From JD Vance and Zohran Mamdani to the Church of England and international courts, outrage over Gaza is breaking through an unprecedented campaign of artificial intelligence, influencers, conservative media, targeted advertising and legal pressure.
For more than two years, the world has watched Gaza being destroyed in real time. Palestinian journalists have documented mass killing, forced displacement, hunger, ruined hospitals, children undergoing amputations and entire neighbourhoods erased. Israeli soldiers have posted videos of their own conduct, while ministers and public officials have made statements cited by lawyers and investigators as evidence of intent.
The Hamas led attacks of 7 October 2023 saw the deaths of over 1,100 people while around 250 more were taken prisoner, according to Israeli figures. Israel answered with an assault that has killed more than 73,000 Palestinians according to Gaza health officials, displaced most of the territory’s population and left much of its civilian infrastructure in ruins.
The description of Israel’s actions as genocide is no longer confined to street protests or activist organisations. In September 2025, the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza. Amnesty International and the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem reached similar conclusions in separate investigations. South Africa’s case under the Genocide Convention remains before the International Court of Justice.
Israel rejects the genocide accusation, saying it is conducting a lawful war against Hamas, seeking the release of hostages and attempting to limit civilian harm under extraordinarily difficult conditions. Its officials argue that high casualty figures do not demonstrate an intention to destroy Palestinians as a group and accuse critics of ignoring the crimes committed on 7 October.
That defence has been repeated by governments, broadcasters, lobby groups, advertisers and online supporters across the Western world. It has not arrested the collapse in Israel’s standing. The central problem is no longer a lack of Israeli messaging. It is the expanding body of evidence against which that messaging is being judged.
No advertisement can make a destroyed hospital stand again. An influencer cannot restore a dead child to a family, rebuild a home or erase footage of civilians waiting desperately for food. Artificial intelligence can generate millions of posts, messages and websites, but it cannot make the events they seek to reframe disappear.
Against that reality, Israel has launched an extraordinary attempt to change not only what Western audiences think, but what they encounter when they search, scroll, watch television, attend church or ask an artificial intelligence system about the war.
According to a Haaretz investigation, the Israeli government has committed roughly $100 million to overseas campaigns intended to improve its image and shape opinion about Gaza, Iran and Israel’s wider regional wars. The operation encompasses digital advertising, social media content, online influencers, mass messaging, religious outreach, conservative broadcasting and the deliberate creation of web material intended to influence automated answers.
Haaretz identified a digital advertising commitment of about $52 million as the largest single component, launched around the 12 day Israel Iran war in June 2025 and distributed across Google’s advertising services, YouTube, X and other platforms. The newspaper also reported that the budget for a separate digital influence operation had tripled to approximately $4.5 million a month in 2026.
Millions of Americans have meanwhile received text messages from people calling themselves “Emma”, “Sarah” or “John”, apparently writing on behalf of a group named Friends for Peace.
“How do you think the US and Israel’s peace talks with Iran will impact global security?” one message asks.
The approach appears conversational and spontaneous, as though an ordinary campaigner is inviting an ordinary citizen into a discussion about peace. According to an investigation by The Wall Street Journal, however, the messages were generated with artificial intelligence, distributed by a company connected to a longtime adviser to Donald Trump and paid for by the Israeli government.
The texts represent the campaign in miniature: a foreign state funded message presented in the voice of an ordinary American, carrying no visible sign of the political machinery behind it. Yet the most consequential challenge to that machinery is now coming from inside institutions Israel once regarded as dependable allies.
US Vice President JD Vance has accused elements of the Israeli government of manipulating American opinion to prolong war with Iran. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani has called Benjamin Netanyahu the architect of genocide and demanded that he face trial. The Church of England has voted overwhelmingly to hear Palestinian Christians describe genocide, apartheid and settler colonialism, while tying their testimony to scrutiny of Church investments.
These are not identical positions. Vance remains a supporter of Israel, Mamdani is an outspoken critic and the Church of England has carefully avoided endorsing every claim made by Palestinian theologians. Together, however, they expose the same failure. Israel can purchase reach, repetition and access, but it cannot compel belief. The harder it tries to manufacture credibility, the more the campaign itself becomes evidence of a political crisis it has been unable to contain.
Vance turns on the campaign
During an appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience in July, Vance said there were people inside the Israeli system who were attempting to move the United States away from negotiations and towards an indefinite military campaign. His accusation was direct:
There are some people within their system, we know beyond a shadow of a doubt, who are manipulating and trying to change American public opinion to keep the war going on indefinitely. Again, not towards any objective, but just indefinitely.
Vance said a well funded campaign had sought to derail an agreement with Iran and that American influencers connected to the operation had attacked him on social media and briefed reporters against him. He pointed directly to a Time investigation published on 13 July, which examined an Israeli funded messaging operation led by Brad Parscale, the digital strategist who helped run Trump’s 2016 campaign and briefly managed his 2020 reelection effort.
