One billion US dollars. This is a conservative estimate of the amount of money the Israeli government has spent on what it calls “public diplomacy” around the world in less than three years. It represents official Israeli government expenditure used in an attempt to influence the public in foreign countries.

The budget allocated for these purposes has skyrocketed since October 2023, when the conflict between Hamas and the Israeli military escalated, culminating in a genocide by Israel against the people of Gaza. Mass civilian casualties, the large-scale destruction of infrastructure, and a humanitarian crisis in Gaza were accompanied by plummeting levels of public support for Israel around the world. Israel’s rapid increase in funding for activities aimed at influencing people abroad represents an attempt to reverse this trend.

Israel’s influence campaigns have been conducted across a variety of arenas and in various forms. Many have involved misinformation or disinformation and were designed to remain covert, with some being uncovered long after they were launched.

In a previous article, GNV looked at how the Israeli government attempts to influence the public in Israel through military censorship of the media. This article looks at how the Israeli government tries to influence public opinion abroad.

Civilian Public Diplomacy Headquarters (Photo: Alonl0504 / Wikimedia Commons [CC BY 4.0])

From explanation to active persuasion

Actions by the Israeli government aimed at influencing public opinion in foreign countries are often referred to in Hebrew as hasbara, meaning “explanation.” Traditionally, the term has largely referred to communications by the Israeli government intended to justify its actions. For example, officials might claim that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) are a “moral” army that warns civilians before attacking, or that a hospital was bombed only because it was being used by Hamas fighters.

Even before the 2023 conflagration of violence, some voices questioned the effectiveness of such approaches. An article published by the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies (BESA Center) in 2021, for example, argued that Israel was failing to reach its potential in terms of “dynamic public diplomacy” and “sophisticated psychological warfare”. The article stated that government messaging “should focus on the jihadist characteristics of Hamas and Islamic Jihad in a way that connects those organizations to significant terrorist elements, such as al-Qaida and ISIS, against which the legitimacy of fighting is undisputed”.

The events following October 2023 made it far more difficult to justify Israel’s military operations in Gaza. For example, footage of dead civilians, starving children, bombed hospitals and schools, and entire residential areas reduced to rubble has been readily available to people around the world. The Israeli government’s own estimates show the indiscriminate nature of the assault on Gaza – as of May 2025, as many as 83% of people killed in Gaza were thought to be civilians.

Given the nationalistic support for Israel’s actions within Israel, combined with extensive media censorship and self-censorship, the majority of the Israeli population does not appear to have a problem with this state of affairs. A survey from August 2025 found that 76% of the Jewish public in Israel agreed with the notion that “there are no innocents in Gaza”. But such a perspective clearly does not hold much weight outside of Israel. This has led to a shift in (and a strengthening of) the means of persuasion used by the Israeli government abroad.

Ministry of Foreign Affairs building (Photo: Almog / Wikimedia Commons [Public domain])

Four days after the 2023 attacks by Hamas, the former Minister of Intelligence of Israel stated during a television interview that “our work is not public diplomacy; it is influence”. An opinion piece published by Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies in November 2023 appeared to concur, urging the Israeli government to shift from “explanation” to “proactive influence that shapes its own narrative line”.

Meanwhile, a leak to Drop Site News revealed that the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs had commissioned a US polling firm called Stagwell Global to study public opinion in Europe and the US in a bid to understand how to repair the damage to its image that it had lost since October 2023. It found that utilizing fear of “radical Islam” and “terrorism” in portraying Hamas was effective in increasing support for Israel among foreign audiences.

Advertisements, influencers and bots

In 2023, Israel quickly employed such messaging tactics. After the October attacks by Hamas, for example, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated that “Hamas is ISIS”. This was followed up by an extensive ad campaign paid for by the Israeli government directed at viewers on YouTube and X in Europe and the US that equated Hamas to the so-called Islamic State (ISIS).

The Israeli government has since made extensive use of ads in a variety of other contexts that are designed to promote its narratives abroad, often through the Israeli Government Advertising Agency (IGAA). One example of such advertising seen in 2024 involved the placing of ads on the Google search engine such that people searching for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) would be shown ads claiming that the Agency had links to Hamas.

Google search engine (Photo: Stock Catalog / Wikimedia Commons [CC BY 2.0])

The following year, the Israeli government signed a 45 million US dollar contract with Google for an ad campaign that included ads denying the existence of famine in Gaza, and ads linking pro-Palestine advocacy groups to extremist ideologies. It has spent large amounts of money on similar advertising on other platforms, including Meta and X.

