Israel’s government has, in recent months, signed multi-million dollar contracts to rehabilitate its image in US public opinion, both online and offline. With support among US conservatives eroding, Tel Aviv has hired firms to run campaigns that go far beyond classic hasbara. The brief now includes mass outreach to church-going Christians, bot networks to amplify pro-Israel messaging across the internet, and efforts to shape search results and responses produced by popular AI systems like ChatGPT.
Among the contracted experts is a former campaign director for Donald Trump. Several other vendors are tied to the Republican Party or to evangelical communities, signalling a heavy pivot toward audiences once assumed to be automatically pro-Israel. Officially, these initiatives are framed as combating antisemitism, which Israeli ministries claim has risen in parallel with declining support for Israel. Taken together, the contracts mark a new post-war phase in Israel’s public-diplomacy strategy and a shift in how it deploys both AI agents and human influencers in overseas hasbara campaigns.
US law requires American firms representing foreign governments to register with the Department of Justice under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Filings over the past two months show multiple contracts signed on behalf of Israel by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Tourism, and the state advertising agency to promote Israeli interests in the United States.
Payments are routed through Havas Media Germany GmbH, a subsidiary of the global advertising and PR conglomerate Havas. In effect, Havas acts as an intermediary, executing sub-contracts with US companies for Israel. Records indicate Havas has received at least 100 million dollars since 2018 to promote Israeli tourism campaigns in the United States, and it runs similar projects for other states, including several Gulf countries.
The largest new hasbara contracts were signed in August with Clock Tower X, owned by Brad Parscale, a key figure in Trump’s 2016 and 2020 digital operations. The four-month, 6 million dollar agreement, executed between Clock Tower X and Havas Media on behalf of the Israeli government, commits the firm to strategic consulting, planning, and communications services to develop and implement a wide US campaign to combat antisemitism.
According to the filings, Parscale’s company will produce at least 100 core content pieces per month, spanning video, audio, podcasts, graphics, and copy, plus 5,000 derivative versions monthly, targeting 50 million views a month. Eighty percent of the content is earmarked for young Americans on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. Messaging will be distributed through the Salem Media network, a conservative Christian group with 200-plus radio stations and websites, where Parscale now leads strategy.
Before the Gaza war, a focus on Christian audiences would have been surprising. Evangelicals, in particular, were long among Israel’s most supportive US constituencies. But Pew polling from 2022 to 2025 shows rapid erosion in support amid the war on Gaza, even among conservatives. In 2022, 42 percent of Americans held an unfavorable view of Israel. Three years later, that share had climbed to 53 percent. The collapse in support is not confined to Democrats. Half of Republicans under 50 now view Israel negatively, a 15-point increase since the war began.
A 2024 report by Tel Aviv University’s Center for the Study of the United States points to a similar trend among younger evangelicals, who are notably more critical and no longer reflexively pro-Israel. Matters worsened after the death of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk, when far-right media and disinformation networks spread conspiracy theories alleging Israel assassinated him for criticizing the Gaza war.
Israel’s public-diplomacy apparatus has long enjoyed direct and indirect government support and remains popular domestically, with celebrities often volunteering. Still, its failures will be subject to the State Comptroller’s forthcoming report, part of a series reviewing wartime shortcomings.
Another proposed campaign, crafted by Show Faith By Works, a consultancy owned by Republican strategist Chad Schnitger, is commissioned by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs with a budget exceeding 3 million dollars, one tenth of which has reportedly been paid via Havas although a final contract has not been signed. Documents dated September outline a focus on churches and Christian organizations in the western United States to counter declining evangelical support and to raise awareness linking Palestinians to Hamas and terrorism.
The plan relies on scripture-based arguments underscoring the supposed religious importance of Israel and the Jewish people to Christians, paired with talking points asserting that Palestinians chose Hamas, kill Christian aid workers, celebrated the 7 October massacre, shelter terrorists, and that Palestinians and Iran share genocidal intent toward Israel.
The documents describe delivery via what is billed as the largest geofencing campaign in US history. The idea is to draw perimeters around every major church and Christian college in California, Arizona, Nevada, and Colorado during worship hours, identify attendees using commercial data, track them, and retarget them with bespoke ads. Target audience: eight million churchgoers and four million Christian students.
Previous investigations by Haaretz have shown how advertising-intelligence firms let operators draw a polygon on a map, extract device identifiers seen within it, and target those users later. The proposed campaign would use similar tools to push Ministry of Foreign Affairs messaging to potential Christian audiences. The ministry says this element has not been implemented and remains a proposal, though the practice itself is legal and common in online advertising. In a statement to Haaretz, the ministry said claims that Israel pays influencers or uses geofencing are false and part of a smear effort.
