As support erodes among younger Republicans, Israel has quietly poured millions into U.S. political marketing—geofencing church pews, hiring Trump-linked digital shops, recruiting influencers, and even trying to shape how AI chatbots answer Israel-Palestine questions. The strategy aims first at evangelicals; next comes the Democratic base and Gen Z. Here’s what’s happening, why it matters, and how Dearborn can respond with transparency, media literacy, and Green-aligned policy that puts people over propaganda.
“When the message can’t win the argument, the tactic becomes winning the algorithm.”
What’s happening right now
Over the past few months, Israel’s Foreign Ministry signed a cluster of multimillion-dollar U.S. contracts to rebuild support among conservatives—specifically churchgoing evangelicals—where younger cohorts have drifted away. Federal filings and investigative reporting outline three coordinated tracks:
- Targeting churchgoers with geofenced ads and a touring “October 7th Experience”
A San Diego firm, Show Faith by Works, LLC, registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), plans the “largest Christian church geofencing campaign in U.S. history,” serving “pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian” messaging to phones inside the geofenced boundaries of churches and Christian colleges across CA, AZ, NV, and CO. The plan includes recruiting pastors, mailing “pastoral resource packages,” and rolling a mobile exhibit with VR headsets into church parking lots.[1][2][3][4] - AI-driven narrative shaping with Trump-linked digital shops
Separate contracts route millions to Clock Tower X, founded by former Trump digital chief Brad Parscale, for high-volume ad production and AI-assisted distribution aimed at Gen Z across TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram—plus a stated plan to “shape outputs” of GPT-based chatbots by flooding the web with SEO-optimized content.[1][2] - Influencer networks with anonymized paid posts
A firm called Bridge(s) Partners (filings sometimes stylize as “Bridge Partners”) markets a rotating stable of influencers—each producing dozens of monthly posts—to seed pro-Israel talking points; reporting has flagged undisclosed, paid content as a potential disclosure problem under U.S. law.[1][5][6]
Multiple outlets have confirmed the broad contours: Times of Israel and JTA walk through the filings, budget numbers, and Havas Media’s intermediary role; local Arizona outlets published church lists and geofencing details; broadcast investigations and think-tank reporting add specificity on spend, targeting, and tactics; Al Jazeera zooms in on the explicit promise to influence how generative AI answers Israel-Palestine queries.[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]
“Largest Christian church geofencing campaign in U.S. history.”
—from the firm’s own FARA pitch materials[2]
Why start with evangelicals? Because the floor is moving
For decades, white evangelicals formed Israel’s most reliable grassroots bloc. That’s changing at the edges:
- Young evangelicals are breaking away. A Tel Aviv University–led study found that among evangelicals under 30, those who support neither side jumped from 25% (2018) to 42.2%, while support for Israel fell sharply across just three years.[9]
- Overall U.S. sympathy toward Israel has hit historic lows. Gallup’s 2025 trend shows 46% sympathy for Israelis—the lowest in 25 years—alongside rising unfavorable views of Israel nationwide.[12][11]
- Partisan softening on the right. Brookings and Chicago Council/Ipsos tracking show Republican support dipping several points since the war’s start, with steeper drops among independents and a pronounced anti-war surge among Democrats and the young. The generational pattern is unmistakable.[10]
Strategists can read polls. The first order of business is to shore up the base—especially young right-leaning churchgoers who live on TikTok and YouTube more than cable news. Hence: church geofencing on Sundays, Christian-college weekday blitzes, VR-trailers in parking lots, and Sunday-friendly talking points that are notably “anti-Palestinian state”—a direct swipe at any negotiated two-state horizon.[1][2][3][4]
The next front: Democrats and Gen Z
Once you accept this is a sequential persuasion plan, the next step is obvious: move into Democratic-leaning spaces and younger audiences with similar tooling—campus micro-targeting, creator pipelines, and AI‐optimized content farms.
Three reasons that pivot is likely:
- Polling gravity: Pew and Carnegie show Gen Z is markedly more skeptical of sending U.S. weapons to Israel and more sympathetic to Palestinians; Democrats have seen the steepest attitudinal swing since 2023.[11][13]
- Tool portability: The same AI-SEO stack and influencer pipes that seed evangelical feeds can be repackaged for campuses, city subreddits, and creator ecosystems that shape Democratic opinion.
