‘Things have only gotten worse’: Israel fumes as millions fail to stop collapse in US support

Israeli officials are reportedly furious that a $1.5 million-a-month influence campaign led by Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, Brad Parscale, has failed to halt the collapse in support for Israel among young US conservatives.

Despite millions of dollars spent targeting the MAGA base, shaping social media narratives and influencing artificial intelligence platforms, polling shows that attitudes towards Israel have continued to deteriorate.

The operation aimed to prevent young conservatives from turning against Israel, according to an investigation published by TIME. Publicly presented as a campaign to combat anti-Semitism, its wider strategic purpose was to preserve support for Israel among a section of the US right increasingly critical of Israel and Washington’s involvement in Israel’s regional wars.

Foreign Agents Registration Act filings show that global advertising agency Havas hired Parscale’s firm, Clock Tower X, in September 2025 to conduct the digital campaign on behalf of Israel. The agreement required the firm to produce 100 original pieces of content each month, with at least 80 per cent directed at Generation Z audiences through TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and podcasts.

In April that Israel had already paid Parscale’s firm $9 million and renewed its contract. The campaign included digital advertising and text-message outreach, alongside attempts to ensure that material favourable to Israel ranks prominently in the online sources used by artificial intelligence systems.

Three people familiar with the campaign said conservative influencers received suggested wording through private group chats and were compensated according to the reach and engagement generated by their posts. Clock Tower X describes its operation as an “influencer ecosystem” capable of amplifying narratives through apparently independent and trusted voices.

It remains unclear how much creators received specifically for work connected to Israel. TIME reviewed messages from another Influenceable campaign which offered a base payment of $2,250 and additional payments based on views, allowing participants to earn up to $4,250 for a single post.

One conservative influencer associated with Parscale’s network was Eyal Yakoby, who has a large following on X and has testified before Congress about alleged anti-Semitism on university campuses. Influenceable confirmed that Yakoby had worked as a paid influencer on several Israel-related campaigns, but insisted that he had not received Israeli government money.

The campaign also created websites including PaxPoint.org and FactSignal.org, which TIME said appeared to be designed primarily to influence material gathered and synthesised by artificial intelligence systems rather than to attract ordinary readers.

Despite the scale of the spending, Israeli officials appear dissatisfied with the results. An Israeli Foreign Ministry official familiar with the arrangement told TIME: “We are pissed at Brad Parscale. 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.”

Polling supports the official’s assessment that Israel has failed to reverse the decline in public support. Pew Research Center found in April that 60 per cent of Americans viewed Israel unfavourably, compared with 53 per cent in 2025 and 42 per cent in 2022. Among Republicans aged between 18 and 49, 57 per cent held an unfavourable opinion, up from 50 per cent a year earlier.

The campaign has also triggered concern in Washington. Following a US-Iran ceasefire, Trump administration officials noticed MAGA influencers publishing similar posts criticising the agreement and accusing the president of surrendering before eliminating Iran’s nuclear programme.

Officials reportedly became concerned that the conservative media network Israel had hired Parscale to mobilise was circulating arguments which undermined Trump’s attempt to end the war as the objectives of the US president and Netanyahu began to diverge.

A senior US intelligence official described the possibility of American influencers receiving foreign money and then seeking to change the president’s position as “a very, very dangerous thing”. The official said the effort could not be dismissed as inconsequential because it targeted Trump’s own political base rather than the general electorate.