{"id":102964,"date":"2026-05-07T21:22:12","date_gmt":"2026-05-07T21:22:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/102964\/"},"modified":"2026-05-07T21:22:12","modified_gmt":"2026-05-07T21:22:12","slug":"israel-just-quadrupled-its-pr-budget-to-730m-experts-say-it-wont-work-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/102964\/","title":{"rendered":"Israel Just Quadrupled Its PR Budget to $730M. Experts Say It Won\u2019t Work."},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Pastor Mike Evans of the Friends of Zion Heritage Center speaks to more than 1,000 Christian influencers on a delegation organized by his group and the Israeli Foreign Ministry, Dec. 3, 2025. (Photo credit: Amir Levy\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n

Asaf Elia-Shalev | JTA<\/p>\n

Israel is betting nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars that it can talk its way out of a reputation crisis.<\/p>\n

Lawmakers in Jerusalem approved a 2026 national budget at the end of March that includes roughly $730 million for public diplomacy \u2014 the broad category known in Hebrew as hasbara \u2014 more than four times the $150 million they allocated the year before. That earlier sum was itself about\u00a020 times what Israel had spent on such efforts before the war<\/a>\u00a0in Gaza broke out in 2023.<\/p>\n

The unprecedented expenditure comes as survey after survey show declining support for Israel in the United States, its most important ally. A Pew Research Center poll\u00a0released last month found 60% of Americans<\/a>\u00a0now view Israel unfavorably, up seven points in a single year, with only 37% viewing it favorably.<\/p>\n

Most striking for a country long accustomed to bipartisan American support: 57% of Republicans under 50 hold negative views of Israel. Support has cratered among the religiously unaffiliated, Black Protestants and Catholics. Among American Jews, support has slipped below two-thirds.<\/p>\n

On social media, the Hebrew word \u201chasbara\u201d has become a dismissive shorthand for pro-Israel advocacy, indicating how widely known Israel\u2019s uphill efforts to shape its image have become.<\/p>\n

Congress is increasingly reflecting this drop in public support. Last month, 40 of 47 Senate Democrats voted to block a $295 million sale of Caterpillar bulldozers to Israel, and 36 voted to block a sale of 1,000-pound bombs, representing the strongest congressional rebuke of U.S. military aid to Israel on record.<\/p>\n

Israel\u2019s foreign minister, Gideon Sa\u2019ar, says the country is engaged in a global war for hearts and minds and it must spend accordingly.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had a major breakthrough this year, but we must as a country invest much much more,\u201d Sa\u2019ar said in December as the government entered budget deliberations. \u201cIt should be like investing in jets, bombs and missile interceptors. In the face of what\u2019s arrayed against us and what\u2019s invested against us, it\u2019s far from enough. This is an existential issue.\u201d<\/p>\n

Alongside the budget, Sa\u2019ar won approval for a dedicated public diplomacy unit inside the Foreign Ministry, headed by a director equivalent in rank to the ministry\u2019s top political official \u2014 a structural consolidation meant to end years of scattered hasbara work across rival ministries.<\/p>\n

Public filings, Knesset testimony and Israeli business reporting show where a portion of the 2025 allocation went.<\/p>\n

A\u00a0$50 million international social-media ad buy<\/a>\u00a0was split across Google, YouTube, X and Outbrain. Roughly $40 million went to\u00a0hosting 400 foreign delegations<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 lawmakers, pastors, influencers, university presidents. A \u201cmedia war room\u201d was erected to monitor 250 outlets and 10,000 daily Israel-related items.<\/p>\n

The Foreign Ministry also signed a $1.5-million-a-month contract with former Trump campaign strategist Brad Parscale\u2019s firm to\u00a0deploy AI tools against antisemitism online<\/a>, a $4.1 million campaign\u00a0aimed at evangelical churches<\/a>,\u00a0and the \u201cEsther Project,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0a paid influencer network running up to $900,000 through a PR firm called Bridges Partners.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa\u2019ar holds up a copy of The New York Times as he speaks during a United Nations Security Council meeting at the United Nations headquarters on in New York City on August 5, 2025. (Photo credit: Michael M. Santiago\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n

The Israeli Foreign Ministry did not respond to repeated requests for interviews and comment.<\/p>\n

