Roughly a decade ago, my cousin Rob invited me to join him and Cousin Jesse at the annual AIPAC conference in Washington. Despite my very negative perception of AIPAC, I opted to go because I thought it would be fun to hang out with my cousins. I had no intention of participating in AIPAC’s agenda or program.
To my surprise, AIPAC wasn’t the organization I expected. Attendees were fiercely patriotic Americans who wanted to promote greater political and economic ties between the U.S. and Israel. A watershed moment for me was attending a breakout session featuring two senior military advisers, one who had served in the Bush administration and the other in the Obama administration. I can’t recall their names, but I remember the one point on which they agreed: The cost of supporting Israel was considerably less than what America would otherwise spend to maintain stability in the Middle East and protect its interests there.
When I returned to Los Angeles, I reached out to local officials and volunteered to help AIPAC improve its much-maligned image. Among my strengths when I worked in PR was warning clients about potential issues before they became full-scale problems. I was confident that if the world turned on Israel, AIPAC’s ability to lobby effectively on the country’s behalf would be compromised.
My warnings fell on deaf ears.
Now my worst fears have been realized.
Time and The Wall Street Journal have published extraordinary accounts of Israel’s roughly $50 million effort to shore up American support through six PR and marketing firms. At the center of the reporting is Brad Parscale, the controversial former Trump campaign manager and digital strategist whose firm, Clock Tower X, was retained through the global advertising agency Havas Media Network to target the president’s MAGA base and prevent young conservatives from turning against Israel.
Israel’s intelligence operations may be brilliant, but its political and communications judgment is astonishingly naïve. Its expensive campaign has so far failed to reverse the decline in American support—and its exposure may now accelerate it.
“We are pissed at Brad Parscale,” an unidentified Israeli official familiar with the arrangement told Time. “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.”
Indeed. According to an April report by the Pew Research Center, 60% of American adults now view Israel unfavorably, up from 53% last year and 42% in 2022. Fifty-seven percent of Republicans ages 18 to 49 have an unfavorable opinion of Israel, up from 50% last year.
This erosion has coincided with a frightening rise in Jew hatred. The Combat Antisemitism Movement’s Antisemitism Research Center recorded a 34% increase in antisemitic incidents worldwide during the first week of the Iran war compared with the preceding week. For all the money Israel is spending on public diplomacy, the stakes could hardly be higher.
Among the Israel campaign’s more questionable activities was paying at least $6.5 million to Sparkfire, a company using artificial intelligence for a mass-texting effort.
Millions of messages were sent from nonexistent people identifying themselves Emma or Sarah and claiming to represent a group called Friends for Peace. They opened with seemingly neutral questions, such as, “How do you think the U.S. and Israel’s peace talks with Iran will impact global security?”
Recipients who responded were drawn into AI-generated conversations emphasizing the importance of the U.S.-Israel relationship and steering them toward preprogrammed pro-Israel arguments. Whatever its technical sophistication, the exercise was deceptive: the appeal appears personal and organic, while the machinery and government sponsor remain invisible to the person holding the phone.
Clock Tower X’s role is even more audacious. The company registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act in connection with its work for Havas supporting a nationwide campaign commissioned by the State of Israel. A draft statement of work included in the FARA filing called for at least 100 original creative assets and 5,000 creative variants every month, with at least 80% tailored to Gen Z audiences. It also called for at least 50 million monthly digital impressions and the “integration of narrative messaging into Salem Media Network properties and aligned distribution channels.”
Parscale serves as Salem Media Group’s chief strategy officer.
The draft also called for search-engine campaigns, new websites and content designed to deliver “GPT framing results” in chatbot conversations. Time reported that the targets included OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini—and that Israel agreed to pay Clock Tower $1.5 million per month.
Time, citing three people familiar with the operation, reported that Parscale-linked firms used private group chats to provide conservative influencers with suggested language and then compensated them according to the reach and engagement their posts generated. Parscale disputed that money from the FARA-registered Israeli contract had funded influencers.
