Netanyahu referred this week to a ‘community’ pushing out preferred messaging in US media — and boy are they making a princely sum
Nick Cleveland-Stout is a Research Associate in the Democratizing Foreign Policy program at the Quincy Institute
Cross-posted from Responsible Statecraft
In a meeting dedicated to harnessing pro-Israel media energy on Friday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu alluded to a cohort of Israel’s influencers. “We have to fight back. How do we fight back? Our influencers. I think you should also talk to them if you have a chance, to that community, they are very important.”
Being paid by Israel to post on social media is also very lucrative. According to previously unreported recent documents, these influencers are likely being paid around $7,000 per post on social media such as Tik Tok and Instagram on behalf of Israel.
Bridge Partners, a firm working for the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, sent a series of invoices for its “Influencer Campaign” to Havas Media Group Germany, an international media group working for Israel. The invoices detailed a sum of $900,000, starting in June and slated to end in November, for a cohort of 14-18 influencers to create content.
The document, which was filed under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, notes that the funding is for both “payments for influencers and production,” but does not provide a breakdown between the two. When taking into account the administrative production costs through Sept. 16 — legal fees, banking fees, marketing fees, and other project services noted in a separate document — that leaves an estimated sum of $552,946 for the influencers between June and September of this year.
The firm estimated that the cohort was expected to produce 75-90 posts in that time. Doing the math, that would be $6,143 per post on the low end. On the high end, each influencer could be making as much as $7,372 per post.
It is not clear which influencers are participating in the program. Havas, the firm overseeing Bridge Partners’ work, did not respond to multiple requests for comment about the project, which influencers are participating in the program, or how much each is paid.
Bridge Partners’ founders are Yair Levi and Uri Steinberg, who each own a 50% stake in the firm. Bridge Partners describes its work as assisting with “promoting cultural interchange between United States and Israel.”
The firm, which lists its business address in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Washington D.C., has also enlisted the help of a former major in the IDF spokesperson unit, Nadav Shtrauchler. For legal counsel, Levi and Steinberg have turned to Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, a firm that previously worked for controversial Israeli spyware company NSO Group.
The Bridge Partners campaign is titled “Esther Project.” It is unclear if the campaign bears any association with “Project Esther,” the Heritage Foundation’s campaign to fight anti-semitism by branding critics of Israel as part of a terrorist support network
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