The vice president said military force required a clear objective and rejected the argument that violence should continue until it produced an undefined political result.
You can’t just say, “We’re going to bomb until something good happens.” That never works. The United States has tried that before.
Vance described the effort against his negotiations as a “very discreet, extremely well funded campaign”. He said people paid by a former Trump campaign official who was himself funded by elements of the Israeli government had attacked him “viciously” for pursuing the president’s diplomatic objective. They posted against him, briefed reporters and accused him of taking instructions from Qatar or conservative broadcaster Tucker Carlson.
The Time report, he said, revealed a “literal foreign influence campaign” funded to “tank” the agreement he had pursued. His response to those involved was: “Go to hell.”
The vice president was careful to distinguish between legitimate disagreement and what he regarded as an attempt to redirect American policy through undisclosed or obscured pressure. Foreign governments routinely seek influence in Washington, he noted, but the decisive question was whether American politicians and media figures allowed that influence to determine their judgement.
What bothers me is actually when Americans allow, meaning American leadership allows, that influence to affect their judgement and to affect what they are advocating for.
Vance also emphasised that his criticism was not a rejection of Israel as such. He spoke warmly of Israel’s ambassador to Washington and described several Israeli officials as friends. His argument was rooted in competing national priorities: Israeli officials are expected to put Israel first, he said, just as he is obliged to put the United States first.
That framing matters. Vance remains a senior figure in a hard right administration and has not become an advocate of Palestinian liberation. His intervention instead reflects the resurgence of an isolationist current in Republican politics, one which is hostile to open ended wars and suspicious of foreign pressure on American decision making. Yet the political significance is difficult to overstate. A serving Republican vice president was publicly accusing elements of the Israeli government of financing a campaign to manipulate US opinion and frustrate a policy set by the president.
Mamdani calls Netanyahu a war criminal
The rupture is not confined to the Republican right. In New York, Mayor Zohran Mamdani has articulated a far more direct moral and legal challenge to Israel and to the American government that arms it.
In a video address issued in July 2026, before an expected visit by Benjamin Netanyahu, Mamdani called the Israeli prime minister a war criminal and the architect of genocide. He linked the destruction of Gaza to American weapons, explained that New York City had no independent authority to execute the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant, and called on the federal government to join the court and act.
His speech, in full, was:
Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal, the architect of a horrific genocide against the Palestinian people. He is responsible for the killing of more than 73,000 people, for the maiming of tens of thousands of children as those who survive undergo amputation without anaesthesia, for the targeting of neonatal hospitals and maternity care centres, denying newborns even the chance to live, for the countless people he starved as he blocked food and humanitarian aid from reaching them, for the gunning down of hundreds of aid workers and journalists, and just last month the UN confirmed that Palestinian children continue to be deliberately targeted and killed by Israeli armed forces more than eight months after the so called ceasefire.
The list goes on and on, all as we as Americans pay for the bombs that do the killing.
There is a reason the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for his arrest.
As human beings, we have spent generations building a shared understanding that there are crimes so great they offend all of humanity. Anyone with their eyes, with their heart, with their conscience should recognise the devastation he has wrought and understand that he belongs before a court of law.
As I’ve said, I agree with the ICC that Benjamin Netanyahu should be arrested and tried for his crimes, as I do for anyone else charged by the ICC.
My administration has reviewed every avenue available under applicable law to determine whether New York City could execute the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant if Benjamin Netanyahu came here.
It is clear that we do not have the independent legal authority to enforce this warrant. The federal government, however, does. And I call on them to join the ICC and execute this warrant.
And I want to be equally clear. Benjamin Netanyahu is not welcome in New York City. Nor is any other war criminal at large.
While we cannot end the genocide on our own, we can decide whether our silence will become another weapon, and we can examine every tool we have to defend the humanity and dignity of all people.
That is my commitment to you.
The legal premise of Mamdani’s appeal is contested. The United States is not a member of the ICC, federal law sharply restricts cooperation with the court, and Netanyahu could have additional protection while attending United Nations proceedings. Trump has said Netanyahu will not be arrested on American soil. Mamdani’s address was therefore less an operational arrest plan than a public challenge to Washington: the mayor of the country’s largest city was demanding accountability from a federal government that was sanctioning the court.
The speech demonstrated how far the boundaries of American debate have moved. A prominent elected official was not merely calling for a ceasefire or criticising individual Israeli operations. He was describing the destruction of Gaza as genocide, calling the leader of a close American ally a war criminal, identifying American financing as part of the machinery of killing and arguing that silence could become another weapon.
The Church of England breaks its silence
The change is not confined to elected politics. It has reached the Church of England, an institution that has spent decades treating Israel and Palestine with extreme caution because of Christianity’s history of anti-Jewish persecution and the Church’s commitment to relations with British Jewish communities.
In July 2026, the Church’s General Synod voted overwhelmingly to stand in solidarity with Palestinian Christians and to hear their testimony about occupation, displacement and the destruction of Gaza. The decision placed the experience of Palestinians inside the deliberations of England’s established church and linked their evidence to the way the Church invests its own money.
