Against the backdrop of Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza that has drawn widespread global condemnation, a multi-hundred-million-dollar investment in social media public diplomacy—known locally as Hasbara—has failed to reverse plummeting support for Israel across Western nations, particularly among younger demographics, regional analysts have confirmed in an interview with Middle East Eye.
A March Pew Research Center survey underscores this shifting sentiment: 60% of the American general public now holds an unfavorable view of Israel. The trend crosses partisan lines among younger voters, with 57% of Republicans under 50 and 84% of Democrats under 50 registering unfavorable opinions. Analysts broadly attribute this shift to the growing reliance of young people on social media for news, rather than mainstream Western outlets that have historically maintained overwhelmingly pro-Israel framing.
To counter this grassroots shift in public opinion, Israeli lawmakers approved a historic $730 million Hasbara budget in March 2025—nearly five times the previous year’s allocation, which itself was 20 times higher than pre-2023 levels. In September 2025, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with a group of high-profile American influencers in New York to recruit them to amplify pro-Israel messaging to U.S. audiences. During the meeting, Netanyahu framed social media as the most critical battlefield for Israel’s public relations campaign, noting “We have to fight with weapons that apply to the battlefields in which we’re engaged in and the most important ones are on social media.” He also praised the recent acquisition of TikTok’s U.S. operations by American billionaire Larry Ellison and other pro-Israel business leaders, calling it “the most important purchase going on right now.”
As part of its coordinated propaganda campaign, Israel has launched covert public relations initiatives, including a secret operation code-named the “Esther Project,” which hired global corporate public relations firms to manage networks of paid influencers. U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) filings show Israel paid participating influencers up to $7,000 per post through its contractor Bridges Partners, which partnered with global advertising giant Havas Media Group Germany on the formal “Influencer Campaign.” Havas also signed a $15 million contract with Clock Tower X, a firm founded by former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale. That contract was recently exposed as backing a covert social media campaign targeting the Biden administration’s ceasefire agreement with Iran on Israel’s behalf.
Last week, Time Magazine published a report revealing that participating influencers received detailed scripting guidance for posts on platforms including X, Instagram, and TikTok in private group chats, with payouts reaching up to $4,250 per approved post. Separately, Wall Street Journal reporting documented a proposal from a U.S.-based group called Show Faith by Works to spend more than $3 million pushing pro-Israel messaging to megachurch attendees and Christian college students across the American Southwest, with a planned reach of 4 million people through partnerships with churches, pastors and Christian social media creators. Group founder Chad Schnitger later confirmed the organization has scrapped those plans.
Additional details about Israel’s global Hasbara infrastructure emerged in April 2025, when Ella Kenan, a former captain in Israeli military intelligence, disclosed at a New York conference that she had coordinated with a network of 60,000 international influencers to shape public narratives in Israel’s favor after the October 7, 2023 attacks. Kenan founded the organization Bright Mind to counter what she frames as misinformation about Israel, and claimed her network’s content—much of it produced for non-Jewish influencers to share—has amassed nearly 3 billion views across social platforms. She also took credit for coining the slogan “Hamas is ISIS,” which was later adopted by global leaders including former U.S. President Joe Biden.
The Israeli Foreign Ministry has also launched targeted outreach to right-wing American creators, funding an Israel tour for influencers associated with the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement through a $86,000 contract with nonprofit Israel365. The trip brought 16 U.S.-based influencers under 30 to Israel to encourage them to share messaging aligned with the Israeli government with their large followings of young conservative Christians.
One high-profile misstep in this outreach came recently when U.S. right-wing influencer Clavicular—real name Braden Eric Peters, a leading figure in the male “looksmaxxing” internet subculture—faced widespread backlash after visiting Israel to address past accusations of antisemitism. Clavicular had previously appeared alongside self-described misogynist Andrew Tate and white nationalist Nick Fuentes while singing lyrics from Kanye West’s song “Heil Hitler.” During the visit, which was promoted as “Israelmaxxing” by pro-Israel right-wing outlet The Free Press, Clavicular appeared on a livestream with Shira Braun, a soldier in the Israeli army’s Spokesperson Unit (the military’s official propaganda wing), and asked her if he would be paid $7,000 for sharing pro-Israel posts. Braun was subsequently removed from her role as social media coordinator and barred from continuing the position. Clavicular was also publicly confronted by Israeli citizens over his past antisemitic comments, and the entire incident failed to produce the polished positive publicity Israeli officials had planned for.
Marc Owen Jones, associate professor of media analytics at Northwestern University, explained to Middle East Eye that modern pro-Israel propaganda campaigns have shifted away from reliance on official government accounts, instead operating through hybrid networks that blend state institutions, advocacy groups, private donors, diaspora organizations and independent content creators, blurring the line between official public diplomacy and decentralized grassroots digital advocacy. “The strategy contains an inherent trade-off: influencers derive much of their persuasive power from perceived authenticity, yet overt coordination or sponsorship can undermine that credibility and generate backlash,” Jones said, pointing to the Clavicular incident as a clear example of this flaw.
