Israel Is Bleeding Support in the U.S. – and Pouring Tens of Millions Into Trying to Change That

Israel is deepening its influence efforts in the United States in a bid to halt the collapse of its standing among the conservative right.

Haaretz has learned that the Israeli government is paying over $40 million for an influence campaign aimed at Christian Republicans – three times the budget originally allocated to it. The campaign launched late last year, and it’s now expanding and focusing its messaging on an attempt to justify the war in Iran. Documents filed with the U.S. Justice Department further reveal that Israel has signed a new contract with a New York production company to produce a pro-Israel digital storytelling campaign for it, at a cost of nearly $1 million.

Haaretz revealed last November that Israel had signed agreements worth millions of dollars with American content and media companies to run pro-Israel campaigns aimed at Christian conservatives on its behalf, against the backdrop of the plunge in support for Israel since the war in Gaza, including among segments of the public traditionally considered pro-Israel.

The central contract, worth $6 million, was signed with a public relations firm owned by Brad Parscale, who ran U.S. President Donald Trump’s digital election campaigns in 2016 and 2020. In February, Haaretz exposed some of the products that the firm delivered, chief among them a network of propaganda sites featuring pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian content, designed to appear neutral and factual. The sites’ central aim was to influence the answers provided by search engines and AI-based chatbots.

Since then, Israel’s standing on the American right has deteriorated even further. Polls conducted in March, at the height of the war with Iran, show this trend is especially strong among young Republicans. According to a survey by the Pew Research Center, about 41 percent of Republicans and 57 percent of young Republicans (under 50) hold a negative view of Israel.

 

Overall, about 60 percent of Americans now hold a negative view of Israel, compared with 53 percent last year and 42 percent in 2022. Americans’ trust in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is also declining: Nearly 60 percent of the American public doesn’t trust Netanyahu’s decision-making on the international stage, compared with 52 percent last year and 42 percent in 2023.

Documents recently filed by Parscale’s firm under the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act show that its agreement with the Israeli government has been updated and expanded, so that the state is now paying $4.5 million a month for the campaign instead of $1.5 million, bringing the total to $40.5 million for “digital advertising” over the course of a year.

The updated agreement again states that the campaign’s purpose is “combating antisemitism,” but as became clear earlier this year, in practice its engagement with antisemitism is negligible. During the war in Gaza, the campaign’s sites dealt mainly with establishing an anti-Palestinian narrative; now the emphasis appears to have shifted to attempting to justify the war in Iran. In all likelihood, this is a response to the mounting accusations in the U.S. – including on the American right – that Netanyahu and Israel dragged Trump into an unjustified war.

An analysis by Haaretz found that a new site recently went live as part of the campaign, purporting “to expose the truth about Iran,” and that in parallel, the existing sites run by the PR firm began attacking Qatar and China more aggressively.

The documents further reveal that Israel recently hired another company, a New York production house called Piro, to carry out a pro-Israel “digital storytelling” campaign whose aim is “to influence American public opinion.” Piro was founded by Hollywood producer Daniel Rosenberg and advertising figure Tim Piper, and markets a proprietary Narrative Operating System built around AI discoverability. Under the contract, a substantial portion of the campaign budget is earmarked for engaging “talent” and producing videos to be distributed on social media.

The truth, the war

The new site put up by Parscale’s company, TheTruthAboutIran.com, continues its predecessors’ line and purports to provide readers with facts. The site presents Iran as a direct danger to the United States, and it appears to have been set up to try to justify the recent war – even as polls show a clear majority of Americans believe their country shouldn’t have participated in the military campaign. “Following the 12-day war in June 2025, Iran accelerated its nuclear program, moved facilities deep underground and used negotiations to buy time,” the site’s homepage states, even though the move underground took place more than a decade ago.

At the same time, the messaging across the other sites built for the campaign got sharper. The website Allyvia, which focuses on the U.S.-Israel security alliance, added articles explaining that Trump was not dragged into war by Netanyahu but went to war to strengthen America’s standing on the global stage. Another article claims that the war contributed to the security of U.S. citizens.

The anti-Iran site is just one sign of what’s shaping up to be the influence campaign’s new central mission: sketching a global anti-Western axis of evil led by Iran, China and Qatar. On Cognitura, which is presented as an “education and research platform,” one can find a long list of articles dealing with how Qatar is expanding its grip on the United States.

One article, citing a report by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, an anti-Iranian conservative American research institute, claims that Qatar funnels hundreds of billions of dollars into the U.S., in particular into its universities, and uses economic ties to buy political influence; others state that Qatar “bought” the International Criminal Court, and cite sources that the MAGA figure Tucker Carlson, who leads the conservative right’s opposition to the war in Iran, is himself tied to Qatar.

Thus, while the prime minister’s advisers built a pro-Qatari campaign that was exposed by Haaretz, Israel is running an anti-Qatari influence campaign. In the first campaign, the emirate was presented as moderate and peace-seeking; in the second, it’s presented as a dangerous actor from which Islamic terror emanates.

The current campaign ties the Iranian-Qatari axis to China, which it names as the leading player in the anti-Western axis. The new site exposes “the Iranian regime’s ties to communist China,” and various articles across the network of sites frame Chinese investment in English-language AI tools as a hostile influence campaign, and describe how fake accounts operating on Beijing’s behalf spread antisemitism on social media.

Again and again, the message is that anti-Israel protests are part of a broader movement against U.S. hegemony, against capitalism and against Western values. “For many Americans, this is a matter of national security, economic competition and the struggle for technological supremacy against China,” one of the sites states.

This is a relatively new and assertive line for Israel, which until now has preferred not to clash with China. That said, since the October 7 massacre, researchers – including from the Institute for National Security Studies – have warned that China is acting against Israel on the cyber and influence fronts, as part of a strategic partnership with Russia and Iran.

Another pro-Israel influence site, Jewish Onliner, first exposed by Haaretz and not connected to the Parscale campaign, also began publishing content against China during the war in Iran.

The new documents show that alongside the attempt to influence AI engines, Israel is also investing in conventional advertising in the form of ads and banners. In one of them, Trump and Netanyahu appear side by side under the caption: “Israel and the U.S. want peace.”

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Omer Benjakob is a reporter for Haaretz.

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