🇮🇱😡📱 Israeli officials are “pissed” after Brad Parscale’s massive pro-Israel influencer campaign fails spectacularly.

After the U.S. and Iran agreed to a ceasefire deal on June 17, a senior U.S. official was monitoring the online reaction when they noticed something surprising.

President Donald Trump’s aides had expected his supporters to celebrate the agreement. Instead, online influencers in Trump’s MAGA movement were excoriating it on social media. One shared an Israeli op-ed titled, “You Could Have Been the Greatest President of All—But You Failed.” Several posted the same video of Qatar’s prime minister appearing to snub Vice President J.D. Vance in Israel, arguing it showed regional powers dismissing the Trump Administration’s “naivete.” Others accused Trump of surrendering before achieving his stated objective of eliminating Iran’s nuclear program. Many of the posts appeared almost simultaneously, with similarities in language and tone.

The official began collecting screenshots, and came to believe it wasn’t a coincidence. Tracing tweets by prominent members of the online right, the official came to believe there was an unlikely figure at the center of all this criticism: Trump’s former presidential campaign manager and digital guru, Brad Parscale.

Last September, the global ad agency Havas hired Parscale’s firm, Clock Tower X, to conduct a digital campaign on behalf of the State of Israel, according to Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) filings reviewed by TIME. Under the agreement, Parscale’s operation would produce 100 original pieces of content each month, with at least 80% aimed at Gen Z audiences across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and podcasts. In a Services Agreement draft included in the filing, Parscale also pledged to amplify the campaign across social media and through “integration of narrative messaging into Salem Media Network properties and aligned distribution channels,” referring to the Christian conservative broadcasting and publishing company where he serves as Chief Strategy Officer. Parscale vowed the effort would produce at least 50 million digital impressions per month, as well as influence how AI tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini characterized Israel and the war. For all this, Israel agreed to pay Clock Tower X $1.5 million per month.

Publicly, the campaign was framed as an effort to combat rising antisemitism online. An Israeli Foreign Ministry official familiar with the arrangement says there was another strategic aim: preventing young conservatives from turning against Israel.

While Parscale acknowledges that the operation was intended to prevent young conservatives from drifting away from Israel, he says neither he nor his firms played any role in turning opinion against Trump's objectives.

Three people familiar with the campaign describe a messaging operation run through a network of interconnected firms overseen by Parscale or other firms he owns or created, such as Campaign Nucleus and Influenceable, in which he now owns a minority stake. Through private group chats, they say, conservative influencers receive suggested language for posts on social media sites such as X, Instagram and TikTok. They were then compensated based on the impressions and engagement their content generated. On its website, Clock Tower X says it has developed an “influencer ecosystem” that includes “managed networks that amplify narratives through credible, distributed voices.”

It remains unclear how much Parscale’s outfits paid creators as part of the Israel campaign. Another recent Influenceable campaign offered influencers a base payment of $2,250, plus $1 for every 1,000 views, up to 2 million views—allowing influencers to earn as much as $4,250 per post.

The Parscale-led effort continues, but neither the Trump Administration nor the Israelis appear happy about how it’s going. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government had hired Parscale to improve the nation’s standing among conservatives, only to watch support continue to erode on the American right and across the broader U.S. electorate. "We are pissed at Brad Parscale," says the Israeli official familiar with the arrangement, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. "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."

🔗 https://time.com/article/2026/07/13/brad-parscale-israel-influence-operation/