Defending the approach, Consul General Israel Bachar, Jerusalem\u2019s top diplomat in Los Angeles since 2023, said in an interview that most of the money so far had gone into social media and delegations. His post oversees seven Western states and one of the largest Israeli expatriate populations in the world.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe flew a lot of delegations to the country \u2014 whether it\u2019s pastors, whether it\u2019s politicians, universities,\u201d Bachar said. \u201cEveryone who returns from the country understands better and is more supportive. But you have to fly out a lot of people.\u201d<\/p>\n

A veteran Israeli political strategist before his consular appointment, Bachar argued the anti-Israel shift in the United States is not primarily a messaging failure. He pointed instead to \u201csociological changes in America that have nothing to do with us\u201d that are \u201cbeing used against us.\u201d<\/p>\n

He called the situation a complex problem with \u201cno silver bullet,\u201d and said he favors additional spending on what he called \u201cproductions\u201d in the United States \u2014 sitcoms, documentaries, feature films that touch on Israeli themes \u2014 alongside the ad buys and influencer work.<\/p>\n

Ask the people who study public diplomacy for a living whether any of this will work, and the answer is, overwhelmingly, skeptical.<\/p>\n

Their central objection is that no amount of messaging can outrun entrenched rejection by its target audiences of Israel\u2019s armed response to conflicts with its neighbors.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy position is that history shows all the money in the world won\u2019t help if the policy is wrong,\u201d said Nicholas Cull, a professor of communication at the University of Southern California and one of the founders of the study of public diplomacy. \u201cThe U.S. discovered that in Vietnam when its own Cold War public diplomacy budget peaked.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cull coined the term \u201creputational security\u201d to describe the argument Sa\u2019ar is implicitly making \u2014 that a country\u2019s standing is itself a strategic asset worth serious investment.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt means protecting the country both by accentuating positive images and by eliminating negative realities,\u201d Cull said. \u201cI suspect that the government of Israel will be unable to sell its solutions to the world when so many of its own people dispute the validity of those solutions, and where the domestic consensus is wide of the international understanding of realities on the ground.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Pro-Palestinian protesters march near the United Nations as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses the U.N. General Assembly in New York City, Sept. 26, 2025. (Photo credit: Spencer Platt\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n

The polling tells a similar story, according to a scholar who has been tracking it longer than almost anyone else.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere has been a paradigmatic shift that has taken place in America about Israel,\u201d said Shibley Telhami, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, who has surveyed American and Arab attitudes toward Israel for decades. \u201cI have been tracing shifts, particularly among Democrats, for a decade and a half. I have never seen a shift like the one we\u2019ve seen.\u201d<\/p>\n

Born in Israel to an Arab family, Telhami was long a two-state advocate operating within the American foreign policy mainstream before moving considerably leftward in recent years.<\/p>\n

He described a new \u201cGaza generation\u201d \u2014 a majority of young Americans who, his polling shows, now see Israel as committing genocide and who see the United States as implicated in it.<\/p>\n

Telhami said the moment reminded him of a previous episode. He served on the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy in 2005, when Washington tried to spend its way out of the reputational damage of the Iraq War with campaigns aimed at Muslim audiences.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur conclusion was, it\u2019s the policy, stupid,\u201d he said. \u201cYes, you can do a lot with public diplomacy, and there are strategies that could help on the margins. But they\u2019re only going to affect a small percentage, because the bulk of the impressions on issues that people care about are shaped by the actual policies, not how well you sell those policies.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many Israelis believe the country has simply never told its story well enough, and that with enough money and the right platforms, it can. But the conventional wisdom that Israel has not been active on the frontiers of public diplomacy simply isn\u2019t true, according to Ilan Manor, a senior lecturer at Ben-Gurion University who has long studied the Foreign Ministry\u2019s online presence.<\/p>\n

Israel was one of the first countries in the world to build a global digital-diplomacy operation, Manor said. Before Oct. 7, he said, its accounts reached roughly a billion people, a scale rivaled only by the United States.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe problem is not that we lack infrastructure. The problem is not that we lack skill,\u201d Manor said. \u201cThe problem is that people don\u2019t believe the state anymore. And that\u2019s a much, much deeper problem that no amount of money is going to repair.\u201d<\/p>\n

