Excerpts from more or less random parts of the (very long) article:

Israeli gov-led Zoom calls, WhatsApp chat logs, and other docs provide a window into the massive effort to shape online discourse and silence pro-Palestinian voices.

As the Israel-Hamas war began to heat up in late October, Courtney Carey, a Dublin-based employee of the Israeli website building company Wix, posted the Irish words “SAOIRSE DON PHALAISTIN” -- “Freedom for Palestine” -- on her LinkedIn page.

Within 24 hours of Carey’s LinkedIn post appearing, Alon Ozer, a Miami-based investor, took a screenshot of the post and shared it with a WhatsApp group of more than 300 like-minded investors, tech executives, activists, and at least one senior Israeli government official. Ozer took care to note that Carey worked for Wix.

Oded Hermoni, a tech journalist-turned-venture capitalist, piped up to assure everyone that Batsheva Moshe, Wix’s general manager for Israel and a member of the group chat, had been “on it since Sat[urday] night.”

Moshe then chimed in to assure her peers that the issue with Carey had been “taken care of since it was published.”

“I believe there will be an announcement soon re our reaction,” she added.

Wix terminated Carey the following day.

[...]

The WhatsApp group where Carey’s case came up serves as a kind of switchboard where the various independent players in Silicon Valley’s pro-Israel community swap ideas, identify enemies, and collaborate on ways to defend Israel in the media, academia, and the business world.

We have obtained access to thousands of the group’s WhatsApp messages dating back to mid-October, and an intricate spreadsheet where group participants request and claim tasks ranging from social media responses to IDF support shipments. Separately, we have viewed a number of video meetings charting best practices for “hasbara” – an Israeli term of art for “public diplomacy” whose detractors see it as a euphemism for propaganda -- that offer a window into Israel’s public-relations war that is not limited to the tech sector.

[...]

The IDF spokesman encouraged those on the call to assist with “maintaining pressure on legislators” in Congress and to work to influence those “in universities or media, or think tanks, or in elite circles.”

Members of the hasbara-oriented tech world WhatsApp group have eagerly taken up the call to shape public opinion as part of a bid to win what’s been described as the “second battlefield” and “the information war.”

[...]

In some cases, officials from the IDF and other parts of the Israeli government have joined the effort. David, the Israeli foreign ministry official and an investor in J-Ventures, has shared official talking points in the WhatsApp group.

[...]

"You guys are our frontline soldiers,” said Tamar Schwarzbard, head of Digital Diplomacy at the Israeli Foreign Ministry, on an October Zoom call posted online by Hasbara Fellowships, a nonprofit group that works closely with the Israeli government to train pro-Israel activists in the U.S. and Canada. She noted that the government needed help reframing the Gaza war and the public messaging over the conflict with Hamas.

“Let’s say you see some kind of newspaper article on your campus news site showing support or solidarity with the Palestinians and not speaking out against what's going on in the Gaza envelope and in Israel,” she said. “So you want to make sure, try to tag, let's say, the president of the university on the post you're putting out condemning that article.”

“Hamas does really good PR,” continued Schwarzbard. “We need to change the narrative.” She implored the group to use focused language. “We need people to see this isn't just a run-of-the-mill resistance, freedom fighter group. This is something equivalent of ISIS.”

[...]

The Israel-based venture capitalist outlined three categories of people for whom outreach, rather than attacks, is the best strategy. The first group is what he dubbed “the impressionables,” who are "typically young people, they reflexively support the weak, oppose the oppressor," but "are not really knowledgeable." For this category of people, the goal is not to "convince them of anything," but to "show them that it's much more complicated than it seems." Seeding doubt, he said, would make certain audiences think twice before attending a protest. "So it's really about creating some kind of confusion,” Fisher continued, “but really, just to make it clear to them that it's really a lot more complicated."

A second category, Fisher explained, is the "uncomfortable sympathizer," a group that "wants to support Israel -- they're typically more liberal," but opposes the current government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. These types can be won over, Fisher said, by pointing out "that we are a multi-ethnic, diverse, democratic liberal society with rotten apples."

The final group consists of those who are "reflexively pro-Israel, kind of ‘Israel, right or wrong.’" Members of this group "are not actually very knowledgeable," so they needed to be equipped with the right facts to make them "more effective in advocating for Israel,” Fisher said.

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The WhatsApp chats provide a rare look at the organizing efforts behind the broad push to fire critics of Israel and suppress public events featuring critics of the Israeli government. The scope is surprisingly broad, ranging from investigating the funding sources of student organizations such as Model Arab League, to monitoring an organizing toolkit of a Palestine Solidarity Working Group – “They are verrrry well organized”, one member exclaimed – to working directly with high-level tech executives to fire pro-Palestinian employees.

[...]

The WhatsApp group mustered similar efforts against pro-Palestinian activists and writers. Lior Netzer, a business consultant based in Massachusetts, and a member of the J-Ventures WhatsApp group, requested help pressuring the University of Vermont to cancel a lecture with Mohammed El-Kurd, a Palestinian writer for The Nation magazine. Netzer shared a sample script that alleged that El-Kurd had engaged in anti-Semitic speech in the past.

The effort also appeared to be successful. Shortly after the letter-writing campaign, UVM canceled the talk, citing safety concerns.

The pro-Israel organizing efforts to silence pro-Palestinian speech raises concerns with some observers of the conflict.

“You can disagree with critics of Israel, you can oppose what they're saying,” noted the Quincy Institute’s Clifton. “But this is an effort to constrain the debate in an underhanded manner.”

[...]

Speaking to the Hasbara Fellowships audience, Hoffman also characterized himself as a foot soldier in a wider war on behalf of Israel, rather than a media watchdog primarily concerned with combating bias, as its website suggests. “There are three battles going on right now for Israel’s existence,” he said. Those battles, he explained, take place on the military battlefield, on college campuses,” and the one in which HonestReporting engages, “the media battlefield.”

Victory on the “media battlefield,” Hoffman concluded, “eases pressure on IDF to go quicker, to wrap up” and “goes a long way to deciding how much time Israel has to complete an operation.”