During the war that was launched against Israel on October 7, 2023, it became commonplace for those following events closely to speak of an “eighth front.” While the IDF was fighting enemies in Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, and Lebanon, and responding to missile and drone attacks from Yemen, Iraq, and Iran, this eighth front was located in the realm of international opinion and public perception. The weapons used weren’t rifles and rockets, but images, social media, and press releases. Here Israel’s enemies fought not to kill and maim, but to demoralize and to break spirits. This unconventional war for hearts and minds directly shaped Israel’s ability to fight on all other fronts and proved itself just as lethal.

While this kind of warfare is accelerated in a digital age where propaganda can travel across the world in a matter of seconds, there is nothing new about it. It would have been familiar to the great Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, who, 200 years ago, understood that this front can be decisive. To Clausewitz, war is never only about the clash of forces. It is a contest of wills. When the will of a people collapses, the war is already lost, regardless of battlefield outcomes. Clausewitz can serve as our guide to understanding the challenges this kind of war poses.

After repeated conventional wars failed to destroy Israel, its enemies adapted. Clausewitz wrote that the aim of war is to compel the enemy to do one’s will. When military compulsion failed, countries like Egypt and Jordan decided to seek peace with Israel. But others, like Syria, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and later Iran, shifted to legal, moral, and political compulsion, using propaganda and perverse moral reasoning to convince the world that Israel is always the aggressor, and any attempt it makes at self-defense is illegitimate. Clausewitz famously taught that war is the pursuit of politics by other means. Today, Israel’s enemies use politics to pursue war by other means.

Aiding these efforts is a powerful tool not available to many practitioners of political warfare: anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is not mere prejudice, but a way of seeing malign Jewish influence behind all the world’s ills. This ancient, ever-mutating hatred latches on to the guiding social constructs of each era—religion, with deep roots in both Christian and Muslim culture; science, with the Nazis depicting Jews as an inferior race that must be destroyed; modern politics, in the Protocols of Elders of Zion and Soviet propaganda; and the “secular religion” of human rights in a post-World War II international rules-based order—conditioning people to believe and to peddle blood libels about “the Jew” as all that is evil, employing lies that are often both vicious and absurd. Today, in its modern strain of anti-Zionism, these irrational beliefs have been transferred to Israel, the Jew among the nations.

It was the response to the war crimes and crimes against humanity perpetrated by Hamas on October 7 that exposed the success of this strategy. Hours after the massacres began, there was a rush to paint Israel as the aggressor. Justifications of Hamas (Gaza was an open-air concentration camp; Palestinians have a right to resist) and denial of the atrocities soon followed. But the most effective tool may have been silence about Hamas’s depredations: speaking constantly about imaginary Israeli war crimes in order to drown out any mention of actual Palestinian ones. Even the targeting and murder of Jews worldwide was excused or downplayed: the Bondi Beach Hanukkah party was hosted by Chabad, an organization that supports right wing-Zionists; that synagogue was selling stolen Palestinian land. Through a kind of moral alchemy, evil was proclaimed good and good evil.

In a digital age, algorithm-driven social media has become the decisive terrain of this conflict. Here expressions of outrage count for more than does evidence; videos and images can circulate without context; lies and falsehoods have more cachet than truth; and people unthinkingly believe and spread further anything that confirms their preconceived notions. Clausewitz might have been bewildered if he could see our online world, but his doctrines still apply: war, he wrote, tends to the extremes when unchecked. Today, those extremes manifest not only in violence, but in the collapse of shared reality and morality.

Anti-Semitism, with its ability to mutate, has hijacked, redefined, and inverted international law and organizations ostensibly dedicated to human rights—turning them into unconventional weapons on this eighth front. Fitted with new meanings, such terms as racism, apartheid, and genocide are now used to demonize, delegitimize, and apply double standards to the Jewish state, following the pattern employed by anti-Semites from time immemorial. Those entrusted to uphold and protect international law have time and again been willing to twist or ignore it in order to condemn Israel—including in the UN Human Rights Council, the International Criminal Court, and the International Court of Justice.

All the more so, commentators, journalists, and politicians with minimal knowledge of either the law or the nature of modern warfare make absurd proclamations about the IDF’s conduct that are all too readily believed. Add to this the numerous NGOs, like Human Rights Watch or Doctors Without Borders, that have been completely hijacked by anti-Israel, anti-human rights, and anti-Western fanatics. Principles designed to restrain violence, and moderate the horrors of war, are thus inverted to restrain democracies and excuse genocidal terrorists. The very institutions meant to protect all who cherish life and liberty are now enemies of both.

In the short term, this information warfare aims to turn popular opinion in the West against the Jewish state, influencing governments to isolate Israel and pressure it to show restraint. A sufficient quantity of such pressure can stop the fighting and leave Hamas, Hizballah, and their allies intact. But there is also a strategic, longer-term goal: to fracture Western societies from within and undermine their moral confidence. Clausewitz emphasized that the strength of a state rests on the unity of its people, government, and armed forces. Already, anti-Israel protests have brought disorder to American cities and constant controversy to university campuses, while corroding politics with accusations that U.S. support for Israel is tantamount to support for genocide. But that’s only the beginning.

For years, enormous sums have been invested in the UN and its agencies, universities, K-12 education, media outlets, cultural institutions, and sports diplomacy to shape narratives and normalize extremist worldviews, with anti-Semitism as both symptom and weapon. This is how modern ideological warfare is waged: slowly, legally, and largely unnoticed until its effects are irreversible. In New York City, more than two years after October 7, children as young as six are taught about “Palestinian resistance” during civic commemorations. Leading feminists publicly rationalize rape as “armed resistance.” These are the fruits of patient and effective propaganda operations.

October 7 was not only an act of mass terror against Israeli civilians. Like September 11, it was a barbaric attack on civilization. It was an act of war against the possibility of peace itself, and against the paradigm shift represented by the Abraham Accords. Too much of the international conversation continues to frame the conflict narrowly as Israel versus Hamas. The multifront war to annihilate Israel exposed this framing as strategically blind. Hamas is a proxy; Gaza is but one arena. The war is waged by a broader totalitarian axis intent on destroying the very ideas of freedom, democracy, and coexistence, of which Israel (and the Jews) have become a symbol.

This totalitarian axis is already deploying the same methods of information warfare against the U.S., and will do so more as conflict escalates. Simply by unleashing anti-Semitism, this axis undermines America, since, as the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks warned, anti-Semitism is almost always coupled with civilizational rot. If the distortions of the laws of war employed against Israel become accepted interpretations, ruthless terrorists will have a permanent advantage over law-abiding Western militaries. Future enemies will copy the strategies of Hamas, knowing that they can justify mass rape and deliberate murder, turn civilian populations into human shields, and then win global sympathy.

America must begin studying and learning from Israel’s eighth front, and applying what it learns. Too often, the distorting lens of anti-Semitism has prevented those who cherish life and liberty from learning the hard lessons Israel has paid for in blood, lessons about conventional warfare, civil resilience, emergency medicine, education, and the defense of democratic societies under sustained attack.

Let us then return one last time to Clausewitz, who taught that the first task in war is to understand the kind of war one is in. Israel’s experience shows us the war we are already fighting. Any Western democracy that fails to recognize this reality risks defeat in the next war, possibly before the first rounds are fired. The battle for will, legitimacy, and truth is well underway.

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