Israel also attempts to use influencers on social media to promoting pro-Israeli perspectives and sentiments. In 2025, for example, it was revealed that the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs was providing payments for influencers and the production of their content. The campaign was coordinated by a firm called Bridges Partners under the oversight of the French PR firm Havas Media. Over the course of four months, and with a total budget of 900,000 USD, 14-18 influencers were each contracted to make a certain number of pro-Israel posts on social media. The government has also paid for influencers from abroad to tour Israel.

Beyond human influencers, the Israeli government has attempted to make use of automated bots to promote its message on social media. In a 2025 contract with the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, for example, Stagwell Global, through its affiliate SKDK, was tasked to “develop a bot-based program on various social media channels” that “‘floods the zone’ with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ pro-Israel message”. The contract was cut short in September 2025, and SKDK denied that it had done any bot-related work.

Training its own personnel to influence people abroad is another part of its information operations. It was reported in 2026 that the Israeli Ministry of Defence was providing training courses to its military personnel on influencing public consciousness in Israel and abroad. One part of the curriculum claimed to teach the “fundamentals of psychological warfare, propaganda, deception, legitimacy and public diplomacy, and segmentation of target populations with emphasis on foreign audiences”.

A meeting at Civilian Public Diplomacy Headquarters (Photo: Alonl0504 / Wikimedia Commons [CC BY 4.0])

Targeted campaigns

It appears that Israeli influence operations target not only the general public, but at times, specific individuals, most notably foreign lawmakers. In 2024, for example, it was reported that Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs paid for a campaign that used fake news websites and numerous fake social media accounts to covertly influence individual lawmakers in the US to support Israel’s military activities. A similar information operation was allegedly implemented in Canada. These campaigns were reportedly implemented by an Israeli political marketing firm called STOIC.

Additionally, an Israeli firm called BlackCore has been implicated in a campaign using fake social media accounts and deceptive websites to smear certain candidates in France’s 2026 municipal elections, although no definitive evidence of Israeli government involvement has emerged.

Another example of targeted influence was a 2025 campaign in which a firm called Show Faith by Works was contracted by the Israeli government to promote pro-Israel views among the Christian public in the US. Part of this contract involved paying pastors to produce certain content. Another part entailed “geofencing” the boundaries of major churches in four states in the US to deliver pro-Israeli and anti-Palestinian ads to church-goers. Geofencing in this case involved automatically sending ads to all mobile devices that were identified as having entered or left a fixed geographical area around the church.

The Israeli government also worked to bring Christian leaders to Israel. Most notably, in 2025, Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs facilitated a visit to Israel by 1,000 evangelical pastors.

US-Israeli meeting on public diplomacy (Photo: US Embassy Jerusalem / Flickr [CC BY 2.0])

Influencing AI

Israel’s recent attempts at persuasion have extended to the realm of artificial intelligence (AI). In 2026, a website calling itself the Hanover Institute for Public Policy appeared online. Styled in the form of a think tank, the website contained more than 100 anonymous articles. Both the content of the website, and the way in which it was structured made it clear that the website was designed to facilitate the appearance of Israeli narratives in AI responses to questions about Israel and Palestine. The articles, formatted in question form, appeared to be AI generated, and the website included copious amounts of information in file formats designed to be read by AI bots.

It was revealed that the site was created by a US marketing firm called Piro, which had been subcontracted by Havas Media, with funding from the IGAA.

Other attempts at influence via AI have also been identified. In July 2026, Drop Site News reported that former Donald Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale, who is officially registered in the US as a foreign agent on behalf of Israel, had established ten websites explicitly designed to influence the output of AI queries. Created by his firm Clock Tower X under a contract with the Israeli government, these websites include a fact-checking styled website giving “fact checks” based on Israeli government narratives, and a website dedicated to sharing stories, data, and eyewitness containing claims regarding Israel’s efforts to protect civilians and its moral values.

Gaza after being bombed, 2025 (Photo: Zyanhayato / Wikimedia Commons [CC0 1.0])

The broader influence ecosystem

The examples above are just part of what is known about Israeli government influence operations. In addition to such operations, some influence campaigns are run by public-private partnerships involving both Israeli government and private donor funding. One such example is the partnership known as Voices of Israel. Groups linked to this campaign have, among other activities, advocated for social media platforms to suppress pro-Palestinian content.

There are also substantial amounts of coordinated private funding used in attempts to steer public opinion in a pro-Israel direction and, often, influence election outcomes in Western and other countries. In the US, the most powerful actor in this regard is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). In European countries, the European Leadership Network (ELNET) is particularly active. In some cases, large corporations and even wealthy individuals also work on their own accord to influence public opinion.

There is no doubt that the Israeli government and its allies have made massive investments in an effort to win over public opinion around the world, particularly in Western countries. But can any amount of money lead people around the world to forget the genocide they have witnessed?

Writer: Virgil Hawkins