"7000 per post? Israel's desperate influencer op backfires" with Max Blumenthal & Aaron Maté
In the video below, Max and Aaron dissect a few very fine examples of Israeli Hasbara featuring obnoxious so-called “influencers”.
Please note all of the anomalies in the video clip with the “female” - she’s no lady! - on the alleged “Flotilla” boat which Max and Aaron included in their analysis.
Below is a reposting of the article written by Nick Cleveland-Stout about this as published on the Responsible Statecraft website, which Max and Aaron referenced in their video.
Israel is paying influencers $7,000 per post
Netanyahu referred this week to a ‘community’ pushing out preferred messaging in US media — and boy are they making a princely sum
By Nick Cleveland-Stout • Responsible Statecraft • September 30, 2025
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.
Bridges 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.
It is not clear which influencers are participating in the program. Havas, the firm overseeing Bridges 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.
Bridges Partners’ founders are Yair Levi and Uri Steinberg, who each own a 50% stake in the firm. Bridges 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 Bridges Partners campaign is titled “Esther Project,” a name which bears resemblance to the Heritage Foundation’s “Project Esther,” a campaign to fight anti-semitism by branding critics of Israel as part of a terrorist support network. A Heritage spokesperson informed Responsible Statecraft that “there is no connection between The Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther announced October 2024 and Bridge Partner’s Esther Project.”
[Please watch the video below with ‘Bibi’ which I had to download separately:]
This is the description for the foregoing video clip which was posted by Anodolu Agency on Instagram and X.com, September 28, 2025:
About the author:
Nick Cleveland-Stout is a Research Associate in the Democratizing Foreign Policy program at the Quincy Institute. Previously, Nick conducted research on U.S.-Brazil relations as a 2023 Fulbright fellow at the Federal University of Santa Catarina.
The views expressed by authors on Responsible Statecraft do not necessarily reflect those of the Quincy Institute or its associates.
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.
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I think Laura from Normal Island could use an extra $7K. Maybe Israel won't get that she writes satire.