The vote centred on declarations produced by Kairos Palestine, an ecumenical movement of Palestinian Christians. Its first document, published in 2009, described the occupation as a sin and called on churches around the world to support nonviolent resistance and a just peace. Its 2025 successor, Kairos Palestine II: A Moment of Truth: Faith in a Time of Genocide, was written amid the devastation of Gaza and accelerating Israeli settlement and military violence in the West Bank. It describes Israel’s conduct in the language of genocide, ethnic cleansing, apartheid and settler colonialism.
The wording of the motion mattered because the Church did not formally endorse every assertion in Kairos II. The original proposal asked the Synod to “receive” the declarations, but members amended that term to “hear”, identifying them as heartfelt expressions of Palestinian Christian experience.
The Reverend Fadi Diab, the Anglican priest from Ramallah who helped write Kairos II, emphasised the distinction:
The Church did not endorse Kairos II. The Church did not accept or receive Kairos II, but it chose to hear the voices of Palestinian Christians who wrote Kairos II in light of the genocidal aggression against the Palestinian people.
Even with that qualification, the scale of support was striking. The amended motion passed in all three houses of the Synod. Bishops backed it by 25 votes to none, with five abstentions; clergy supported it by 115 votes to 20, with 30 abstentions; and lay members approved it by 113 votes to 27, with 35 abstentions. This was not a narrow resolution pushed through by one faction. It commanded majorities across the Church’s leadership, priesthood and ordinary membership.
The resolution went beyond listening. It committed the Church to solidarity with Palestinians engaged in nonviolent resistance to the occupation, encouraged dioceses and parishes to study the Kairos documents, and called for advocacy and practical support for churches serving people in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory.
It also asked Church investors to review their policies in light of the International Court of Justice’s July 2024 advisory opinion on the illegality of Israel’s continued occupation. The Church Commissioners and the Church of England Pensions Board were asked to report on their progress, while the wider Church was urged to develop guidance on the human rights risks attached to occupied territories and conflict.
That provision gives the motion potential material consequences. The Church cannot order the British government to sanction Israel, but it controls and influences substantial investments. A human rights review can lead to engagement with companies, exclusions from portfolios and pressure on businesses linked to settlements, military supply chains or the occupation. The Synod also called on the government to work urgently for a lasting peace that protects the rights and dignity of everyone in the region.
Archbishop of Canterbury Sarah Mullally supported the motion after visiting Palestinian communities in the occupied West Bank. In her address to the Synod, she described unprecedented settlement expansion, the forced removal of Palestinians from their land and Christian villages such as Taybeh approaching disappearance.
Her conclusion was stark: “Palestine is disappearing.” The danger facing its shrinking Christian population, she said, was existential and required “a new and active solidarity”.
Mullally also confronted the Church’s historic responsibility for antisemitism, insisting that Christians remain vigilant against anti-Jewish hatred. Yet she rejected the idea that this history required the Church to close its ears to Palestinians, explaining that hearing their lived experience did not require agreement with every part of the documents.
For Diab, the debate concerned the survival of one of the world’s oldest Christian communities. He said churches, institutions, cemeteries and Christian villages had come under attack or pressure, while Christian leaders in Jerusalem faced growing intimidation. People were leaving because they no longer believed they could safely remain.
Christians are facing existential threats and are in danger of disappearing from the Holy Land. This needs to stop.
His challenge to churches was practical as well as theological. They should pressure their governments, he said, and governments should in turn press Israel to comply with international law and recognise Palestinian rights to freedom, equality, dignity and self determination.
The vote produced a forceful backlash. Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, the Board of Deputies of British Jews and leaders of Progressive Judaism warned that Kairos II used extreme language, misrepresented Zionism and risked damaging decades of Christian and Jewish dialogue. The Board of Deputies argued that the document erased Jewish history and attachment to the land, propagated antisemitic ideas and presented a one sided account that would deepen conflict rather than advance peace. It urged the Church to reject the document rather than give it institutional legitimacy.
Those concerns cannot simply be dismissed, particularly given Christianity’s long history of antisemitic teaching and violence. The Synod’s answer was to include an explicit rejection of antisemitism and anti-Muslim hostility, acknowledge the Church’s own historic culpability and reaffirm dialogue with Jewish and Muslim communities. It rejected the proposition that protecting those relationships required Palestinian Christians to be excluded from the conversation.
Diab’s response to those who sought to stop the debate was equally direct:
These voices that roar against the Church of England for its historic decision should themselves hear the voices of the victims on the ground, rather than silencing and shunning the oppressed, the colonised and the occupied.
The vote did not amount to the Church of England repudiating Jewish people, abandoning interfaith dialogue or endorsing every sentence of Kairos II. It did mark a weakening of the institutional deference that has frequently allowed accusations of antisemitism to halt discussion of Palestinian dispossession before Palestinian evidence could even be heard.
