The Millions Fueling Israel's Frantic Battle to Win Back U.S. Public Opinion
As Israel's global standing plummets amid the wars in Gaza and Iran, government documents and U.S. filings reveal that Jerusalem has poured unprecedented sums into public diplomacy campaigns and influence operations abroad since October 7
Since the October 7 massacre, Israel has committed roughly $100 million to campaigns abroad aimed at improving its image and shaping public opinion about the wars in Gaza and Iran.
Government procurement documents and filings submitted under the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) reveal the scale of that effort, as previously reported by Haaretz. Yet despite the investment, public opinion polling shows that Israel's standing has continued to deteriorate.
The single largest commitment was a digital campaign run by the Government Advertising Agency, worth 174 million shekels (about $52 million). The campaign launched at the start of the 12-day war with Iran in June 2025 and ran through December. Its budget was allocated across Google's advertising platforms (90 million shekels), YouTube (60 million shekels), X (10 million shekels), and the combined advertising platforms Outbrain and Teads (14 million shekels).
The contract, approved without a tender, was intended to serve government and security bodies, including the Defense Ministry, the Foreign Ministry, the Home Front Command, the National Public Diplomacy Directorate and the Diaspora Affairs Ministry. The 2026 budget has not yet been disclosed, but it is unlikely to be smaller than the 2025 allocation and could well be larger.
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A second influence channel operates through American firms and is documented in FARA filings. Israel retained the services of Havas, the multinational advertising and public relations company, which in turn employs a network of subcontractors. At the center of this effort is a contract with a company owned by American digital consultant Brad Parscale, who managed Donald Trump's digital campaigns.
Payments for what was described as "digital advertising" tripled this year to $4.5 million a month. The contract is worth $31.5 million between April and October 2026, and $40.5 million in total since September 2025. The company's semiannual financial report shows that by the end of March 2026, Israel had already transferred $15 million through six payments beginning in October 2025. In practice, the pace of payments had already risen to roughly $3 million a month even before the contract was formally expanded. Of the money it received, the company spent about $13 million on American subcontractors.
Beyond the Parscale contract, Israel signed several additional agreements: nearly $1 million with the New York creative agency Piro for a "digital storytelling" project; a campaign targeting evangelical audiences that has already received roughly $3.3 million and could be worth up to $4 million; payments to law firms and public relations firms in Washington; and $150,000 to an American nonprofit that brought U.S. influencers to Israel on public diplomacyvisits. Together, the documented commitments through the American influence channel amount to roughly $50 million.
A third channel operated through the Diaspora Affairs Ministry. According to investigations by Haaretz and independent media outlets The Seventh Eye and Shakuf, the ministry has transferred about 25 million shekels in grants to roughly 100 organizations and influencers in 2024 and until early 2025, along with another 20 million shekels for producing and distributing videos.
Some grants given in 2024 were awarded to civil society organizations that promoted pro-Israel messaging without disclosing that their activities were funded by the government. It is not known whether similar projects are still operating.
The three channels are not fully integrated and at times appear to fund similar activities through separate mechanisms. Even so, the two main channels – the Government Advertising Agency campaign and the network of U.S. contracts – account for documented financial commitments of roughly $100 million since the war began, in addition to the tens of millions of shekels spent by the Diaspora Affairs Ministry
Investigations by Haaretz, The Seventh Eye and Shakuf revealed that the Diaspora Affairs Ministry has spent at least 45 million shekels since the start of the war, including about 25 million shekels in grants to roughly 100 organizations and influencers and another 20 million shekels on producing and distributing videos.
The campaigns are part of an unprecedented expansion in public diplomacy spending. In 2025, the budget reached 545 million shekels (about $150 million), more than 20 times its previous level. For 2026, a budget of 2.35 billion shekels (about $730 million) has already been approved.
Even these figures may not capture the full scope of government spending on Israel's image. Public diplomacy efforts are funded through ministries, agencies and government directorates, including the National Public Diplomacy Directorate – and even the IDF. Early campaigns launched in 2023 were never publicly priced, and some financial information is inaccessible. As a result, it is impossible to determine how much has actually been spent, only the scale of the documented commitments.
The surge in spending on influence campaigns has coincided with a sharp deterioration in Israel's standing among the American public. According to the Pew Research Center, about 60 percent of Americans held an unfavorable view of Israel in March 2026 – up from 42 percent in 2022. A recent Gallup poll also found that 41 percent of Americans sympathized more with the Palestinians, compared with 36 percent who sympathized more with the Israelis. It was the first time since Gallup began asking the question in 2001 that Israelis did not hold the lead in Americans' sympathies.
The decline in Israel's standing has also been acknowledged by a senior figure in the Trump administration. In an interview on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, U.S. Vice President JD Vance said Israel was "losing the battle" for American public opinion.
Vance's comments came weeks after reports that Israel had expanded a multimillion-dollar public diplomacy campaign targeting Christian conservatives and MAGA audiences.
In the interview, Vance said that, while he did not "mind an effort to try and influence – Israel does it, other governments do," he was bothered by the fact that "American leadership allows that influence to affect their judgment" and added: "When I see there's a literal foreign influence campaign being funded [...] my response is 'go to hell,'" he said.