Israel's election campaign runs on AI: a minister's deepfake of judges being dragged away, a Netanyahu-shared video evoking a rival's dead son, and bots recycled from the Iran war
Two days before Israel's Oct 27 general election, Al Jazeera (Oct 25) describes a campaign fought with AI-generated video and automated accounts on both sides. On Sep 15 Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich's Religious Zionism party posted a 34-second AI video showing Supreme Court President Isaac Amit, Justice Daphne Barak-Erez and Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara being dragged away from a protest by men in yellow vests; opposition leader Gadi Eisenkot called it 'violent and despicable' and President Isaac Herzog said elections are not fought 'through offensive AI videos', per the Times of Israel. Earlier in the year Netanyahu shared an AI video in which Eisenkot runs toward a figure many took to resemble his son Gal, killed in Gaza, then embraces Ra'am leader Mansour Abbas; his camp said the figure was not meant as the son and swapped it for a female character. Ben-Gvir shared a video portraying Gaza's people as donkeys. Haaretz reported on Oct 22 that dozens of bot accounts built to undermine Iran's government had been redirected to promote Likud and warn voters about Eisenkot and Naftali Bennett. An Open University of Israel monitoring project, Ze Be AI, is reported to have found roughly one in eight election posts AI-generated or altered, 46% of them traced to Likud, which alone produced more than 1,800 AI posts (figures reported by the Sunday Guardian; the project's own publication was not located). The Central Elections Committee restricted Likud's Elector turnout-tracking app on privacy grounds; no platform or regulator action on the deepfakes is reported.
Damage
Deepfaked depictions of sitting judges, the attorney general and a bereaved rival circulated to a national electorate during the campaign; no legal or platform consequence reported
Sources
Al Jazeera, second source. Evidence confidence: medium. Dated to the Smotrich video (Sep 15, Times of Israel, day precision); disclosed as a pattern by Al Jazeera's Oct 25 roundup, which this row follows. The one-in-eight, 46% and 1,800-post figures rest on the Sunday Guardian's account of the Open University's Ze Be AI project and could not be checked against the project itself; the bot finding is Haaretz's, relayed by Al Jazeera. Novelty 2: sitting ministers and a prime minister's own channels, not anonymous actors, distributing deepfakes of judges and a rival's family during a national campaign; comparable to Spain's PP video the same month. Al Jazeera spells the minister 'Belazel'.
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