Polishing Israel’s Tarnished Reputation
Asharq Al-Awsat, London, November 14
Israel’s image has absorbed profound damage as a result of its unrestrained war in Gaza, a campaign that has effectively trapped the enclave’s entire population inside a cage of conflict as a punitive gesture against the Hamas movement.
The fallout was expected in the Arab and Islamic worlds, and even in Latin America—regions historically sympathetic to popular struggles against Western power structures and therefore attuned to the suffering in Gaza—but the real rupture has occurred at the core of the West: the United States.
What has shifted for Israelis is the crumbling of their crafted image—the reputation of their state, the presumed righteousness of their cause, and the dominance of their narrative over competing stories from the Middle East—particularly among American and European audiences, though the American public is most consequential.
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Recent surveys from the Pew Research Center show a steep decline in American sympathy for Israel, especially among younger generations. This trend is reflected in political developments such as the rise of the insurgent “socialist” New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, a Shiite Muslim born to Indian parents whose ascent signals deeper shifts in public sentiment. Against this backdrop, Israeli sources have disclosed that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has signed a range of advertising contracts aimed at repairing Israel’s standing with Americans through a variety of media channels, including chatbots, as reported by Haaretz last week.
The campaign has targeted botnets to amplify pro-Israel messaging online while attempting to shape search results and responses produced by major AI platforms such as ChatGPT. According to the newspaper, the largest of these contracts was finalized last August with Clock Tower X, a firm owned by Brad Parscale, the strategist behind President Trump’s digital campaigns in 2016 and 2020. Brad Parscale’s team is committed to producing at least 100 core pieces of content per month—videos, audio segments, podcasts, graphics, and written materials—along with 5,000 derivative items, all designed to generate 50 million monthly views.
Central to Israel’s push is its effort to influence the rapidly expanding ecosystem of AI-powered chatbots—a strikingly new frontier in information warfare. Yet the reality is that such a campaign will find only limited success unless Netanyahu’s government rethinks its approach to the Palestinian issue and moves toward the very path it has resisted: genuine peace, recognition of a Palestinian state, or a reimagining of Israel as a shared state for Jews and Palestinians—a transformation that remains deeply improbable for religious, cultural, political, security, economic, and psychological reasons.
The inclusion of artificial intelligence tools in this broader propaganda effort raises an unavoidable question for the fervent believers in the supposed scientific rigor and neutrality of AI: considering this, do you still hold such unshaken faith in the objectivity and power of these systems?
Mishary Dhayidi (translated by Asaf Zilberfarb)
