How much is your support for Israel worth? Try $1 billion. — SkimNews
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- Israel has spent over $1 billion on global 'hasbara' since Oct. 7 — covering TV appearances, social media campaigns, chatbot training, and other influence efforts — with the public diplomacy budget quadrupling in the past year alone.
- Israel has shifted from relying on sympathetic American lobbying groups like AIPAC to directly hiring U.S. contractors and firms that must register as foreign agents under FARA, a transition Quincy Institute researcher Nick Cleveland-Stout says signals 'increasing desperation.'
- Brad Parscale, Trump's former campaign manager, holds three of Israel's largest contracts, running mass texting campaigns on behalf of fake 'peace' groups like 'Allies for Peace.'
- Targeted Communications Global has spent nearly $10 million running ads on X, the Daily Caller, and Breitbart, targeting right-leaning American audiences.
- The Israeli government is paying for 'LLM poisoning' — building pro-Israel websites designed to feed AI chatbots (including ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok) with framing that turns events like the IDF's killing of 5-year-old Hind Rajab into a 'he-said, she-said' story rather than a factual account.
- Nick Cleveland-Stout, a Quincy Institute Research Fellow, presented these findings on the 'Always at War' podcast, producing what the episode calls 'the most-definitive accounting yet' of Israel's new U.S. influence strategy.
Why it matters: Israel's pivot from AIPAC-style indirect lobbying to FARA-disclosed direct influence campaigns — including AI chatbot manipulation and right-wing ad buys — makes the spending transparent in ways it wasn't before, exposing not just the $1B+ price tag but the specific contractors and the deliberate framing of events like Hind Rajab's killing as contested rather than factual.
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