As Salem’s chief strategy officer, Parscale occupied a senior role at a major Christian and conservative media company while his foreign-funded contract expressly promised to integrate narrative messaging into Salem properties. Salem’s roster includes broadcasters and commentators such as Hugh Hewitt and Scott Jennings, and it carries Lara Trump’s podcast. There is no evidence that any of those personalities participated in or even knew about the Israeli campaign. Salem and Parscale told the Wall Street Journal that the Israeli money paid for advertising, not scripts for hosts.
But the arrangement still compromised the appearance of Salem’s independence. When a media executive is simultaneously a registered foreign agent whose contract promises to place messaging inside that executive’s media network, audiences are entitled to wonder where advertising ends and influence begins.
U.S. intelligence officials reportedly wondered as well.
“We’re talking about American influencers who are being paid by a foreign country, then trying to build momentum to change the President’s view, or the views of others around him,” Time quoted an unidentified senior U.S. intelligence official as saying. “It can’t be dismissed as inconsequential by any means.”
Parscale denied allegations that his campaign undermined President Trump or sought to derail his Iran policy. He said the campaign’s purpose was to stop Israel’s enemies from driving a wedge between the Jewish state and Americans who had traditionally supported it. He also maintained that much of the pro-Israel activity appearing online was organic.
Fair enough. But Israel’s decision to entrust such a sensitive campaign to Parscale still reflected remarkably poor judgment.
Long before he began taking millions to run Israel’s digital influence operation, Parscale’s career had become synonymous with the aggressive exploitation of data, algorithms and opaque political machinery.
As digital director of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, Parscale built his reputation on an experiment-heavy Facebook advertising system dubbed “Project Alamo.” The campaign also hired Cambridge Analytica, the British political consulting firm that later became engulfed in a historic data-harvesting scandal.
Cambridge Analytica obtained data derived from tens of millions of Facebook profiles without those users’ consent. Facebook eventually said as many as 87 million users may have been affected. Former Cambridge Analytica employee and whistleblower Christopher Wylie described how the data was used to construct psychological and behavioral profiles intended to “target their inner demons.” The revelations plunged Facebook into crisis, forced Mark Zuckerberg to testify before Congress and helped drive Cambridge Analytica out of business.
There is no evidence that Parscale personally harvested the data, and he later downplayed Cambridge Analytica’s contribution to Trump’s victory, arguing that its vaunted psychographic targeting did not work. But he had chosen to bring the firm into Trump’s digital operation. At a minimum, the association should have raised questions in Israel about whether the architect of a public-trust campaign should be someone so closely identified with one of the most notorious data scandals of the social-media era.
There were other warning signs.
In 2020, the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center accused the Trump campaign and an affiliated fundraising committee of routing $170 million through firms connected to Parscale and other campaign officials to obscure the ultimate recipients. The Trump campaign dismissed the complaint as a publicity stunt. But Federal Election Commission attorneys later determined there was reason to believe campaign-finance law may have been violated and recommended an investigation. The six commissioners split 3-3, preventing the investigation from proceeding, according to the Associated Press.
Parscale also experienced a highly publicized personal crisis that should have given Israel pause.
In September 2020, just months after his high-profile demotion from the Trump campaign, Fort Lauderdale police were called to Parscale’s waterfront home after his wife reported that he had armed himself, made suicidal comments and remained inside with access to multiple firearms. Officers ultimately removed 10 guns from the residence and detained Parscale under Florida’s Baker Act for an involuntary psychiatric evaluation.
The episode alone should not have disqualified Parscale from future government work. But for Israel’s Foreign Ministry to proceed despite a public record containing the Cambridge Analytica association, the campaign-finance complaints, the obvious Salem conflict and a past crisis serious enough to require involuntary intervention—and still entrust him with a multimillion-dollar influence operation—is an astonishing indictment of its risk assessment.
Ultimately, I’m skeptical that dropping automated chat funnels into Americans’ cellphones, feeding suggested language to internet personalities and seeding the web to influence AI answers can meaningfully restore public trust in Israel.
The real impact comes when the machinery is exposed—transforming an ineffective marketing campaign into a reputational disaster.
Israel’s leaders hired Parscale to manufacture trust. Instead, they handed Israel’s enemies fresh ammunition to argue that the country cannot be trusted.