Israel pumps millions into anti-Palestine propaganda to sway US opinion: Report

The Israeli regime has reportedly signed contracts worth millions of dollars in recent months to sway American public opinion as part of attempts to launder the occupying entity’s genocidal war crimes against Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip.

Israeli daily Haaretz reported on Friday that the multimillion-dollar campaign aimed to reshape US public opinion, both online and offline, through coordinated influence operations combining digital marketing, AI, geotagging, and religious messaging.

The contracts, signed between the Israeli regime and firms linked to US President Donald Trump, reveal a “hasbara [propaganda] campaign” and schemes to target millions of US churchgoers, deploy bots, hire influencers, and try to make ChatGPT more pro-Israel.

The largest contract, worth $6 million, was signed with Clock Tower X, owned by Trump’s former digital campaign chief Brad Parscale, to produce and distribute roughly 100 core pieces of pro-Israel content per month and thousands of derivative versions, primarily on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.

One clause in Parscale’s contract outlines a “Search and Language Operation” designed to influence both search engines and generative AI systems, including ChatGPT and Claude, to frame discourse about Israel.

Haaretz said a second proposed $3 million initiative, by evangelical consultant Chad Schnitger’s Show Faith by Works, targets declining support among young evangelicals over the Gaza war.

Additional filings reveal contracts with Democratic-aligned firm SKDKnickerbocker to run bot networks that “flood” social media with pro-Israel messaging, and with Targeted Communications Global to promote Israeli tourism through influencers.

Another project, “Esther Project,” managed by Bridges Partners, recruits 14 to 18 influencers to post hundreds of times monthly in support of Israel, echoing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts to mobilize online personalities as “digital soldiers.”

Israel paying influencers $7,000 per post in propaganda campaign: Report

Israel is paying social media influencers up to $7,000 per post as part of a coordinated online propaganda campaign aimed at shaping public opinion.

Haaretz quoted Netanyahu as saying that the multimillion-dollar campaign expands the “Eighth Front” of Israel’s genocidal war, a digital offensive to erase evidence of its war crimes in Gaza and reshape global opinion.

Dubbed the “Digital Iron Dome,” it merges AI surveillance, mass reporting, and influencer networks to suppress and replace resistance narratives.

The Israeli daily underlined that platforms like TikTok and Meta have deleted millions of posts critical of Israel, while paid ad campaigns flood feeds with pro-Israel propaganda.

The report said Netanyahu’s cabinet has also spent over $145m on projects such as “Project 545” and the “Esther Project,” contracting Trump-linked firms and influencers to influence social media and even AI tools like ChatGPT and Grok.

Investigations by OpenAI and the New York Times have revealed that Israeli-run networks use fake accounts as part of attempts to push anti-Palestinian content and defend Tel Aviv’s atrocities in the besieged Gaza Strip.

This is while a Reuters-Ipsos poll published in October showed that nearly 60 percent of US citizens support recognizing Palestine, marking a clear shift in public opinion against Israel’s crimes in the coastal territory over the past two years.

Since Israel launched its genocidal war on Gaza on October 7, 2023, approximately 69,000 Palestinians, including 20,000 children, have been killed and over 170,000 wounded.

Even after last month’s ceasefire between Hamas and Israel, the death toll continues to rise as more bodies are recovered from the rubble and the occupying regime repeatedly violates the truce.

Experts warn the true death toll could reach hundreds of thousands once those missing or buried beneath Gaza’s ruins are accounted for.    

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