Israel's general election on Tuesday is deadlocked, with polls showing Netanyahu's bloc and the opposition led by Gadi Eisenkot in a virtual tie. The margin will be decided not by ideology but by turnout mechanics — and the machinery deployed to manipulate both is unprecedented in scale and sophistication. Haaretz reported that dozens of online bots originally created to undermine the Iranian government have been repurposed to spread Likud campaign propaganda, attacking Eisenkot and former PM Naftali Bennett. Both camps are pushing AI-generated and deepfake videos on X. Netanyahu's camp circulated a deepfake appearing to show Eisenkot running past a figure resembling his dead son — killed during the Gaza operation — to embrace the head of the Arab Ra'am party. The campaign later replaced the male figure with a female one after backlash, while denying the resemblance was intentional. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich released an AI video depicting the Supreme Court president, a justice, and the attorney general being violently dragged from a protest. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir shared an AI video portraying Gazans as donkeys being herded to Paris — consistent with his public calls for ethnic cleansing via 'voluntary emigration.' The right's deepfake arsenal is not subtle; it is designed to entrench what political scientists call affective polarisation, pulling wavering voters back into their bloc through visceral antagonism. The voter-tracking infrastructure is equally telling. Likud attempted to deploy Elector, an app that tracks voter turnout in real time, but the Central Elections Committee blocked it on privacy grounds. The replacement, Victory 26, strips voter identities but still allows activists to identify low-turnout areas, manually record who has voted, and target those who haven't. The distinction between surveillance and get-out-the-vote dissolves when the app operates in communities already subject to heavy state monitoring. Palestinian citizens of Israel — roughly 20 percent of the population — sit at the intersection of every pressure. Their parties (the Joint List and Ra'am) face legal challenges, demonisation via AI content, and disproportionate surveillance. Mauricio Lapchik, directing the Joint List's Hebrew-language campaign, described competing against parties with 'far greater budgets and technological resources.' The asymmetry is structural, not incidental. The turnout gap is the real battlefield. Secular cities like Tel Aviv and Haifa typically see 60 percent turnout; ultra-Orthodox strongholds like Jerusalem and Bnei Brak hit 80-85 percent. The entire digital apparatus — bots, deepfakes, voter-tracking apps, affective polarisation — exists to close or widen that gap. As researcher Roi Zur noted, the campaign targets 'people at the fringe, who might be thinking of voting for a party in an opposing bloc, and bring them back into the fold.' Sebastian Ben Daniel, a doctoral researcher in algorithms and AI, framed the broader trajectory bluntly: 'Israel has the perfect laboratory with which to develop this kind of technology.' The occupied territories provided the testing ground for facial recognition and mass surveillance; domestic elections now provide the testing ground for computational propaganda. The two pipelines are converging.
