TEHRAN- Finally, the extremism and criminality exercised by Israel are backfiring and are causing concern among the regime’s officials.

Israel, especially through the policies of its ultra-hardliners, has caused the regime to lose support among Americans, including the conservative youth.

Enjoying unwavering American backing for decades, officials in Israel have been committing numerous crimes against Palestinians. The Israeli genocidal war on Gaza, which began after Oct. 7, 2023, has awakened the people across the world, including Americans, to come to their senses.

The world has realized that Israel sees no limit to its crimes. Israel’s behavior toward Palestinian prisoners, including Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, the chief of the Kamal Adwan hospital in Gaza, is a stain on human history.

Many Americans and many Jews outside Israel were not fully aware of Israel’s brutality until the Gaza war. Israel’s officials and its loyalists have been misusing the term anti-Semitism to cover up and justify their illegal and criminal acts.

Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust have been key words to advance Israel’s evil plans.

Israel’s illegal and brutality have not remained confined to Palestinians. It is using the October 7 incident to expand Israel’s occupation of other nations’ lands. Just recently, Israel Katz said that the Netanyahu regime has no plan to withdraw from Gaza, Lebanon, and the lands it occupied in Syria following the fall of the Assad government in December 2024.

Under its current prime minister, Israel also dragged the Trump administration into the war against Iran in June 2025, and again in the current one that began in late Feb. 

Joe Kent, Director of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center, resigned in March in protest of the war on Iran, stating that Israel and its American lobby had pushed the United States toward the unlawful war.

Now, after it seemed that the war between Iran and the U.S. may be brought to an end under a memorandum of understanding (MOU) mediated by Pakistan, Netanyahu and his cabinet members felt unsettled and tried to kill this initial agreement, the same way that Netanyahu used his utmost influence on Republicans to provoke Trump to quit the Obama-era 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. It is again mostly due to Israel’s pressure that the Trump administration has resumed the war against Iran after a lull.

In June, U.S. Vice President JD Vance lashed out at Israeli critics of the Iran-U.S. MOU, saying Trump is Israel’s only ally left in the world.

Again, speaking on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast on Wednesday, Vance described a “very discreet, extremely well-funded campaign to try to derail the negotiation and try to derail the deal” with Iran.

“There are certain influencers in America who are being paid in order to attack the deal,” he said, mentioning funding that came from Israel.

The vice president referenced a TIME magazine article this week which details an “Israeli influence operation targeting the MAGA base”.

Brad Parscale, a digital adviser on Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign, is reportedly being paid $1.5m a month to run this operation.

According to Vance, the TIME article “lists a bunch of people who have quite literally been paid by a former Trump campaign person, who is himself paid by certain elements within the Israeli government, and those people are attacking me quite viciously.

“I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that there have been people within the Israeli government who are trying to, like, actually shift us away from that policy [the Iran negotiations] because they want to continue the military campaign,” Vance said.

The vice president said that there are people "who are super-hawkish in the American system who have attacked the deal and, frankly, in some ways tried to derail the deal. And what I always say to those people is, what is your proposal?"

He said he had been widely accused of being an antisemite, “which is insane”.

No amount of media campaign can heal the damaged reputation

Israeli officials are reportedly furious that Parscale has failed to halt the collapse in support for Israel among young U.S. conservatives.

Despite millions of dollars spent targeting the MAGA base, shaping social media narratives and influencing artificial intelligence platforms, polling shows that attitudes towards Israel have continued to deteriorate.

The operation aimed to prevent young conservatives from turning against Israel, according to an investigation published by TIME. Publicly presented as a campaign to combat anti-Semitism, its wider strategic purpose was to preserve support for Israel among a section of the U.S. right increasingly critical of Israel and Washington’s involvement in Israel’s regional wars.

Foreign Agents Registration Act filings show that global advertising agency Havas hired Parscale’s firm, Clock Tower X, in September 2025 to conduct the digital campaign on behalf of Israel. The agreement required the firm to produce 100 original pieces of content each month, with at least 80 percent directed at Generation Z audiences through TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and podcasts.

The campaign promised at least 50 million digital impressions each month and included efforts to influence how artificial intelligence tools, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini, present Israel and its wars. Parscale also proposed integrating campaign narratives into properties and distribution channels associated with the Christian conservative Salem Media Network, where he serves as chief strategy officer.

In April, Israel had already paid Parscale’s firm $9 million and renewed its contract. The campaign included digital advertising and text-message outreach, alongside attempts to ensure that material favorable to Israel ranks prominently in the online sources used by artificial intelligence systems.

Three people familiar with the campaign said conservative influencers received suggested wording through private group chats and were compensated according to the reach and engagement generated by their posts. Clock Tower X describes its operation as an “influencer ecosystem” capable of amplifying narratives through apparently independent and trusted voices.

It remains unclear how much creators received specifically for work connected to Israel. TIME reviewed messages from another Influenceable campaign, which offered a base payment of $2,250 and additional payments based on views, allowing participants to earn up to $4,250 for a single post.

‘Seismic shift’

One conservative influencer associated with Parscale’s network was Eyal Yakoby, who has a large following on X and has testified before Congress about alleged anti-Semitism on university campuses. Influenceable confirmed that Yakoby had worked as a paid influencer on several Israel-related campaigns, but insisted that he had not received Israeli government money.

The campaign also created websites, including PaxPoint.org and FactSignal.org, which TIME said appeared to be designed primarily to influence material gathered and synthesized by artificial intelligence systems rather than to attract ordinary readers.

Despite the scale of the spending, Israeli officials appear dissatisfied with the results. An Israeli Foreign Ministry official familiar with the arrangement told TIME: “We are pissed at Brad Parscale. 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.”

Polling supports the official’s assessment that Israel has failed to reverse the decline in public support. Pew Research Center found in April that 60 percent of Americans viewed Israel unfavorably, compared with 53 percent in 2025 and 42 percent in 2022. Among Republicans aged between 18 and 49, 57 percent held an unfavorable opinion, up from 50 percent a year earlier.

The campaign has also triggered concern in Washington. Following a U.S.-Iran ceasefire, Trump administration officials noticed MAGA influencers publishing similar posts criticizing the agreement and accusing the president of surrendering to Iran.

A senior U.S. intelligence official described the possibility of American influencers receiving foreign money and then seeking to change the president’s position as “a very, very dangerous thing”. The official said the effort could not be dismissed as inconsequential because it targeted Trump’s own political base rather than the general electorate.

The latest disclosures add to previous revelations about Israeli operations targeting U.S. public opinion. In 2024, Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs commissioned a $2 million campaign that used hundreds of fake accounts posing as Americans to pressure U.S. lawmakers into supporting military aid for Israel.

Israel has since expanded its public diplomacy budget to $730 million as it attempts to counter its worsening global image following the genocide in Gaza. However, the continued decline in support among young Americans, Democrats and younger Republicans suggests that greater spending has so far failed to reverse the political consequences of Israel’s actions.

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Brad Parscale