The significance is difficult to overstate. The Church of England is not a revolutionary organisation and its governing bodies are rarely at the leading edge of political protest. When such an institution votes across bishops, clergy and laity to hear Palestinians describe genocide and settler colonialism, then connects that testimony to the stewardship of Church investments, it shows how far the centre of moral opinion has moved.
Israel can contest the terminology, condemn the document and mobilise allies against the decision. It cannot easily answer Palestinian Christians who describe emptying congregations, threatened villages and a homeland disappearing around them. The global outrage over Gaza is no longer confined to marches and encampments. It is entering the governing chambers of institutions that once preferred silence.
Public support collapses as Gaza remains visible
The same shift is measurable across the United States. A Pew Research Center survey conducted in March 2026 found that 60 percent of American adults held an unfavourable view of Israel, while only 37 percent viewed it favourably.
That represents a net rating of minus 23 points. In 2022, before the Gaza war, favourable opinion had led by 13 points. The movement therefore amounts to a 36 point reversal in four years. The proportion holding a very unfavourable opinion had nearly tripled, from 10 percent in 2022 to 28 percent in 2026.
The partisan figures reveal a fracture that now crosses the traditional boundaries of American politics. Eighty percent of Democrats and Democratic leaning voters viewed Israel unfavourably, up from 53 percent in 2022. Republicans remained more supportive overall, with 58 percent favourable and 41 percent unfavourable, but the apparent stability concealed a generational break: 57 percent of Republicans aged between 18 and 49 viewed Israel negatively.
The erosion also reaches constituencies Israel has long regarded as anchors of American support. Pew found favourable views among Jewish Americans had fallen from 73 percent in 2025 to 64 percent in 2026. Among white evangelical Protestants, favourable opinion fell from 72 to 65 percent. Israel still retained majorities in both groups, but the direction of travel was unmistakable.
A Quinnipiac University poll in August 2025 found that 50 percent of registered voters believed Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, while 35 percent disagreed. Sixty percent opposed sending additional American military aid for the war, with 32 percent in favour. For the first time in the poll’s long running series, sympathy for Palestinians narrowly exceeded sympathy for Israelis.
In Britain, a July 2026 YouGov poll commissioned by the Council for Arab British Understanding and Medical Aid for Palestinians found that 50 percent believed Israel’s actions in Gaza constituted genocide, while 17 percent disagreed. The same survey found majorities in favour of suspending arms exports and imposing several forms of economic pressure.
These opinions developed despite the diplomatic, political and media support Israel received from Western governments. They also developed alongside a sustained Israeli argument that hostility to the country was primarily the result of misinformation, antisemitism or hostile social media algorithms.
Netanyahu has blamed social media for the deterioration, saying the decline in support “correlates almost 100 percent with the geometric rise of social media”. There is a limited truth within that complaint: social media allowed images, testimony and documentation from Gaza to reach millions of people without passing through the traditional filters of broadcasters, editors and government spokespeople. The platforms did not create the underlying events; they exposed them.
Public opinion has shifted because Gaza transformed Israel from an abstract ally discussed through official talking points into a state whose conduct could be witnessed every day on a mobile phone. The evidence did not reach everyone and it did not persuade everyone, but it reached enough people to rupture a consensus that had held for generations.
Trump turns sanctions law against Gaza accountability
The struggle over opinion is only one side of the response to Israel’s growing isolation. Under Donald Trump, the United States government has constructed a sanctions regime that can make certain forms of organised opposition to Israel’s conduct legally hazardous.
It is important to describe the development precisely. Trump has not secured an act of Congress making it illegal to call Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide, nor has he imposed a general ban on criticism of Israel. The mechanism is narrower, but potentially far reaching: an executive order using existing emergency powers to punish the International Criminal Court and people or organisations that assist its work.
On 6 February 2025, Trump signed Executive Order 14203, declaring that ICC investigations concerning Americans and Israelis constituted an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to US national security and foreign policy. The order invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, known as IEEPA, to block the property of designated ICC officials and people deemed to have materially assisted them. It also authorised entry restrictions against designated individuals and certain family members.
The administration presented the order as a defence of American and Israeli sovereignty. Neither country is a party to the Rome Statute, which established the court, and Trump described the ICC warrants for Netanyahu and former Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant as baseless. The ICC’s position is that it has jurisdiction over crimes allegedly committed in occupied Palestinian territory because Palestine has joined the court. Netanyahu and Gallant reject the allegations, while Israel disputes the court’s jurisdiction.
The order’s reach extends beyond the people formally placed on the sanctions list. Treasury regulations implementing it prohibit Americans from providing funds, goods or services to blocked people and entities, and from receiving such services from them, unless the government issues a licence or an exemption applies.
The term “services” is not defined in the executive order and is not exhaustively explained in the regulations. Under IEEPA’s penalty provision, a person who wilfully violates a sanctions rule can face a fine of up to $1 million and as many as 20 years in prison. Civil penalties can also be imposed without a criminal conviction.
