Mission failed: How Israel’s anti-BDS app went belly-up
A float marking the launch of Act.IL, a pro-Israel app, New York, 4 June 2017
Natasha Roth-Rowland reports in +972 on 25 April 2022:
In June 2017, at an event connected to New York’s annual Celebrate Israel parade, then-Minister of Strategic Affairs Gilad Erdan announced the launch of a new digital campaign, 4IL (“For Israel”), a one-stop digital shop designed to provide tools for activists to promote Israel and delegitimize the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
The centerpiece of the initiative was an app called Act.IL, which would assign users “missions” to push back on articles and social media posts deemed critical of Israel and/or supportive of the boycott movement; Erdan called the new project an “Iron Dome of truth” and “a true game changer in defending Israel online and changing the narrative.” At the New York parade, a float promoting the app showed a cellphone with Act.IL’s logo next to a rendition of Theodor Herzl, the father of modern Zionism, as a hipster, complete — for some reason — with a pair of Israeli flags protruding from his head.
The app took a scattergun approach to devising “missions” over the years. While a large proportion of its tasks revolved around targeting boycotts, justifying Israeli oppression, and going after human rights groups and activists, Act.IL also assigned its users a wide range of other tasks. These ranged from trying to marshal support for Israeli technology and culture, to suggesting that people criticize Israeli conscientious objectors and praise joint Israeli-German military exercises. Some missions also strayed into inane territory, such as calling on users to discuss an apparent emerging Israeli fashion trend of sporting trucker hats with animal designs on them.
The official story behind Act.IL is that it was developed by students at one of Israel’s private colleges, building on hasbara (Israeli government PR) work they had been conducting during the 2014 assault on Gaza. Yet it also had the involvement of former Israeli intelligence officials, the Israeli government, and was bankrolled at least in part by the late casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson. The app’s operators, like the Israeli government, still repeatedly insisted on its grassroots bona fides, characterizing it as little more than a civil society effort at centralizing opposition to “anti-Israel propaganda.”