Why Israel's $150 million 'public diplomacy' budget has failed so abysmally

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For decades, Israel has invested heavily in hasbara – a term for state-backed public diplomacy campaigns whose Hebrew root literally means “to explain”. In practice, it is a tool to justify the state’s policies to a global audience. Since the Gaza war began in October 2023, the state has continued its media influence campaigns relentlessly.

Yet the world is no longer buying Israel’s explanations: the justifications for the war in Gaza simply don’t fly. Hasbara may still operate at full force, but the reality of pulverised neighbourhoods, mass starvation and mounting civilian deaths has made the narrative impotent, as Israel continues prosecuting a war that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians.

Start with the money. In late 2024 and early 2025, Israel’s government approved an unprecedented budget infusion for public diplomacy: roughly $150 million, which is more than 20 times the usual annual allocation. These aren’t rumours or activist talking points; they’re the government’s own figures.

Behind that sum is a sprawling architecture. A long-running public-private project once known as Kela Shlomo (“Solomon's Sling”) was eventually rebranded as “Voices of Israel.” Journalistic investigations show it has received at least $8.6 million in government-linked funding to shape discourse in the US, through PR, lobbying for expansive definitions of anti-Semitism and media placement. Even before the rebrand, internal plans envisioned multiyear budgets of $28 million to $36 million, partly matched by private donors, to counter critics abroad.

There have also been covert pushes. In June 2024, Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs allegedly hired a political marketing firm, Stoic, and spent around $2 million to run a hidden social-media campaign in the US, complete with fake “American” accounts that commented on lawmakers’ feeds and targeted progressive audiences with bespoke pro-Israel content. Social media platforms later took down parts of the network. Whatever one thinks of such tactics, they cost real money and reflect a government that is most definitely trying.

And yet, for all this, public opinion has moved steadily against Israel’s conduct of the war. In the US, a July 2025 survey by polling firm Gallup found only 32 per cent of Americans approve of Israel’s military action in Gaza, with disapproval near 60 per cent. Pew similarly reports that a majority (53 per cent) of Americans now hold unfavourable views of Israel overall, a sharp deterioration since 2022, when the figure was 42 per cent. Among young Americans under 35, the “unfavourable” figures are much higher, while support for Palestine is higher than that of Israel. Israel has not only lost the war in Gaza – it has lost an entire generation of Americans. If hasbara were working, these numbers would not look like this.

Why the collapse in credibility? Because facts on the ground cut through talking points. Independent monitoring and international agencies continue to document a catastrophic civilian death toll. As of early August 2025, more than 60,000 Palestinians have been killed, with starvation and malnutrition contributing to the deaths of hundreds, including children. These figures will make it hard to rehabilitate Israel’s image.

Israel has lost an entire generation of Americans

Legal rulings have also intruded on the narrative. In January and May 2024, the International Court of Justice ordered provisional measures obligating Israel to prevent acts of genocide (associating that word with the Gaza war for the first time, officially) and to enable humanitarian aid, including a specific order related to operations in Rafah at the time. The Court did not rule on whether a genocide was taking place, but it found the risk plausible enough to trigger binding precautions. That, too, is something audiences understand viscerally: when one of the world’s highest courts is repeatedly warning you, PR budgets can only do so much.

You can tell the hasbara aura is cracking when even unlikely voices inside US politics start speaking plainly. In July, US Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene – a staunch conservative and proponent of Donald Trump’s Maga movement – labelled what’s happening in Gaza a genocide and argued that the US should stop sending money to Israel, noting that the “nuclear-armed nation… is very much capable of defending themselves”. She also highlighted that Israel provides universal health care and subsidised university education to its citizens – benefits the US does not offer – while America carries over $37 trillion in national debt. Even Madonna has spoken out, urging Pope Leo to visit Gaza. As a mother, she said she can no longer watch the suffering of children in silence. That anguish resonates far beyond Gaza: the moral injury of witnessing such devastation has left many of us grappling with a profound sense of helplessness.

When hasbara claims Israel seeks peace and restraint, members of Israel’s own government keep blowing the whistle on that fiction. Far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has repeatedly urged “resettling” Gaza with Israelis and driving Palestinians out – couched as “voluntary emigration”. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has made “applying sovereignty” over the occupied West Bank an explicit political objective and declared 2025 “the year” to do it. This month he boasted of a settlement plan meant to “bury” the prospect of a Palestinian state. These are not slips; they are policy platforms explicitly articulated by Cabinet ministers.

Displaced Palestinians push a cart loaded with belongings, as they flee amid an Israeli military operation, in Gaza City, on August 22, 2025. Reuters

When famine and chaos took hold in Gaza, Israeli spokespeople blamed Hamas for hijacking aid – a tidy narrative that pushes responsibility onto Palestinians themselves. Impartial investigations show otherwise: organised criminal gangs, supported by Israel, looted aid in Israeli-controlled areas, often operating freely while Hamas had no practical access to GHF sites. On the ground, Israeli-backed strongmen such as the Abu Shabab Popular Forces now control access to assistance, fragmenting Gaza’s social fabric. These are criminal gangs propped up by Israel as a divide-and-conquer tactic, euphemistically labelled as “clans” despite being disavowed by their own tribes. Their role has been to terrorise civilians, steal aid and obscure the true scale of the ongoing atrocities in Gaza.

This tactic – fracture Palestinian society, then blame Palestinians for the fractures – is not new. For years, historians and journalists have documented how Israel, in the 1980s, encouraged Islamist social networks as a counterweight to the left-nationalist Palestine Liberation Organisation. Hamas emerged from that ecosystem. Former Israeli officials and mainstream outlets have described the strategy in blunt terms: Israel helped Hamas grow, deliberately separating leftist secular Palestinian nationalists from Islamists as a divide-and-conquer tactic. And at some point, this was openly explained as a good strategy.

So even while Israel has escalated hasbara publicly, privately and covertly, reality keeps breaking in. Members of Israel’s own Cabinet are avowing transfer and annexation. Reporters document aid theft and militia-like gangs thriving precisely where the Israeli military calls the shots. And in Washington, even a Maga standard-bearer has started calling Gaza what so many human rights organisations, including Israel’s own B’tselem have warned it is.

Ultimately, it is one thing for Israel to explain policies that are fair and defensible; it is quite another to try to explain away or justify the unjustifiable. The state could succeed in the former, but in the latter it fails spectacularly.

Hasbara can buy airtime, bots and billboards. It cannot buy legitimacy – not when the policy is a permanent occupation, an attempt at regionally-menacing hegemonic expansionism into Syria, Lebanon and elsewhere dressed up as “security”, or when “de-Hamasification” looks like deliberate social collapse. The budgets might keep rising; the world’s tolerance is not.

Meanwhile, Palestinians keep dying or being pushed off their land under bankrupt “voluntary emigration” labels. No amount of glossy messaging can soften that truth.