Trump’s administration has used this framework against ICC prosecutors and judges, the United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, and the Palestinian human rights organisations Al Haq, Al Mezan and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights. Those organisations collect testimony, preserve evidence and document alleged crimes in Gaza and the West Bank. Albanese has repeatedly described the assault on Gaza as genocidal and urged international legal action against those responsible.
The result, according to two American advocacy groups, is a system of indirect censorship backed by the threat of financial ruin and imprisonment. On 15 July 2026, Democracy for the Arab World Now, known as DAWN, and the Taxpayer Alliance Against Genocide filed a federal lawsuit challenging the sanctions regime.
The groups argue that the order violates the First Amendment rights of Americans who wish to share evidence, submit legal arguments to the ICC, host events with sanctioned speakers, publish their writing or work with Palestinian organisations on human rights campaigns. The danger arises from the possibility that any of those activities could be classified as providing a service.
DAWN executive director Omar Shakir explained the effect in an interview with The Electronic Intifada:
There is no plain language around what constitutes a service. The US government has set out guidelines that suggest that it applies to conferring any sort of benefit on a beneficiary.
Advice to an ICC prosecutor, communication with witnesses and victims, an amicus brief, a research submission, a public meeting or coordinated advocacy could all potentially fall within that undefined category. Shakir said these were not marginal activities but the “bread and butter” of human rights work.
DAWN sent the ICC a 279 page submission in January 2025 asking prosecutors to investigate whether Joe Biden, Antony Blinken and Lloyd Austin aided and abetted crimes through American military support for Israel. The organisation says a similar filing concerning the Trump administration could now expose its American staff to punishment.
Albanese regularly requests material from civil society because she does not have a large independent research staff. The sanctioned Palestinian organisations possess evidence and local knowledge that American groups cannot reproduce from a distance. Sharing information with them, inviting one of their staff members to speak, publishing their analysis or coordinating a campaign could all be treated as a prohibited service.
Shakir said the uncertainty was producing extensive self censorship:
There are so many US organisations that are self censoring right now. Some of them are going even further. They won’t even do advocacy against the sanctions.
Some groups, he said, were afraid to share social media posts from sanctioned organisations or send emails containing work written by their staff. The uncertainty achieves much of the effect of a formal ban because organisations stop themselves before prosecutors ever have to test the limits of the order.
The Taxpayer Alliance Against Genocide had begun preparing a submission concerning Trump administration officials and senior members of Congress. Its researchers were gathering evidence about American supplied 2,000 pound bombs and the financing of militarised aid sites where Palestinians had been killed. The work stopped after the sanctions were imposed.
One of the alliance’s Palestinian founders said he had lost 49 relatives during the assault. Some, he said, were killed at aid sites of the kind his organisation wanted the ICC to investigate.
We’ve completely paused all of our work. It breaks my heart because my family members were amongst those killed at places like the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
He said American made and financed weapons had killed members of his family, yet the attempt to hold American officials accountable now carried its own threat of punishment. “The one way that we have to try and hold the US government accountable,” he said, was being torn apart by the same government.
DAWN and the Taxpayer Alliance asked the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control whether their planned work was lawful. They sought a licence and requested public guidance explaining what the word “service” covered. Asked what answer they received, Shakir replied: “Crickets.”
Their lawsuit argues that the sanctions violate the First Amendment protection of speech, association and the right to petition. It raises a Fifth Amendment challenge because people cannot conform their conduct to a rule whose central term remains undefined. It also invokes the Berman Amendment, through which Congress restricted the president’s power to use sanctions law against personal communications and the exchange of information.
Shakir summarised the case in human terms:
Americans should be able to campaign for accountability without risking jail time.
The administration denies that the policy is an attack on legitimate expression. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said the ICC presents an intolerable threat to US sovereignty and has defended sanctions as protection against what the government calls politically motivated prosecutions of citizens from democratic countries with functioning courts.
Critics answer that territorial jurisdiction does not depend on the nationality of the accused. Russia is not an ICC member, but the court issued a warrant for Vladimir Putin over alleged crimes committed in Ukraine, which accepted its jurisdiction. Palestine’s accession to the Rome Statute provides the asserted jurisdictional basis for alleged Israeli crimes in Palestinian territory. The further question is whether domestic investigations are genuine and sufficient, since the ICC is intended to act only when national authorities are unwilling or unable to prosecute.
No American is known to have been charged merely for criticising Israel or describing Gaza as genocide. The dispute concerns the boundary between speech and a prohibited service. When research, evidence gathering, publication or advocacy involves a person or organisation on the sanctions list, the possibility of 20 years in prison can silence people without a single prosecution.
Albanese’s separate legal challenge has already exposed that constitutional tension. In May 2026, a federal judge granted a preliminary injunction protecting her American husband and daughter from penalties for ordinary contact and support, concluding that they were likely to show the sanctions burdened speech because of its message. A federal appeals court later stayed that injunction while the government appealed, reinstating the restrictions for the time being. The underlying questions remain unresolved.
