In December 2025, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met in Palm Beach, Florida, with evangelical Christian Zionist leaders and university presidents. He told them that Israel had been fighting a “seven-front war,” and warned that there was now an eighth front: the battle “for hearts and minds in the West,” particularly among young people, and, above all, in the United States.
And almost two years ago, I wrote how Western media normalises genocide through language. Euphemism and clinical jargon frame Israel’s wars against Palestinians in Gaza and the people of Lebanon as a war with “Hamas” or “Hezbollah,” and words such as “clashes” replace “massacres”. Each nuance desensitises the reader by degrees, and it moves the focus from the child under the rubble to the geopolitics above it. The vocabulary was never neutral; in fact, it was the first draft of the narrative Israel needed to numb the human conscience and perpetuate the world’s indifference.
Traditionally, the media used to operate behind closed doors. In the editorial rooms where a handful of gatekeepers decided what the public would see and what it wouldn’t. But social media broke that monopoly. We can witness instances of citizen media when a Palestinian teenager livestreams from Gaza or exposes Zionist youth mobs in the West Bank, when a nurse films the inside of a hospital, or a father records the cries of his baby beneath the rubble. The gatekeepers are no longer the only lens through which the world sees, and this new media reality terrifies Netanyahu and threatens Zionists’ monopoly on the narrative.
The transformation of how raw news reaches the public has opened Netanyahu’s “eighth front.” It is a battle fought across US college campuses, churches, and the media to reshape how Americans see Israel and the war. Unlike Israel’s seven bloody fronts, this one is fought with cash. Israel has spent over $1 billion on it since October 2023, and this year alone Jerusalem quadrupled its public diplomacy budget to $730 million. Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar put it plainly: image spending should be treated “like investing in jets, bombs, and missile interceptors.” A government is now budgeting propaganda the way it budgets for ordnance.
Meeting with American influencers, Netanyahu called social media “the most important weapon” in Israel’s fight. This is a foreign head of state—one who, through his lobby, for all practical purposes controls Congress and the White House—strategising how to use social media to occupy the American mind.
That occupation has a name and a price tag: the Esther Project. Israel’s government hired 14 to 18 American influencers recruited by a Delaware-registered firm, Bridges Partners, and funneled through the PR giant Havas to flood social media with pro-Israel content 25 to 30 times a month. None of the influencers has disclosed to their own followers that a foreign government is the client, a plain violation of the spirit, if not the letter, of federal disclosure law. Alongside Esther, Clock Tower X, run by Trump’s former campaign manager Brad Parscale, signed a $1.5-million-a-month contract promising Israel a minimum of 50 million views and 5,000 posts every month, 80 percent of it aimed squarely at Gen Z, the demographic least persuaded by Israel’s propaganda and therefore the one Israel is spending the most to manufacture consent from.
Then there are Clock Tower X’s satellite websites: Paxpoint, Allyvia, Justorium to seed AI chatbot answers with pre-loaded Israeli framing, so a “neutral” AI response arrives quietly laundered. That’s narrative laundering at industrial scale, and most Americans asking a chatbot a question have no idea their chatbot is an agent for Zionists’ Hasbara.
Another aspect of Netanyahu’s “eighth front” is the fictionalisation of news, and Ben Shapiro has served as one of his commanders. The Daily Wire, the portal Shapiro co-founded, helped recast Israel’s wars as battles in a fabricated Muslim-Christian conflict. His new film, Run Hide Fight: Infidels, is the eighth front’s fictional arm. It fuses pro-Palestine campus protests with Islamic State imagery seizing an American university. In a propaganda production dressed as entertainment intended to normalise Muslim hate as American news and theatre.
The irony almost writes itself: a proponent of a state that justifies its very existence on the collective memory of religious persecution is now cultivating an army of Islamophobes promoting hate of another faith. The language once used to portray Jews as an existential threat has been repurposed, by supposed Jews, to portray Muslims as the new threat. People who know, perhaps better than any other, the terror of being demonised because of their religion are financing a media apparatus to demonise Muslims.
Nevertheless, and according to a Pew poll last spring, 60 percent of Americans held a negative view of Israel. To reverse that, a foreign prime minister pays influencers $7,000 a post, and quietly colonises AI’s knowledge. Sixty percent isn’t a messaging problem. It’s the verdict of a public that has seen through the Hasbara.
Israel is not spending money to inform; it is spending money to manipulate and school people in ignorance. Truth, left alone, is Israel’s deadliest enemy. And when truth cannot be defeated, the only way to occupy the mind is to blind people with hatred: a murdered Palestinian child recast as a “human shield,” and turn a place of worship into a “Sharia threat.”
Israel can suppress the truth only by turning citizens into hostages of their own planted bigotry. Bigotry needs no evidence, only an enemy. Once a mind is hoodwinked into believing it already knows who the enemy is, no fact and no injustice can move it. That is what Israel’s eighth front hopes to achieve: not to persuade people with truth, but to indoctrinate them to hate.
Jamal Kanj is the author of ‘Children of Catastrophe: Journey from a Palestinian Refugee Camp to America,’ and other books. He writes frequently on Palestine/Arab world issues for various national and international publications.
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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