for the People’s Republic of China against Taiwan, which we consider an integral part of the united Chinese lands. [emphasis added]

[Fatah Central Committee member Abbas Zaki, Facebook page, Jan. 8, 2023]

This is part of a long-term PA policy of identifying with and embracing goals of the anti-American axis.

Were China to successfully invade Taiwan, it would have near total control of global computing components. It would literally control the West’s source of Taiwan’s technological manufacturing capabilities, potentially leading to a crippling of the supply of technology components.

The PA’s backing of China’s goals for Taiwan — as part of the global anti-American axis — should convince the US and Western countries that the PA is not an ally, and that were a Palestinian state to be created, it would be aligned with the adversaries of the West.

Itamar Marcus is the Founder and Director of Palestinian Media Watch (PMW). Ahron Shapiro is a contributor to PMW, where a version of this article first appeared.

New Israeli Shekel banknotes are seen in this picture illustration taken Nov. 9, 2021. Photo: REUTERS/Nir Elias/Illustration

The shekel’s rise to around four-year highs against the dollar reflects the resilience of the Israeli economy and comes amid solid export performance, Bank of Israel Governor Amir Yaron said on Wednesday.

Speaking to Reuters on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Yaron said the Israeli currency’s strength was also acting as a tailwind that was moderating inflation.

“The appreciation of the shekel represents a lot of the positive fundamentals in terms of geopolitical developments and certainly post the ceasefire,” he said of the October 2025 ceasefire in Gaza.

“We understand the appreciation makes it difficult for exports. But we’ve seen exports of both goods and services rise in the last two readings,” he added of the roughly 12% rise in the shekel against the dollar since the start of 2025.

Asked at what point the central bank would consider intervention to lower the level of the shekel, Yaron said: “The FX tool is part of the toolbox of the Bank of Israel. We have many tools for facilitating our policies.”

In the past, the central bank had bought tens of billions of dollars to keep the shekel from appreciating too fast and harming exporters. It sold $8.5 billion of foreign currency at the outset of the Gaza war in October 2023 to defend the shekel, but it has largely stayed out of the market since.

The Bank of Israel unexpectedly cut its interest rate by 25 basis points earlier this month, a second successive cut after lowering it in November for the first time in nearly two years.

It cited the shekel’s strength and an improving inflation environment after the ceasefire, which led to an easing of the supply constraints that emerged during the two-year war. The inflation rate currently stands at 2.6%, within an official 1-3% target range.

Yaron underlined that demand in the Israeli economy had remained robust during the conflict and that the bank had not so far seen it surge further as a result of the ceasefire.

“We haven’t seen demand erupt the way it did post-COVID,” he said.

He noted that the bank‘s research department had identified a baseline scenario of a further 50 basis points of cuts down to an official rate of 3.5% by the end of this year, notwithstanding the high level of uncertainty facing all central banks.

“We will have to see how much demand picks up, how much supply constraints are mitigating, what is happening with the tailwind from the shekel,” he said.