The clash between Mamdani and Trump could hardly be clearer. The mayor of New York publicly asks that Netanyahu be brought before the ICC; the president uses emergency economic powers against the court, its officials, its expert supporters and Palestinian organisations capable of supplying evidence. One elected official calls silence a weapon. The other administration makes organised accountability work dangerous.
Set beside Israel’s spending on advertisements, influencers and artificial intelligence, the sanctions regime creates a stark asymmetry. One side finances the mass production of favourable speech, while the other can encounter frozen assets, civil penalties or prison when it works with designated bodies to turn testimony from Gaza into a legal case.
The machinery built to reverse the backlash
The political and moral rupture helps explain the urgency behind Israel’s influence operation. Its task is no longer simply to defend a longstanding alliance. It is to reverse conclusions that millions of people, elected officials, churches and human rights bodies have already reached after watching Gaza.
The Parscale network
According to Time, Parscale secured an Israeli government contract worth approximately $1.5 million a month. His interconnected media and public relations companies were expected to produce 100 original pieces of content each month, with at least 80 percent directed at Generation Z audiences across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and podcasts. The Wall Street Journal described the artificial intelligence messaging as part of a broader contract worth more than $45 million.
The operation promised at least 50 million digital impressions every month and was described by one Israeli Foreign Ministry official quoted by the magazine as an attempt to prevent young conservatives from turning against Israel. Influencers were allegedly supplied with coordinated language through private communications, while similar posts sometimes appeared at roughly the same time.
The article raised questions about the relationship between the Israeli contract and Influenceable, a Parscale backed company which pays creators to distribute online content. Time said another Influenceable campaign had offered creators a base payment of $2,250, with additional compensation linked to views, allowing a payment of up to $4,250 for a single post.
That figure does not establish that Israeli government money was used to pay influencers under the contract. Parscale has firmly denied doing so, arguing that any creator directly funded by a foreign government would face disclosure requirements under the US Foreign Agents Registration Act. He has also denied organising any attempt to sabotage Trump’s diplomacy with Iran.
Eyal Yakoby, a conservative commentator with more than 300,000 followers on X, acknowledged that he had been paid for work with Influenceable but said he had never been paid to express an opinion he did not already hold. The company similarly said that Yakoby had worked as a paid influencer but not on behalf of the Israeli government.
Parscale said the purpose of his campaign was to prevent Israel’s adversaries from driving a wedge between the country and Americans who had traditionally supported it. He described claims that every pro Israel commentator was part of a coordinated operation as absurd and maintained that conservative support for Israel existed independently of his work.
The distinctions are important. Payment by a company that also holds an Israeli government contract is not, by itself, proof that every message produced by that company or its contractors was commissioned by Israel. Nor does synchronised language automatically prove that every participant knew the source of a campaign’s funding. The reporting does, however, reveal an organised and heavily financed effort to shape the online environment in which American conservatives discuss Israel, Gaza and Iran.
It also reveals mounting frustration among the campaign’s sponsors. An Israeli official quoted anonymously by Time complained: “He was supposed to make things better. We have paid him lots of money. But what did he do with it? Things have only gotten worse.”
Conservative media becomes part of the battlefield
Parscale is not merely a digital consultant with access to influencers. He is also the chief strategy officer of Salem Media Group, one of the largest conservative broadcasting companies in the United States, with a network of radio programmes, podcasts, websites and political personalities.
The initial Israeli contract reportedly included the integration of narrative messaging into Salem properties and associated distribution channels. Salem and Parscale have said that hosts were not paid to adopt particular positions and that money from the contract was spent on advertising. The company said more than $500,000 had been used to purchase advertising across its network.
The arrangement nevertheless prompted criticism from Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist and now an influential far right broadcaster. “How is the second biggest conservative talk network run by a registered foreign agent?” he asked.
That question points to the central issue. Paid advertising by a foreign government can be legal when properly registered and disclosed. The concern arises when a broadcaster, consultant, influencer network and foreign client occupy overlapping parts of the same political ecosystem, making it difficult for audiences to distinguish sincerely held opinion, paid promotion, strategic amplification and government sponsored messaging.
The Wall Street Journal investigation reported that Israel had retained at least six firms for its American influence effort during the preceding year. Three dozen people, many with backgrounds in marketing, had registered as foreign agents for Israel. Nick Cleveland Stout, a researcher at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told the newspaper that Israel was on course to spend more than any other country on influence activity disclosed to the US federal government that year.
Other governments, including Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, have also spent heavily on lobbying, public relations and political influence in the United States. Israel is therefore not unique in trying to shape American policy or opinion. The scale, methods and timing of the current campaign are what make it exceptional, particularly because it is aimed at reversing a rapid collapse in public support while US weapons and diplomatic protection remain central to Israeli military power.
