When the war of October 7 shook us all to the core, some people went quiet. Hillel Fuld did the opposite.
Known for years in the Israeli tech world as a startup advisor, writer, and connector, Fuld took the platform he had built for tech – and turned it into a megaphone for Israel and the Jewish people. He shut down his business, walked away from his income, and threw himself into online advocacy full-time.
We sat down with him for a wide-ranging conversation about hate, hope, narrative, faith, and why he believes the Jewish people need to stop apologizing for their own light.
“At some point I looked at the analytics and thought: holy smokes”
Was there a moment when you realized: “Okay, what I’m doing online is actually changing something”?
“First of all, I don’t know that I have,” he laughs. “But there were definitely milestones during the war that blew my mind.”
One of those milestones came when the Knesset invited him to receive an award for his online work.
“That was… what?” he recalls. “I was like, how is this my life?”
Another came when he finally did something he normally doesn’t bother with: he checked his analytics.
“I’m not a numbers guy. Before the war I didn’t look at impressions; it just didn’t interest me. But at some point I saw things skyrocket. I looked at the analytics and realized: holy smokes – we’re talking in the billions.
“I don’t think views or impressions are a perfect metric for impact, but they’re a good indication that a couple of people are reading my stuff. That felt good.”
What he rarely sees, though, is the impact on actual human beings until someone tells him directly.
“You write on a phone or a computer and you don’t see a face,” he says. “So when someone says, ‘You inspired my Aliyah’ or ‘Your posts helped me feel less alone,’ that’s huge. It makes it all feel real.”
Walking away from tech – and a paycheck
How did you make the decision to step away from your tech business and go all-in on public opinion after October 7?
“I’ll be honest: I didn’t really feel like I had a choice. I never sat down with a spreadsheet and said, ‘Okay, if I keep doing tech, X. If I switch to advocacy, Y.’
“I had this very unique platform – the tech world trusts me. Not many people have access to those people, and they’re very influential. I felt I had to use that. So I shut down my business and basically closed down all sources of income – which is fun,” he says wryly.
“It wasn’t a heroic sacrifice calculated in advance. It was just clear to me that this is what I needed to do. And I haven’t doubted it for a second since.
“It feels extremely clear that this is what I was put on this planet to do.”
Today, he still uses his tech background – just in a very different way.
“Before October 7 I marketed tech companies: define the narrative, get it out there. Now I do the same thing, but for Israel. The overlap is marketing. Everything else – the business model, the ‘career’ part – is gone. I don’t get paid by anyone for this. But in terms of purpose, it’s never been clearer.”
Handling hate: “Tweet and mute”
You get unbelievable amounts of hate online. How do you not get dragged into every argument?
Hillel smiles and shares a story.
“Many years ago I met Ben Shapiro and asked him the same question: ‘How do you handle all this hate? Every time you tweet, you get 5,000 hate messages.’
“He laughed and said, ‘You think I see that stuff?’ I said, ‘What do you mean? How do you not see it?’
“He told me: ‘I tweet and I mute. I don’t read the replies.’”
At the time, Hillel thought it was insane.
“I remember thinking: doesn’t that defeat the purpose? Isn’t social media supposed to be social? Posting and muting – that’s not the point,” he says.
“But that’s what I do now. I post something and mute it. Nine out of ten tweets, I don’t read the replies at all. Once in a while I peek in, remember why I muted, and leave again. Because the hate is just insane.”
Behind the scenes, FOA’s volunteers, are busy reporting the worst replies, using FOA’s Trusted Flagger status on major platforms to get dangerous content removed as quickly as possible.
“Our enemies are running a marketing agency. We’re not even on the field.”
At the heart of Hillel’s frustration is one big idea: narrative.
“Our enemies have a very clear narrative,” he explains. “‘You’re oppressing us. Free Palestine.’ That’s it. It’s simple, unified, and emotionally charged.”
“And us?” He shrugs. “We don’t have a narrative. What we do have is completely fragmented. Everyone’s yelling their own thing. It’s ridiculous.”
He contrasts the coordination he sees on the other side – media kits, Zoom calls, viral visual campaigns like “All Eyes on Rafah” – with the lack of strategy on the pro-Israel side.
“If I were hiring a marketing agency for my startup, I’d hire our enemies in a second. They’re amazing at this. We stink,” he says bluntly.