- FARA breadcrumbs: The filings already name high-volume ad generation, SEO flooding, and LLM output shaping as deliverables. That isn’t a one-community toy; it’s a general-purpose persuasion engine.[1][6][7]
Key number
47,000,000 projected ad impressions in one year from the church geofencing program alone, according to the filing.[2]
How the tactics work (and why they matter)
Geofencing worship
Draw a digital fence around churches and Christian colleges; tag devices that cross it during worship/service; push bespoke ads later in the day or week. This is legal marketing—but religious-space geofencing raises red flags about chilling effects, privacy, and viewpoint targeting in sacred settings. Texas outlets report more than 200 churches were highlighted as targets in related planning; Arizona outlets published lists of 38 churches flagged in the documents.[3][4][15]
Influencers and “pastoral content”
Filings show budgets to recruit pastors for op-eds, podcasts, and social amplification; separate programs pay lifestyle and politics creators to seed narratives without always clear labeling. Undisclosed foreign-funded political messaging can cross regulatory lines and—regardless of legality—erodes trust.[5][6]
AI and “RAG poisoning”
Parscale’s shop touts shaping outcomes in GPT-style chatbots by saturating search indices and newsfeeds—classic SEO flooding—so retrieval-augmented models pull more Israel-friendly pages. Experts warn that if a political actor can flood the zone, answers tilt toward their preferred story even when the underlying facts are contested.[7]
Bots and automation
Haaretz previously documented an Israel-aligned bot that went rogue, showing how opaque automated campaigns can misfire—another reason transparency beats spin.[16]
This isn’t a moral panic about ads. It’s a structural shift: persuasion as infrastructure, rented by a foreign government, piped through America’s religious spaces, social platforms, and AI systems.
What this means for Dearborn
Dearborn sits at the intersection of faith communities, immigrant experience, and youth-heavy institutions (UM-Dearborn, Henry Ford College) under the shadow of AI-shaped media diets. Our civic immune system needs updating:
- Transparency first: Any foreign-funded messaging—whether targeting a mosque, church, campus, or neighborhood—should be clearly labeled. Platforms and PR firms must enforce conspicuous disclosures and bar geofencing inside houses of worship.
- Media literacy that actually teaches the stack: Help students, parishioners, and congregants understand how geofencing, creator marketplaces, and AI-prompt shaping work. Once you see the toolchain, you’re harder to game.
- Policy with teeth: City and state lawmakers can pursue privacy protections that restrict location-based political targeting in sensitive places (houses of worship, clinics, schools), and demand public registries for foreign-funded digital campaigns that geofence local institutions.
- Journalism that follows the money: Local outlets can download FARA filings, trace intermediary agencies (Havas et al.), and map the ad supply chain from foreign ministry budget lines to a Sunday sermon’s Instagram Reel.
- Movement integrity: A pro-human-rights, Green-aligned Dearborn politics should welcome open debate, reject collective punishment framing, and insist that AI-era persuasion plays never substitute for accountable policy, international law, or a livable peace.
“If your case is strong, you don’t need a VR trailer in a church parking lot. You need a ceasefire, accountability, and real diplomacy.”
The broader U.S. political chessboard
All signs point to phase two: when the right flank stops hemorrhaging, the same contractors and subcontractors will repurpose the kit for Democratic-leaning and youth spaces—campuses, creator communities, progressive churches and synagogues, and the AI answer layer itself. The messaging will soften—“both-sides humanitarianism,” “moderation,” “responsible restraint”—but the pipeline will be the same: paid creators, SEO farms, micro-targeted feeds, and chatbot-aware content seeding.
Democrats and Gen Z are not immune. They’re just differently persuadable—less moved by biblical claims, more by safety, rights, and international law. The communications fix won’t solve the policy problem: bombed neighborhoods, mass displacement, settlement violence in the West Bank, and a blockade-driven humanitarian catastrophe are not issues that branding can launder. The Green perspective is simple: justice is the message, and you don’t need bots for that.
What to watch next
- More filings: Expect additional FARA paperwork as budgets renew and new “non-political” NGO cutouts appear.
- Campus micro-targeting: Watch geofences expand from megachurches to universities and community colleges outside the Southwest.
- AI-ops disclosures: Look for language in SOWs about “RAG optimization,” “LLM output shaping,” or similar. Regulators should treat this like political ad placement, not harmless SEO.
- Creator paywalls: Pressure to disclose foreign funding on posts will rise. Creators who value their communities will label it—or walk away.
Dearborn can lead by example: ban location-based political ad targeting in houses of worship and schools, fund community media literacy, and partner with campus researchers to test AI answer integrity across hot-button topics. We can be the city that chooses light over engagement bait.