He calls it a credibility gap, borrowing the term American reporters used for Lyndon Johnson\u2019s Vietnam-era statements. \u201cIf you\u2019re not a credible spokesperson, if you\u2019re not a credible state, it doesn\u2019t matter how good your message is,\u201d Manor said. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t matter how viral it might get. It doesn\u2019t matter how many likes you get.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Delegates walk out as Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu prepares to speak during the United Nations General Assembly at the United Nations headquarters in New York City on September 26, 2025. (Photo credit: Michael M. Santiago\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n

The credibility problem is now compounding itself. As disclosures have revealed Israeli contracts with influencers, shell websites, and AI-driven campaigns, pro-Israel posts on American social media routinely draw comments accusing the poster of being a paid foreign agent, whether they are or not.<\/p>\n

Similar concerns come from inside the pro-Israel branding world. Joanna Landau, founder of the Tel Aviv\u2013based Israel branding nonprofit Vibe Israel, has spent more than a decade flying international influencers to Israel on lifestyle-focused trips. She said she was not available for an interview but has laid out her views in a recent series of essays on her Substack, \u201cReputation Nation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Landau called the 2026 allocation \u201ca long overdue course correction\u201d but warned that structural failures would swallow the money. \u201cIsrael\u2019s narrative has no single strategic owner,\u201d she wrote, noting that messaging responsibility is scattered across the Foreign Ministry, the Prime Minister\u2019s Office, the Diaspora Affairs Ministry, the Government Press Office and the IDF.<\/p>\n

According to the government\u2019s own announcements, she added, most of the new funding is slated for \u201ctactical activity\u201d \u2014 \u201cthe same tools Israel has relied on for years, only now with many more zeros.\u201d Her conclusion: \u201cA large budget poured into a broken system produces scale, not strategy.\u201d<\/p>\n

The spending does vault Israel into the same league as some of the world\u2019s largest public diplomacy operations, according to Landau.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Daniel-Ryan Spaulding, New York City based comedian and influencer seen in the crowds that came to support Israeli released hostage Tal Shoham on Feb. 22, 2025. (Photo credit: Sharon Eilon\/SOPA Images\/LightRocket via Getty Images)<\/p>\n

Exact comparisons are hard to make, and there are no widely accepted figures for what different countries spend on public diplomacy \u2014 the work is scattered across culture ministries, state broadcasters, foreign affairs budgets, and intelligence agencies, often without a single label.<\/p>\n

Germany, for example, funds Deutsche Welle, its international broadcaster, and the Goethe-Institut, its global network of cultural centers, at hundreds of millions of dollars a year, but both operate independently of the government. Britain spends around $450 million on the BBC World Service and millions more on international scholarships, also at arm\u2019s length from direct messaging. The United States allocates an estimated $2.3 billion through State Department programs and the U.S. Agency for Global Media. China\u2019s public diplomacy spending\u00a0has topped<\/a>\u00a0$10 billion. Qatar has built Al Jazeera into a global network through state funding whose full scope is not publicly disclosed.<\/p>\n

Israel, a country of roughly 10 million people, is now set to spend on its global image at a scale normally associated with much larger countries.
It may be too late, according to one Israeli scholar who has argued for two decades that Israel chronically underinvests in public diplomacy.<\/p>\n

Eytan Gilboa, a professor of international communication at Bar-Ilan University, said he welcomes both the larger sum and its consolidation inside the Foreign Ministry, which he said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had deliberately \u201cdried up\u201d in favor of rival ministries.<\/p>\n

But Gilboa agrees the current moment may be beyond repair.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is the worst crisis in Israel\u2019s image abroad,\u201d he said. \u201cIn the past, we have seen criticism of Israeli policy. Since Oct. 7, we have seen a rejection of Israel\u2019s right to exist.\u201d He argued that Israel has lost a generation of Americans, calling it \u201chighly dangerous, because these people are going to be the next politicians, elites, journalists.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cPerhaps $730 million is not enough,\u201d Gilboa said. \u201cYou have to establish a mechanism, a system that would systematically address all the challenges. I am quite pessimistic.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Pastor Mike Evans of the Friends of Zion Heritage Center speaks to more than 1,000 Christian influencers on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":102965,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[33],"tags":[2492,37,35802],"class_list":["post-102964","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-israel","tag-antisemitism","tag-israel","tag-pr"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/116535397141732618","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102964","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102964"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102964\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/102965"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102964"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102964"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}