“We’re answering AI-generated pictures of dead babies with, ‘But we invented cherry tomatoes.’ What is that? We’re not even playing the same sport.”
For Hillel, the way forward is to treat Israel’s story the way you’d treat a major brand.
“I want to sit with the brightest marketing minds in the world – I don’t care if they’re pro-Israel or not – and say, ‘Help us define the narrative.’ Then we need media kits, clear messages, and agreement on how we get that story out.
“Until we do that, we will continue to lose the PR battle. Not because they outnumber us – but because we’re not telling a unified story.”
So what should our narrative be?
We asked if this confusion is partly “a Jewish thing” – always leaving room for doubt, always seeing the other side – Hillel doesn’t disagree, but he reframes it.
“I like how you’re spinning it as a good thing,” he says. “Two Jews, three opinions – that’s real. We can’t agree on anything.”
But he insists the core narrative is actually clear:
“Our narrative should be: Light.
We are a source of light in this world. Objectively.”
He lists examples: Nobel Prizes, medical breakthroughs, Israel’s disaster relief teams that rush to the scene of earthquakes and floods.
“Israel – and by extension the Jewish people – has been an incredible source of light. But we’re still stuck in an exile mindset. We’re constantly apologizing for being awesome.”
“We need to stop that. We need to own the fact that we are an amazing nation. Period.”
Antisemitism vs. criticism of Israel: the 3 Ds
At FOA, one of our daily challenges is explaining the difference between legitimate criticism of Israel and antisemitism. How do you see that line?
“Let’s be crystal clear: you absolutely can criticize Israel and the Israeli government without being antisemitic,” he says. “The key question is: Are you holding Israel to a different standard? Are you accusing Israel of ‘genocide’ when other countries have killed 100 times more and you say nothing? Are you denying Israel’s right to exist while accepting dozens of Muslim and Christian states? If the only country you treat that way is the world’s only Jewish state – you’ve got a problem.”
We mention Natan Sharansky’s well-known “3 Ds” test, which FOA often uses in its educational work:
Delegitimization of Israel’s right to exist
Double standards applied only to Israel
Demonization through exaggerated or blood-libel-style accusations
“If you’re doing those things,” Hillel says, “you’re not a human rights activist. You’re an antisemite.”
Advice for “small” accounts: consistency over perfection
There are so many smaller Jewish accounts doing powerful work post-October 7, but not everyone gets amplified. What would you tell someone just starting out?
“The same thing I tell any entrepreneur: consistency,” he says immediately.
“If someone tells me they’re thinking of recording a podcast once a month, I say: don’t bother. People need consistency. If I come to your blog, read something great, and then come back twice with nothing new – you lost me. “But if every time I come back there’s strong content, I’m staying. That’s how trust is built.”
He’s unapologetic about the numbers.
“I’d even say quantity is more important than quality. No one is telling you to write bad content. But if you can either publish a 50,000-word masterpiece once a month or a 500-word post every day, choose the daily post. No question.”
And there’s another hard truth about patience.
“I’ve been doing content for 15 years. For most of that time, I didn’t see ‘results’. Today people want to go viral in a week. That’s not how this works.
“If you want your voice to matter, keep going. Don’t stop just because it’s not exploding right away.”
Aliyah, history, and not repeating 1930s Germany
One of the strongest themes in Hillel’s content is his call to Jews in the Diaspora to take rising antisemitism seriously – and to seriously consider Aliyah.
“It’s not easy to pick up and leave,” he acknowledges. “Humans hate change. That’s built into us.”
But he can’t ignore the historical echoes.
“If you could talk to my grandmother in 1935, knowing what you know now, what would you tell her? You’d say: ‘Get the hell out.’ And she would have said: ‘Stop being an alarmist. This is Germany, not Spain. We’re enlightened. Nothing will happen here.’
“That’s exactly what I’m hearing today.”
He’s heard from dozens of people who say his posts inspired them to move to Israel. For him, even one person would be enough.
“If I help one person make Aliyah and, from my perspective, save their life, that’s worth it.”
His own story began at age 15, when his parents brought the family from New York to Jerusalem – right in the middle of high school.
“It was the worst age to come,” he remembers. “Tenth grade in Jerusalem after ninth grade in New York? Brutal. At the time I said, ‘I’m leaving the first chance I get.’