Attached drafts list potential celebrity participants, including actor Chris Pratt of Guardians of the Galaxy, Jon Voight, football player Tim Tebow, and NBA star Stephen Curry, though it is unclear whether any have been approached. The plan also features a mobile installation called the 7 October Experience, designed by Hollywood creatives with VR screens to immerse visitors in what it presents as the atrocities of the Hamas attack and the Nova festival killings.
From SEO To Geofencing
A core pillar of Israel’s campaign is to guide AI-based chatbots that have swept the digital landscape. One clause in the Clock Tower X contract details a research and language operation that goes beyond promoting content on Google and other search engines to seeding rhetorical outputs inside conversations with generative language models and AI dialogue systems.
The project also envisions the largest geofencing drive in US history, mapping every major church and Christian college, identifying and tracking attendees, and retargeting them. The intended reach is roughly eight million churchgoers and four million Christian students.
If executed as described, this would be the first publicly documented case of a state actor attempting to reshape discourse by directly targeting the output of generative AI systems such as ChatGPT and Claude. It marks a shift from search-engine optimisation that pushed pro-occupation sites to the top of results to manipulating the chatbots themselves, aiming to influence how answers about Palestine and Israel are framed.
At the same time, Israel remains invested in traditional tools. A government tender exemption shows more than 45 million dollars spent in the second half of 2025 on standard digital ads across Google, YouTube, Twitter (X), and Outbrain.
US FARA filings also reveal another campaign routed through Havas for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs with SKDK Knickerbocker, valued at roughly 2.5 million shekels. The Democratic-aligned firm is tasked with developing a bot-driven program across social platforms to flood the space with ministry messaging, while recruiting up to five spokespeople to boost Israel’s narrative in international media and online. Separately, Targeted Communications Global runs a 1.2 million dollar Ministry of Tourism campaign using influencers and branded content to promote travel to Israel.
Project Esther
Another influence initiative has been launched with Bridges Partners, a Washington consultancy owned by Yair Levy and Uri Steinberg, Israel’s former tourism attaché in North America. The 1 million dollar contract, signed via Havas for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the state body LABAM, funds a stable of social-media influencers to promote Israel.
According to filings submitted to the US Department of Justice in September, the project aims to enhance cultural exchange between the United States and Israel through influencer-based content and related activities. It plans to recruit and manage between 14 and 18 influencers, each posting 25 to 30 times per month on Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and X.
The influencer focus has accelerated. In July, Haaretz reported that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs awarded, via tender exemption, hundreds of thousands of shekels to a nonprofit tasked with bringing right-wing American influencers to Israel, a cohort showing the steepest drop in sympathy. In August those influencers arrived for tours that included settlement visits, described by the ministry as having media, diplomatic, and public value. During his September trip to New York, Prime Minister Netanyahu met with US influencers and urged them to treat social media as a battlefield.
Records attached to the filings show Bridges Partners paid several prominent figures, among them communications consultant Nadav Shtroschler for 15,000 dollars, who has worked with Netanyahu and the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, and Israeli digital marketing specialist Benina Rezidor for 10,000 dollars.
The campaign carries the name Project Esther. It is unclear whether this is linked to the Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther, a conservative policy blueprint marketed as a national strategy to fight antisemitism and protect Jewish communities, which critics, including Jewish and progressive groups, argue is designed to criminalise pro-Palestine activism. Proposed measures included restricting student visas and cutting federal funds to universities hosting such activity, steps implemented immediately after Trump returned to the White House.
A Pivotal Tool
The newly disclosed campaigns suggest Israel’s early experiments with AI have matured into a coordinated public-diplomacy strategy inside the United States.
Internal documents obtained by Haaretz state that AI is explicitly classified as a pivotal tool within the technological arsenal of Voices for Israel, a government-backed nonprofit formerly known as Concert operating under the Ministry for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism. Its mission is to run large-scale online perception-shaping operations to counter what it terms global delegitimisation campaigns.
An early-war document called for a technological war room equipped with monitoring systems, AI, big data, distribution and disruption capabilities, operational tooling, and more. Elements of this approach coalesced under Project Max, also funded by the Ministry for Diaspora Affairs.
Under the heading Countering Digital Hate Narratives via Influencers and AI, Project Max served as a prototype for current influence operations. A prior Haaretz investigation revealed a government-backed effort to build an AI-powered propaganda bot for hasbara that malfunctioned and produced content hostile to Jews and to Israel.
The latest disclosures point to a parallel strategy blending human influencers with AI-enabled operator tools to export Israeli messaging. In response to the reporting, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said claims of an agreement with Show Faith on geofencing and influencer payments are false and part of a broader disinformation campaign against Israel’s legitimacy and right to exist. The ministry added that, as part of its pushback, Israel is mounting physical and digital exhibitions worldwide showing, among other things, the atrocities of 7 October, describing these as the activities Show Faith has executed to date.
