Israel faces uphill battle against Wikipedia disinformation, critics warn of ‘knowledge poisoning’

Israel is facing what critics describe as an uphill battle against widespread anti-Israel and antisemitic narratives on Wikipedia, the world’s largest online encyclopedia. A group known as “Tech for Palestine” has reportedly employed dozens of senior editors to influence content, with claims that they have altered roughly 10,000 entries in ways that favor the Islamic Republic of Iran and its proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah.

According to these claims, the edits form part of a broader effort to promote narratives that critics say delegitimize Israel’s right to exist. For example, the Wikipedia entry “Comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany” has been cited as portraying Israel in extreme terms, while Zionism – the Jewish national movement – is described by some contributors as a form of colonialism, a characterization supporters dispute as ignoring thousands of years of Jewish historical ties to the land.

By contrast, Wikipedia content presents Hamas as a “political organization with a military wing,” ignoring that Hamas is a genocidal, internationally designated terrorist organization that openly calls for Israel’s destruction and the murder of all Jews. The Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of largely 1,200 Israeli civilians, the largest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, is referenced by the military wing of Hamas as “attacks."

Wikipedia has detailed entries on “Jewish terrorism” and Israeli “apartheid.” By contrast, the online encyclopedia legitimizes Palestinian Arab terrorism as “political violence” and “insurgency.” Wikipedia also deleted the entry “Destruction of Israel in Iranian policy.”

The overall goal of the disinformation effort is to demonize Israel and Jews while presenting the Iranian regime, Hamas and Hezbollah in a positive light. 

“It’s called knowledge poisoning,” explained Dr. Shlomit Aharoni Lir, a research fellow and lecturer in the interdisciplinary master’s program in culture and film at the University of Haifa. 

“This is a Trojan horse that injects poison under the guise of neutral knowledge,” she assessed.

Aharoni Lir placed the ongoing information war in the wider context of shaping public opinion and perception. 

“Knowledge poisoning is the ability to influence how we perceive and understand reality, and our ability to think freely. It influences not only what we think, but how we think. And when search engines and language models rely on Wikipedia, its influence extends far beyond the site itself. This is not only a localized distortion, but contamination of the entire global knowledge base.”

The anti-Israel disinformation campaign has escalated following the Hamas-initiated Gaza war. In November 2025, Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales admitted that the encyclopedia’s “Gaza genocide” article failed to meet Wikipedia’s own neutrality standards. 

“This article fails to meet our high standards and needs immediate attention,” Wales assessed at the time.

In March 2025, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a Jewish-American watchdog that combats antisemitism, accused at least 30 Wikipedia editors of participating in spreading an organized anti-Israel bias online. 

Aharoni Lir warned that lies and factual distortions spread by Wikipedia are dangerous because they are presented as neutral encyclopedic information. Furthermore, she assessed that anti-Israel groups like “Tech for Palestine” systematically seek to rewrite historical facts to fit their political agenda against Israel and the Jewish people. 

“Undermining the connection of the Jewish people to Israel – They create an alternative history by using and distorting the term Palestine, from the name of a place into a term of identity. In addition, they literally invent a ‘Palestinian-Hellenistic’ history that never existed, going through entries in which, for example, ancient coins appear, and changing them from Hebrew to Canaanite, and more. Through this, they achieve an undermining of Israel’s right to exist,” she explained. 

Aharoni Lir organized many anti-Israel and anti-Jewish biases and factual manipulations on a website called WikiBiases. 

“The project creates a broad evidentiary infrastructure: comparisons between previous and current versions, screenshots of edits, documentation of talk-page discussions and recurring patterns of conduct by editors, and exposes the internal dynamics of the system: how terms undergo semantic change, which sources are defined as ‘reliable’ and how seemingly tiny formulations manage to shift the center of gravity of an entire entry. The result is that the reader is exposed to a one-sided narrative, often without being aware of it,” she said. 

Aharoni Lir emphasized the need to assess the credibility of sources and protect knowledge. 

“It is important not to believe, to ask questions, to challenge, to examine additional sources. It is our duty to protect ourselves. The most precious thing in the world is knowledge, which enables our freedom and our thoughts. Knowledge must be protected in an era of post-truth, in which many things are happening that could harm the ability to think independently,” she explained. 

She concluded by stressing the importance of factual content that strengthens Jewish and Israeli identity. 

“Precisely at a time like this, it is important to increase creation and writing, to strengthen Israeli, Hebrew or Jewish identity and to feed the world with knowledge, perceptions, articles and creative thought. This, too, is a strategy for preserving and protecting ourselves in a world that is trying to undermine our right to exist. We can no longer afford to be naive, but must look at reality as it is: The campaign began long ago, and we are in the midst of a disruption and flattening of knowledge.”

In April 2025, the Trump administration accused Wikipedia of spreading propaganda and warned that the encyclopedia could lose its nonprofit status.