Sources (detailed)
[1] Times of Israel – “Israel to spend up to $4.1M in bid to bolster support among Christians in western US,” details on Show Faith by Works, Havas routing, Parscale’s Clock Tower X, and “shape GPT outputs.” Published Oct. 4, 2025. The Times of Israel
[2] Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) – “Israel to spend up to $4.1M to bolster support among Christians in western US, filings show,” geofencing churches, pastoral recruitment, mobile “Oct. 7th Experience,” and projected 47M impressions. Published Oct. 3, 2025. Jewish Telegraphic Agency
[3] KJZZ (AZ Public Radio) – “Israeli government-backed PR campaign lists 38 Arizona churches as potential targets,” citing FARA filings and geofencing language. Published Oct. 13, 2025. KJZZ
[4] FOX10 Phoenix – “How this $3.2 million Israeli campaign will digitally target Arizona Christians with anti-Palestinian ads,” breakdown of budget lines, states, and tactics. Updated Oct. 24, 2025. FOX 10 Phoenix
[5] Responsible Statecraft – Reporting on Israel’s influencer program (“Esther Project”), celebrity pitches, and potential disclosure issues. Oct. 7 & Oct. 15, 2025. Responsible Statecraft+1
[6] Al Jazeera – “Spinning genocide: How is Israel using US PR firms to frame its Gaza war?” overview of Bridges Partners, Show Faith by Works, Clock Tower X, and explicit focus on shaping outputs of ChatGPT/Gemini/Grok through content flooding. Published Oct. 30, 2025. Al Jazeera
[7] Haaretz – Coverage of Israel’s AI-hasbara contracts targeting evangelicals and churchgoers, bots, influencers, and attempts to make chatbots more Israel-friendly (article series by Omer Benjakob). Nov. 6–9, 2025. Haaretz+1
[8] Houston Chronicle – “More than 200 Texas churches highlighted in pro-Israel public relations campaign,” details on church targeting and privacy concerns. Oct. 25, 2025. Houston Chronicle
[9] Tel Aviv University – Center for the Study of the U.S. – “Recent Survey Shows Dramatic Decrease of Young Evangelical Supporters of Israel,” data on under-30 evangelicals. Feb. 12, 2024. Tel Aviv University
[10] Brookings – “Support for Israel continues to deteriorate, especially among Democrats and young people.” Aug. 6, 2025. Brookings
[11] Pew Research Center – “How Americans view Israel and the Israel-Hamas war at the start of Trump’s second term” and “Younger Americans stand out in their views.” Apr. 8, 2025 & Apr. 2, 2024. Pew Research Center+1
[12] Gallup – “Less Than Half in U.S. Now Sympathetic Toward Israelis” (Mar. 6, 2025) and “32% back Israel’s military action in Gaza, a new low” (Jul. 29, 2025). Gallup.com+1
[13] Carnegie Endowment for International Peace – “What Gen Z Thinks About U.S. Foreign Policy,” including opposition to U.S. arms for Israel. Apr. 17, 2025. Carnegie Endowment
[14] Haaretz – “Pro-Israel bot goes rogue…” cautionary tale about automated hasbara misfiring. Jan. 29, 2025. Haaretz
[15] Arizona public media & filings referenced by KJZZ – corroborating lists and FARA document links for targeted churches. Oct. 13, 2025. KJZZ
Notes for readers, clergy, creators, and students in Dearborn
- If you see location-triggered political ads on Sundays, take screenshots and report them. Ask the publisher to disclose funding and FARA links.
- Creators: if you’re offered money to post on this conflict, insist on disclosure. Your credibility is your capital.
- Educators: assign short explainers on geofencing and RAG/LLM answer shaping so students can spot these plays in the wild.
- Lawmakers: explore ordinances to ban geofenced political messaging in houses of worship and schools and require clear labeling of foreign-funded digital content.
From a Dearborn perspective—pro-peace, pro-human rights, pro-planet—this is straightforward: we don’t outsource our conscience to ad tech. The Green path is de-escalation, equal rights, and accountability under international law. No algorithm can counterfeit that.
“You can spend millions teaching people what to think. Or you can stop the bombs and let the facts speak.”
Disclaimer
This article is based on publicly available news reports, federal filings, and expert analyses cited above. Facts and interpretations reflect the best information available as of November 12, 2025. If you represent any entity mentioned and believe a correction or contextual addition is warranted, please email info@dearbornblog.com with documentation; we will review promptly and update as appropriate. Dearborn Blog publishes in good faith and is not responsible for third-party content or external links.
Footnote references: Each bracketed number in the article corresponds to the numbered source in the “Sources (detailed)” section above.
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