Israel has poured large sums into campaigns designed to make its actions look justified.
And this time, a round of spending, documented in U.S. Justice Department filings, puts millions of dollars into an effort to shape what AI tells Americans about Gaza, about casualties, and about the U.S.-Israel relationship.
The money moved through Havas Media Germany, the prime contractor for a set of Israeli government communications programs in the U.S..
Behind that intermediary, depending on the filing, stood the State of Israel, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, or the Israel Government Advertising Agency, known as Lapam.
Officials ran the program internally as Project 545, named for a 2025 budget line of 545 million shekels, about 150 million U.S. dollars. Eran Shayovich, chief of staff for strategic communication at the Foreign Ministry, is the ministry contact named in the filings and the official publicly associated with leading the program.
One of the U.S. firms that received the work was Clock Tower X LLC, based in Medina, Ohio, and owned by Brad Parscale, Donald Trump's 2020 campaign manager.
Parscale registered the company with the Justice Department on September 18, 2025, as a foreign agent, registration 7649, after signing a contract on September 8 with Havas Media Germany GmbH of Frankfurt.
The statement of work committed the firm to the "deployment of websites and content to deliver GPT framing results on GPT conversations," so that tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Copilot would be more likely to retrieve and repeat preferred accounts of the war, of casualties, and of the U.S.-Israel relationship.
The original term ran to December 31, 2025, at $1.5 million a month, or $6 million in all.
A later amendment and a 2026 work order at $4.5 million a month produced a cumulative figure of $46.5 million once receipts through March were added to the later monthly rate.
The pages were not ordinary news sites.
They carried generic domain names with no reference to Israel in the address, clustered by theme, and formatted with the citations, statistics, and authoritative tone that retrieval systems tend to treat as reliable.
Allyvia.org published pieces such as "The Economic and Security Benefits of U.S. Support for Israel." Other sites in the same network, among them Paxpoint, FactSignal, FeedingYouFiction, Justorium, Culturavia, Cognitura, Compassion Pulse, and Econora, cast reports of journalist deaths or civilian harm as propaganda, argued that money had never been Gaza's principal problem, or framed Iranian conduct as the larger threat.
Privacy policies across the network are nearly identical, and the contact address on each resolves to clocktowerx.com.
A related operation, the Hanover Institute for Public Policy, produced hundreds of thousands of words in a matter of days under question-shaped headlines such as "Is Israel Carrying Out a Genocide in Gaza?" while disclosing, in a footer, that the material was distributed on behalf of Lapam through Havas.
The production target in the Clock Tower contract called for roughly 100 original pieces a month, with reporting on the filings also describing thousands of derivative versions, at least 80% shaped for Gen Z audiences on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and podcasts, plus at least 50 million paid impressions a month.
Parallel contracts paid influencers about $7,000 a post under an effort labeled the Esther Project, funded a bot program meant to "flood the zone" on social platforms, and paid for geofenced outreach and a mobile "10/7 Experience" trailer aimed at megachurches in California, Arizona, Nevada, and Colorado.
The Esther Project was a paid-influencer slice of the same Israeli government influence effort that ran through Havas Media Germany in 2025. Public Foreign Agents Registration Act filings identify it with Bridges Partners LLC, registration number 7652, listing Uri Steinberg and Yair Levi, Israeli consultants who formed the Delaware company in June 2025.
The disclosed amount was roughly $900,000 for a term running from mid-June to the end of November 2025, with a schedule that brought on three to six influencers at a time and expected each to post 25 to 30 pieces a month.
The influencers themselves were not listed as registrants.
Public Citizen later filed a complaint arguing that the omission left them in violation of the same statute that bound the firm paying them.
Every page carried the footer required by U.S. law: "This material is distributed by Clock Tower X LLC on behalf of the State of Israel. Additional information is available at the Department of Justice, Washington, DC."
The disclosure sat at the bottom. The content above it was written to travel.
Independent testers queried commercial chatbots and found that some models cited the network as a source, then omitted the funding notice from the answer they gave the user.
In a test published by Drop Site News on 28 July 2026, Perplexity was asked whether it is beneficial for the U.S. to enhance military cooperation with Israel. It answered yes. Its top source was allyvia.org.
The answer gave no sign that the site was paid for by a foreign government. Gemini and Copilot also surfaced the material in other trials.
A later check reported by WIRED Middle East put the same question to six systems.
All six described closer military cooperation as beneficial, some with caveats, and Copilot, Claude, and Grok cited Allyvia and repeated a claim that the alliance delivers 48 billion dollars in measurable value.
That shared conclusion cannot be pinned on the campaign alone, because the test did not compare answers from before the sites existed.
The clearer finding is about attribution. The source arrived without the sponsorship line.
Separate checks found that Common Crawl, a public dataset used in training large language models, captured the sites hundreds of times between January and June 2026, so the same pages could influence not only live search results but future training runs.
Operators told Axios they were seeing success at getting the systems to incorporate their information. They declined to release the data.
Parscale's team has described the method, in plainer language used by reporters covering the contract, as an attempt to poison the well the models drink from: pages built less for a human audience than for the crawlers and retrieval indexes that now sit between a question and an answer.
The push followed a measurable collapse in support. Israel’s public-diplomacy budget was about $7.5 million a year before October 2023.
This sum rose to about $150 million in 2025, and about $730 million in 2026, more than four times the prior year, after lawmakers in Jerusalem approved a national budget that treated hasbara as a line item on the scale of a weapons program.
Polls after the war began showed favorable views of Israel dropping sharply among Americans under 50, including inside Republican age groups that had once been among the most reliable backers.
Younger conservatives were encountering critical accounts of Gaza through independent creators and through the same conversational tools the campaign now targeted.
Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar has said spending on public diplomacy "should be like investing in jets, bombs, and missile interceptors," and that in the face of what is arrayed against Israel the sum is still not enough.
Officials familiar with the effort described the practical aim, in background comments to TIME, as preventing those younger conservatives from turning against Israel before the critical framing hardened into the default reply an AI supplies, a drift the ministry associated with isolationism and with commentators such as Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon.
The filings themselves continued to describe the work only as a campaign against antisemitism.
The money did not stop at the websites. An original contract of $1.5 million a month, later amended, plus a 2026 work order at $4.5 million a month, produced a cumulative figure of $46.5 million once receipts through March were added to the later monthly rate.
About $13 million of those receipts went onward to other firms: just under $5 million to a Republican digital shop for placement and consulting, $6 million to a company running AI chatbot and mass-texting programs that contacted Americans under neutral-sounding names and pushed links back into the same network, and more than 500,000 dollars for advertising on conservative media properties whose audiences were already drifting.
Lapam also bought advertising directly from the platforms, including a contract worth about $45 million with Google for YouTube and Display & Video 360, alongside disclosed buys on X and on Outbrain and Teads. A separate Stagwell firm, Targeted Communications Global, registration 7553, billed Lapam through Havas for strategy and advertising in the closing months of 2025.
The Foreign Ministry had already ended a smaller contract with SKDKnickerbocker, a Democratic-aligned firm that had run an earlier bot program, before shifting this larger slice of the work toward Parscale’s shop.
The entire arrangement sits in the Justice Department's public database because the Foreign Agents Registration Act requires the contracts, the intermediaries, and the on-page notices.
What the filings do not capture is the distance between the footer at the bottom of a page and the clean paragraph a chatbot speaks after it has summarized the source and dropped the sponsorship line.
That gap is where the manipulation operates, and it is the part no registration statement measures.