Trying to shape what artificial intelligence says
The Israeli strategy extends beyond persuading people who encounter an advertisement or social media post. Contractors have also promised to create websites, articles and online material intended to affect how artificial intelligence services characterise Israel and its wars.
This does not mean that a contractor can directly rewrite the internal rules or training data of ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini. Artificial intelligence companies control their own models, data pipelines and safeguards. The strategy is more indirect: flood the searchable web with favourable material, improve its prominence in search results and increase the likelihood that automated systems retrieving information from the internet will encounter and repeat it.
Such methods represent a new stage in state sponsored public diplomacy. Conventional propaganda attempts to persuade a reader. An operation aimed at the wider information environment seeks to influence the summaries, search results and automated answers that may later be presented to millions of users as neutral background information.
The risks are not theoretical. In May 2024, OpenAI announced that it had disrupted a covert influence operation linked to the Israeli political marketing company STOIC. The network, which OpenAI called Zero Zeno, used artificial intelligence to generate articles and comments for Instagram, Facebook, X and a collection of associated websites.
OpenAI said the operation had used its models to produce content more quickly and with fewer language errors, but found no evidence that the activity achieved substantial engagement. It ranked the campaign at no more than level two on a six point scale measuring whether an influence operation had broken into authentic communities.
The finding illustrates both the promise and the limitation of artificial intelligence as a propaganda tool. It can manufacture text, identities and apparent activity at extraordinary speed, but volume is not the same as credibility. A synthetic crowd can repeat a message thousands of times without persuading real people.
Fake Americans and the targeting of Congress
The STOIC operation was part of an earlier campaign that came to light in 2024. Reporting by The New York Times, Haaretz and other outlets said Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs had allocated about $2 million for an operation targeting American politicians and the wider public after 7 October 2023.
Hundreds of fabricated social media profiles posed as ordinary Americans, including Black citizens, Jewish students and supposed grassroots supporters of Israel. The accounts circulated pro Israel messages, praised Israeli military operations, attacked “radical Islam”, criticised student protests and urged US legislators to continue supporting Israel’s war.
Politico reported that at least 128 members of Congress were targeted. Roughly 600 fabricated profiles generated more than 2,000 coordinated comments each week, with prominent Democratic lawmakers and Black members of Congress among the principal targets.
Meta removed more than 500 Facebook accounts and 32 Instagram accounts connected to STOIC. Many posed as people living in the United States or Canada, although the network was operated from Israel. The Israeli Ministry of Diaspora Affairs denied involvement in the campaign.
The operation appears to have had limited direct reach, but its significance lies in the method. It did not merely promote the official position of the Israeli government under a recognisable state banner. It manufactured American identities and used them to simulate domestic political pressure, creating the appearance that legislators were hearing from concerned constituents rather than participants in a foreign influence operation.
The use of artificial amplification is not confined to overseas audiences. An Israeli Channel 12 investigation broadcast in January 2026 estimated that about half of politically active accounts in Israel were automated, a proportion the report said was comparable with global patterns. Many of the identified accounts rapidly amplified posts by Netanyahu and members of his governing coalition, attempting to trigger recommendation systems and manufacture the appearance of political momentum.
A different message for every audience
The wider campaign has been carefully divided by demographic and political identity. Young MAGA supporters receive one kind of messaging, evangelical Christians another, while liberal and progressive audiences are approached through cultural figures, identity politics and claims about Israel’s social values.
A company called Show Faith by Works filed documents under the Foreign Agents Registration Act describing a $3.2 million campaign aimed at Christian churches and colleges in California, Arizona, Nevada and Colorado. According to Responsible Statecraft’s examination of the filing, the company proposed geofencing major churches during worship and continuing to target attendees with advertising after they left.
The campaign estimated it could reach 3.8 million churchgoers. Its stated aim was to create “positive associations with the nation of Israel” while “linking the Palestinian population with extremist factions”. Proposed messaging asserted that Palestinians had elected Hamas, although Gaza’s last legislative election took place in 2006 and a large proportion of its present population was either too young to vote or not yet born.
The planning documents listed potential celebrity spokespeople, including actors Chris Pratt and Jon Voight, basketball star Stephen Curry and former American football player Tim Tebow. The company later said that none of those figures had been approached and that the list represented preliminary ideas rather than confirmed participants.
Another strand has sought to use Israel’s record on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights to appeal to socially liberal audiences. Critics describe this strategy as “pinkwashing”, arguing that the presentation of Israel as a haven for LGBTQ people is used to divert attention from the occupation and the destruction of Palestinian life.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Yoav Davis, founder of the @Jews_of_NY Instagram account and head of a marketing company contracted by Israel, had work that included calls with an “influencer management team” and the management of contracted talent. His account has also promoted Israel through LGBTQ themed content.
For queer Palestinians, the suggestion that Israeli social policy can excuse military conduct is particularly bitter. Palestinian LGBTQ people in Gaza have been killed, injured, bereaved, displaced and deprived of shelter, food and medical care alongside the rest of the population. Their testimony, including messages preserved by projects such as Queering the Map, challenges the idea that a state’s selective presentation of liberal values can be separated from the consequences of its bombs, siege and occupation.
