HasbaraTech Hackathon Aims to Amplify Israel’s Voice Online During Gaza War: Jerusalem’s Tech Elite Join Forces at JVP Headquarters.
By Troy O. Fritzhand, Algemeiner
Leaders of industry, government, and academia in Israel’s capital gathered at the headquarters of Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP), a top venture capital fund headed by Erel Margalit, for a “hackathon” to develop tools to assist Israel in its public diplomacy efforts amid the Jewish state’s war with the Hamas terror group.
The event, in partnership with Israel’s Foreign Ministry, was developed to bring together the top technical talent in the capital city’s hi-tech scene for a three-day event to “help amplify Israel’s voice in the digital domain.”
Dubbed “HasbaraTech” — taking on the Hebrew word hasbara, the term used to denote efforts to explain Israel’s place in the world — the event combined top corporate and public partners to make it happen.
Partners included private tech firms, top academic centers, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), and Israeli government agencies at both the local and federal level.
At the event, a member of the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit came to address the importance of their work.
Participants have been working on solutions such as a GIF generator to produce pro-Israel content, as well as a tool to share pro-Israel content on social media with just two clicks.
Lital Vilensky, head of innovation and marketing at the Hadassah Academic College’s Blender Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, explained the reasoning behind the event.
“How do we harness the ‘Startup Nation’ and all the brilliant minds here to amplify our voice in the world and compensate for our numerical gap?” she said. “The solution we found for this — a technology hackathon — for 48 hours, the best minds from Israeli hi-tech met together with the factors that lead Israeli hasbara to develop technological solutions for them that will increase Israel’s voice in the world.”
According to Jonathan Sagir, one of the event organizers, the hackathon aims to combat the “challenges identified as the main weak points of Israeli hasbara, including: fake news, developments to optimize the delivery of messages on social networks, and the development of tools to monitor and measure anti-Israeli biases in traditional media.”
The hackathon ends on Sunday afternoon, when the participants will present their built-out solutions to representatives of the Foreign Ministry at their headquarters in Jerusalem.
Representatives from other ministries will be present as well. The goal is for some of the proposals to be picked up — through either direct funding or adaption of the tool — by any of the relevant ministries to help their hasbara efforts.
The event comes as Israel continues to face international pressure to curtail its military campaign in Gaza against Hamas, which launched the current war with its Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israeli communities.
Pro-Israel advocates have argued that the Jewish state’s public relations strategy will be in many ways as important to the war effort as its military strategy.