The Answer Was Already Paid For

A phone buzzes in Illinois. “Hi, I’m John with Friends for Peace. Quick question for folks in Illinois about Israel and Iran. Got a second?” There is no John. There is no Friends for Peace. There is no organization behind that name at all, not a nonprofit, not an LLC, nothing a person could look up before she answers.

That matters because of what happens after she does answer. She’s polite. She says sure. A few exchanges later, a link arrives: a website about the U.S.-Israel alliance, built by a Trump-world political operative on a government contract now running $1.5 million a month.

The Hasbara budget. That text message is one thread in a much larger fabric. In April, Israel’s parliament approved roughly $730 million for public diplomacy in 2026, more than four times the year before, which was itself twenty times what the country spent before the war in Gaza began.

Israel’s foreign minister told his own government that spending on image should be treated “like investing in jets, bombs and missile interceptors.” A country of ten million people is now spending on its global image at a scale usually reserved for great powers.

This isn’t the first time Israel has tried to buy influence at arm’s length through outside partners rather than official spokespeople. A covert funding program called Solomon’s Sling tried the same approach starting in the late 2010s, channeling government money to civil-society groups willing to carry state messaging abroad. It collapsed. Most of the “agents” it needed wouldn’t take the money, and the program raised only a fraction of what had been budgeted. When the Foreign Ministry unveiled its next initiative, it didn’t mention Solomon’s Sling once.

The pattern repeats now at a different scale: pay someone else to say it, so it doesn’t sound like the state saying it.

Some of the current money buys the obvious things: 400 flown-in delegations of pastors and university presidents, a media war room watching 250 outlets and 10,000 daily items, an influencer network running near a million dollars through a single PR firm.

Some of it buys something stranger. Two videos, posted to the Foreign Ministry’s own verified YouTube channel last summer, showed markets full of food and restaurants serving meals in Gaza, an AI-generated voice closing each one with, “There is food in Gaza. Any other claim is a lie.” A cross-border investigation by DW and the Eurovision News Spotlight network found the government had spent roughly $49 million pushing those videos and others like them into feeds in Germany, Austria, Italy, Poland, the UK and the US, and that they were misleading. Eighteen million views, aimed at people scrolling in another country, about a famine documented by the UN’s own food-security monitors.

The Algorithmic Layer.And some of the money buys the layer underneath all of that: not a person’s opinion, but the machine that now sits between a question and its answer. A separate contract, worth $46.5 million and climbing, pays a firm called Clock Tower X to build websites engineered to be picked up as source material by AI chatbots. Eleven of them so far. Every one carries a legally required line at the bottom of the page: this material is distributed on behalf of the State of Israel. That satisfies the law. It doesn’t satisfy the plain meaning of disclosure, because almost nobody scrolls to a footer, and when Copilot or Gemini cites one of these pages in an answer, the disclosure often doesn’t come along for the ride.

Two of the pieces in that network aren’t abstract narrative-shaping. One works to discredit the journalists killed in Gaza by suggesting a majority had terrorist ties. Another casts doubt on the death of Hind Rajab, a five-year-old girl killed by the Israeli military in 2024. These aren’t messaging adjustments. They’re attempts to weaken specific witnesses and a specific child’s death before an AI system summarizing “what happened” ever weighs their testimony on its own terms.

None of this is obviously working. An Israeli official told Time the government is unhappy with what Parscale has delivered: “things have only gotten worse,” they said. A researcher who studies public diplomacy for a living put it more starkly to a Jewish news outlet: “The problem is not that we lack infrastructure. The problem is not that we lack skill. The problem is that people don’t believe the state anymore.” A foreign-policy scholar makes the same point from the other direction: a government that keeps getting caught spinning teaches its audience that more spin is coming, not less. It is the Solomon’s Sling lesson again, at a different scale, still unlearned.

That should be a comfort. It isn’t, quite. Because the woman who answered the text from “John” doesn’t read Time or trade press. She asked a chatbot a question about Israel and got an answer that sounded sourced and calm. She had no reason to know that calm was purchased, at a moment when the thing it was built to obscure is a documented famine and a five-year-old’s death.

The suffering in Gaza is not a debate to be won by whichever government funds the better-sourced-sounding video. It’s a fact of human lives, and it deserves an information environment honest enough to let people reckon with it directly, rather than one where an emaciated child becomes a line item in a three-quarter-billion-dollar budget.