This is the second article in a two-part series. You can find the first part, explaining how public relations firms have been aiding Israel, here. 

The filings of the freshly minted Christian marketing agency Faith Through Works speak to Israel’s new public relations focus.

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Registering as a foreign agent of Israel with the US Department of Justice, Faith Through Works –  one of at least three PR agencies contracted by Israel to improve its image in the United States – says (PDF) it has been hired to “Combat low American Evangelical Christian approval of the Nation of Israel”.

It’s not only within the US’s evangelical base that polls show Israel to be losing ground. Widespread protests across US cities and college campuses, allied to surveys from the University of Maryland and others, indicate that Israel is also losing US support across Gen Z, the left and within its traditional allies in mainstream US politics and the evangelical right.

And, for Israel, that’s a real problem, analysts said.

As well as hiring Faith Through Works to target US Christians, Israel has enlisted the support of Bridges Partners to pay an undisclosed group of online influencers to improve perceptions of Israel in the US. It has also contracted another newly formed US company, Clock Tower, to try to improve its online reputation, not least by trying to reshape how artificial intelligence (AI) discussions on Israel’s war on Gaza are framed.

“For Israel, the war for American public opinion is existential,” Shibley Telhami of the University of Maryland said. “This is a serious game for them and one in which the gloves are off.”

“The last two years have shown Israelis just how reliant they are on the US. That’s to say, nearly everyone knew they were reliant upon the US before the war, but not to what extent,” he said, outlining how Israelis have watched their country’s reliance on the US increase with every new front their government has opened against regional neighbours, including Lebanon and Iran.

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“All of this is before you include the US’s sheer diplomatic power,” he said, “which has been vital in protecting Israel through the war, and the potential loss of that is terrifying to them.”

Losing support

The US public has largely borne the economic, military and reputational costs of supporting Israel. However, amid the scenes of unrelenting carnage that Israel continues to unleash on Gaza, cracks are emerging in US support for Israel: cracks that many in Israel fear could eventually become fractures.

Attempts to shore up Israel’s support in the US are not new. In addition to banning foreign journalists from entering Gaza to record the full extent of the carnage inflicted upon the enclave, there have been concerted efforts to tilt the online conversation in Israel’s favour.

A survey carried out by the Al Jazeera Centre for Studies in May found a concerted effort to influence how social media users were describing Israel’s war on Gaza had been launched shortly after the campaign itself.

Speaking to US social media influencers in September, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu underscored the importance of social media to Israel’s efforts to safeguard its support within the US.

Framing social media as the “weapon” of the modern age, Netanyahu told his audience, “The most important purchase going on right now is … TikTok. Number one. And I hope it goes through because it can be consequential.”

“And the other one? X. We have to talk to Elon [Musk, X’s owner]. He’s not an enemy, he’s a friend. We should talk to him. Now, if we can get those two things, we get a lot … We have to fight the fight, to give direction to the Jewish people and give direction to our non-Jewish friends.”

“Even before the war in Gaza, there was less support for Israel and greater sympathy for Palestinians among younger Americans, including young evangelical Christians,” Dov Waxman, professor of Israel studies at the University of California, said. “Israel’s behaviour during the war in Gaza has significantly accelerated the erosion of support for Israel among these key groups.”

Polling conducted by Telhami bears this out.

A University of Maryland survey (PDF) between July and August this year found that support for Palestinians had expanded from younger Democrats to all areas of the party, while a significant gap has opened between older and younger Republicans over their party’s support for Israel. Of potentially greater concern for Israeli policymakers – and helping explain the contracting of Faith Through Works – is a separate poll (PDF) conducted over the same period showing growing opposition to Israel’s war on Gaza among young evangelicals, traditionally one of Israel’s most reliable bases of support.

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Shift in MAGA

That fracturing of support is beginning to extend to the US’s mainstream politics, and critically, to President Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement. In July, one of the loudest voices in that movement, Marjorie Taylor Greene, pushed back against a bill approving $500m in aid for Israel over the following year.

“Nuclear armed Israel’s national debt is under $400 Billion compared to our crippling national debt of $37 TRILLION,” Greene wrote on the social media platform X. “Nuclear armed Israel seems to have their defense and debt under control, so the American taxpayers should not be required to give Nuclear armed Israel another $500 million in our U.S. defense bill.”

Another prominent MAGA figure, Tucker Carlson – who in October described Christian Zionists as “heretics” – said on his YouTube show the same month: “There’s only one story going on, and it’s Israel … And yet, despite its objective insignificance, it is the focus of the conversation … We are spending our time, our money, and we’re taking enormous risks on behalf of a country that geopolitically is not significant at all.”

“The US Republican leadership is still solidly behind Israel, and that’s not likely to change in this Trump administration,” HA Hellyer of the Royal United Services Institute said, “But there is a strong trend in MAGA’s ‘America First’ contingent that is keen to reorient American foreign policy away from being Israel-centric when it comes to the wider Arab world region,” he said, citing Carlson and right-wing influencer Candace Owens as examples.

“I don’t think this will fundamentally shift policy in this administration, but it is definitely a trend that is picking up steam, and is likely the future of the Republican Party more generally,” he said of Israel’s prospects for future support from the US right.

“There is a profound generational shift under way,” Telhami said. “Just as we had the Pearl Harbor generation and the Vietnam generation, now we have the Gaza generation, which sees Israel as a genocidal villain.”

“That’s a generation of young people who saw these horrors unfold on their screens in real time, and I don’t think Israel gets how deep the shift is,” he said. “Israelis probably feel that this is just a media problem, especially social media, and that if they can just counter that narrative, people will come back to them. They won’t. This is a profound change, one that will determine US public perceptions for years to come.”