Scrutiny is not antisemitism
Any examination of Israeli influence must make a distinction that is both morally and analytically essential. Israel is a state, its ministries are state institutions, and the contractors identified in registration documents and investigative reporting are specific companies and individuals. They do not represent Jewish people collectively.
Antisemitic conspiracy theories portray Jews as a hidden and unified force controlling governments, banks or the media. The documented activity described here is categorically different: named government departments sign contracts, companies register under American law, budgets are recorded, platforms identify coordinated networks and public officials contest the purpose and effect of particular campaigns.
Conflating those two things protects neither Jewish people nor democratic debate. It risks turning antisemitism into a shield against legitimate investigation while giving genuine antisemites an opportunity to distort evidence of state conduct into hatred of an entire people.
The correct response is precision. The actions of the Israeli government should be attributed to the Israeli government. The actions of Parscale, Salem Media, STOIC, Show Faith by Works or any influencer should be attributed only to those actors and supported by evidence. Disputed claims should be identified as disputed, and denials should be reported. That standard permits rigorous scrutiny without collective blame.
The story Israel cannot buy its way out of
Israel’s influence operation was designed to rebuild a political coalition. Instead, its exposure has revealed the depth of the coalition’s fracture and the desperation of a government attempting to solve a crisis of conduct as though it were merely a crisis of communication.
On the left, support for Israel has collapsed under the weight of Gaza. Among younger Americans, including younger Republicans and evangelicals, the old claims of shared values and automatic strategic alignment are losing force. Within the MAGA movement, the campaign has collided with a constituency that may be hostile to progressive politics but is also hostile to open ended wars, hidden foreign influence and the expectation that American lives and money should be committed indefinitely to another country’s objectives.
The breaks are appearing in language that would have been almost unimaginable within the political and religious establishment only a few years earlier. Vance tells participants in an Israeli funded influence operation to “go to hell”. Mamdani says Netanyahu is “not welcome in New York City” and calls American silence another weapon. The Archbishop of Canterbury warns that “Palestine is disappearing”. Palestinian Christians tell the Church of England that their continued presence in the Holy Land is under existential threat. American human rights lawyers ask the Trump administration what activities could send them to prison for 20 years and receive what Omar Shakir described in one word: “Crickets.”
None of those interventions should be collapsed into a single political programme. Vance continues to describe Israel as an ally and frames his objection through American nationalism. Mamdani takes a far more radical position on accountability but lacks the authority to execute an ICC warrant. The Church of England rejected antisemitism, preserved interfaith dialogue and deliberately declined to endorse every sentence of Kairos II. The organisations challenging Trump’s sanctions are pursuing constitutional rights in an American court, not asking that the court simply adopt their conclusions about Gaza.
Their convergence lies elsewhere. Each rejects the demand that Israel’s interests, explanations or pressure should automatically determine the boundaries of acceptable debate. Each insists, for different reasons, on the right to look at the evidence, identify responsibility and act without submitting to a state funded narrative.
Israel can continue to buy advertisements, retain consultants, seed websites, court influencers, geofence churches, create synthetic American identities and target carefully selected communities. It can pay for material designed to appear in search results and perhaps in answers produced by artificial intelligence. It may persuade some people, reinforce existing supporters and obscure particular facts for particular audiences. The money would not be spent if officials believed it had no effect.
What it cannot do is return the world to the information conditions that existed before Gaza was destroyed in public view. It cannot force Palestinian journalists to become unseen, make the testimony of doctors unheard or reverse the judgements of people who watched homes, universities, mosques, churches and hospitals reduced to rubble. It cannot restore the assumption that every accusation against an Israeli leader is unthinkable, every Palestinian witness is unreliable and every demand for accountability is beyond the political mainstream.
The campaign is also vulnerable to its own methods. Every disclosure of artificial intelligence texts, paid messaging, fake accounts or coordinated influencer content invites audiences to question apparently spontaneous support. Every attempt to suppress cooperation with investigators strengthens the suspicion that the evidence itself is feared. A campaign intended to rebuild trust can therefore deepen the distrust it was created to overcome.
One Israeli official’s complaint about the Parscale operation captured the failure: “Things have only gotten worse.” The reason is not simply poor execution, insufficient spending or the wrong choice of influencers. Israel’s standing has deteriorated because millions of people have concluded that the destruction of Gaza cannot be reconciled with the moral and legal claims made in Israel’s defence.
That is the story no communications contract has yet overcome. Israel is spending unprecedented sums to change what the world thinks about Gaza, while its most powerful ally uses sanctions to restrict some of the channels through which Gaza’s victims can reach investigators and courts. Yet the evidence has already travelled further than the campaign can contain. The global outrage is no longer outside the institutions of power, pleading to be heard. It is inside city halls, churches, political parties and courtrooms, changing the language those institutions use and the loyalties they are willing to question.