“But as I grew up, I realized it was the best thing that ever happened to me.”
The Israel he lives in now is very different from the country of his childhood.
“Back then, coming to Israel meant lowering your quality of life by default. People would ask friends flying in from the States to bring deodorant and tuna fish. Today, it’s paradise.
“You don’t need perfect Hebrew to get by. You don’t automatically have to cut your salary in half. If you’re good at what you do and willing to work hard, you can do as well here – or better.”
He says it with love, but he doesn’t blur his opinion.
“A lot of my friends and family are still in the Diaspora. I love them. But I think many of them are delusional. They’re sticking their heads in the sand, exactly like our ancestors did in Germany.”
When “No” Is Also an Answered Prayer
Though Hillel’s feed is full of geopolitics and media criticism, at the center of his worldview is something more basic: talking to God.
He’s honest about the parts of his religious life that were hard for him.
“There were two mitzvot that were always super challenging: going to synagogue every morning, and wearing tzitzit in the Israeli heat,” he says.
“Throughout the war, I worked on them. Now I go every single morning, I put on tefillin and tallit, I pray with a minyan, and I post that picture. It’s therapeutic, but it’s also something I’m proud of. I fought my biggest challenges and overcame them.”
He pushes his kids to notice abundance, too.
“Every Shabbat I say: ‘Look at this table. The food. The comfort. Ninety-nine point nine percent of humanity doesn’t live like this. Are you thanking Hashem for this?’ Even going to the mall for ice cream – I’ll say: ‘Do you understand how insane this is?’”
He also believes not getting what we want can be its own blessing. His analogy is a three-year-old getting a shot at the doctor.
“From the kid’s perspective, it’s betrayal. ‘How can my father watch someone stab me with a needle?’ But the father and doctor know it’s for his own good. That’s us. Sometimes the answer is ‘no,’ and only later we understand why.”
His own “needle moment” came when his speaking tour to Australia was abruptly cancelled after he was labeled a danger to the public for “Islamophobic” tweets.
“I was devastated. I felt like I was in 1930s Germany again. Then the organization said, ‘We’ll do it on Zoom and pay you anyway.’ And because of all the media attention, more people came and they raised more money.
“And three days later, the Iran attack on Israel started. If I’d been in Australia, I would have been stuck there while my kids were in bomb shelters under ballistic missiles.
“So thank God He didn’t ‘fix’ that for me. In that case, the reason became obvious. In other cases, we may never know. But He’s clearly listening.”
Miracles Do Exist
Hillel sees the current war as full of miracles, technological and otherwise.
“Iron Dome, David’s Sling, Arrow – these systems are miraculous,” he says. “They were never built to work together, and yet when Iran attacked, we intercepted around 99% of what was launched at us. Tens of thousands of threats – and single-digit casualties.
“Rockets ‘fall in open areas’ in a country the size of a fingernail. Where are these open areas? If you look honestly, you see something bigger at work.”
He also sees profound meaning in the way tragedy can unify us – most painfully, in the case of the Bibas family, whose return in coffins was a moment of total national grief.
“At that moment, there were no political camps. We were one,” he recalls.
Here he points to a teaching about Jewish unity from Mount Sinai – where the Torah describes the people camping not in plural (“they camped”) but in singular (“he camped”), as if they were one person with one heart: k’ish echad b’lev echad.
“Unity in the Torah is described with that word k’ish – ‘like one man’,” he says. “Now look at the Bibas family’s names:
Kfir – Kaf
Ariel – Aleph
Yarden – Yud
Shiri – Shin
Kaf, Aleph, Yud, Shin – that spells k’ish.
They unified us again.”
He pauses. “Tell me that’s random.”
“We are an amazing nation. It’s time we start acting like it.”
As the conversation winds down, Hillel returns to the thread that runs through everything he’s doing online.
“Our enemies hate us. That’s the consistent story of Jewish history. There’s no rational explanation that we even exist. And yet – here we are.
“Call it what you want. The reality is that the Jewish people are an absolute miracle and an unprecedented source of light in the world.”
His message to Jews – in Israel and abroad, online and offline – is simple:
“We need to stop apologizing for that.
Keep doing good. Fight evil and darkness. When we make mistakes, we own them. But we don’t lose sight of what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s good and what’s evil.
We are an amazing nation. It’s time we start acting like it.”