Rachel Lester, a former Israeli military spokesperson who spent four years producing social media content for the Spokesperson Unit’s international branch, acknowledged in an interview with The Media Line that Israel cannot win the online battle against rising anti-Israel sentiment. “Our enemies are too good at manipulating the world’s emotions,” she said, adding that the “biggest challenge that we face is that you can’t really fight photos of dead children.” Lester explained that her branch’s core goal was convincing global audiences that Hamas does not care about Palestinian civilians in Gaza, and even the highest-performing pro-Israel content focused on civilian suffering in Gaza failed to shift broader public opinion, because “the international community doesn’t really have much sympathy for Israel.”
Miriyam Aouragh, professor of Digital Anthropology at the University of Westminster in the U.K., told Middle East Eye that most of Israel’s influencer recruitment attempts have backfired. Not only have they failed to move public opinion, but they have also drawn unwanted attention to the covert infrastructure behind the messaging, turning the propaganda operation itself into the central story. She frames the strategy as a “triumphant failure”: even as Israel has consolidated control over mainstream media and gained leverage over major social media platforms, it has been unable to reverse the shifting cultural zeitgeist and growing organized pro-Palestine movement pushing for change.
Aouragh noted that Israel faces an inherent messaging conflict between its domestic and international audiences: to maintain public support among its own population for continuing the occupation and conflict, it relies on colonial framing that radicalizes the public around ethnic supremacy, a narrative that directly undermines Israel’s longstanding international branding as “the only democracy in the Middle East.”
“Palestine has become our generation’s… political cause like Vietnam was in the 60s and 70s,” she said. “It is impossible to break through the zeitgeist with money and influence. There are some things that money cannot buy.”
This shift in attitudes among younger Americans poses a long-term existential challenge to Israel, which has depended on consistent bipartisan support from elected U.S. officials to maintain the billions of dollars in annual military aid it receives. However, recent Democratic midterm primary elections have seen multiple openly pro-Palestine candidates defeat establishment incumbents whose ties to pro-Israel funding have come under growing scrutiny from voters.
One high-profile example is Abdul El-Sayed, who is running in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary against incumbent Haley Stevens. According to pro-Israel lobbying watchdog TrackAIPAC, pro-Israel political action committees have spent more than $20 million to support Stevens’ campaign. The United Democracy Project, the super PAC aligned with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), launched a barrage of attack ads against El-Sayed claiming he has “a history of disrespecting women” after multiple polls showed El-Sayed leading the race ahead of the August 4 primary. A Jewish influencer recently revealed he received a confidential recruitment offer from Stevens’ campaign, offering $1,500 to share pro-Stevens talking points under a non-disclosure agreement he ultimately refused to sign. Middle East Eye reached out to the Stevens campaign, Clavicular, and the Israeli army for comment, but received no response prior to publication.
During the campaign, El-Sayed faced criticism for meeting with Hasan Piker, a prominent political commentator and Twitch streamer who is one of the most influential pro-Palestine voices for younger American audiences. Piker was recently the target of a coordinated smear campaign by U.S. mainstream media, but a rally with Piker boosted El-Sayed’s polling numbers, increasing his name recognition and cementing his standing as the anti-establishment candidate voters were seeking. A similar trend benefited Piker himself after he was banned from the U.K., a move he says was “at the behest of Israel.” The ban increased his popularity, an example of what Piker calls the “Streisand effect,” where attempts at censorship draw greater public attention to the censored viewpoint.
Unlike Israel’s network of paid influencers, Aouragh noted that independent pro-Palestine content creators set the media agenda and understand how to build social media traction that can operate parallel to mainstream media, and even drive mainstream news coverage. She added that efforts to ban creators like Piker are a dangerous development: “every erosion of citizen liberal rights is one too many, and creates… new rules of engagement” that normalize the suppression of free speech.
Abeer al-Najjar, professor of media and journalism studies at the American University of Sharjah, told Middle East Eye that Israel’s campaign to silence pro-Palestine creators and buy support from other influencers is almost guaranteed to fail, and may in fact accelerate the shift in public opinion that Israel fears. Pro-Israel influencers act as “the ‘organic-looking’ front of a professionalised state operation” whose official channels have already lost credibility, she explained, with the core goal of “laundering state messaging as peer culture.”
“Israel’s real problem is the gap between message and reality; you cannot ‘explain’ a livestreamed genocide,” al-Najjar said. “The Clavicular episode exposes the model’s limit; even funded, curated trips can’t manufacture the authenticity they’re buying.” Instead of winning over young audiences, Israel can expect “diminishing returns, visible backlash like the Clavicular fiasco, and deepening cynicism among the very youth being targeted,” she added.
