Benjamin Netanyahu would like you to know that the reason you loathe him is not the flattened neighborhoods, the starvation, the arson attacks, or the genocide—it’s not even the espionage, blackmail operations, or the billions in American taxpayer dollars bankrolling it all. It’s the “Russian disinformation.”
The desperate Israeli prime minister claims Russia is “poisoning” American minds with automated accounts, and he plans to fight fire with AI.
In remarks that have circulated through Israeli and American media, Netanyahu described a “disinformation front” as the eighth front in Israel’s ongoing war, accusing Qatar and “some Russian operations” of using automated accounts to “poison young American minds” against Israel.
His solution: Israel must “do a lot of AI work” to fight back, deploying what he framed as superior technology to counter the alleged bot networks .
The implication is clear: if Americans oppose what Israel is doing in Gaza, they’ve been manipulated. The problem isn’t Israeli policy. The problem is the information environment.
There’s just one issue with this framing. The polling doesn’t support it.
What Americans Actually Say
According to Pew Research Center surveys conducted over the past two years, American opposition to Israel’s actions has risen steadily and sharply—precisely as the death toll in Gaza has mounted and as documentation of the humanitarian crisis has become impossible to ignore.
By September 2025, two years into the war, 59% of Americans held an unfavorable view of the Israeli government, up from 51% in early 2024. Nearly four in ten (39%) said Israel was “going too far” in its military operation—a figure that had climbed from 27% in late 2023. An earlier Pew survey from March 2025 found 53% of Americans expressing an unfavorable opinion of Israel overall, a significant jump from 42% in 2022, before the war began.
These aren’t the numbers of a public that has been “poisoned” by “Russian disinformation”. They’re the numbers of a public that has been watching.
The same September 2025 survey found that 80% of Americans were at least somewhat concerned about starvation among Palestinians in Gaza and Israeli military strikes killing Palestinian civilians. Clear majorities expressed concern about Hamas attacking Israel in the future, too—but the concern for Palestinian civilian life was overwhelming and bipartisan.
If Qatar and Russia were running a bot campaign designed to turn Americans against Israel, they would have needed to simulate something that looks remarkably like a genuine, organic response to observable events: a rising civilian death toll, a blockade that international organizations described as deliberate starvation, and a growing body of legal analysis concluding that genocide was underway.
The Real Information War
Netanyahu’s call for an AI-driven propaganda campaign is not merely rhetorical. Morally bankrupt social media influencers have been accepting $7,000 checks to push Israeli propaganda on their followers.
A U.S.-based firm, Clock Tower X, signed a $6 million contract with the Israeli government in August 2025 to create websites and content designed to influence how AI chatbots like ChatGPT present information about Israel
Israel’s Diaspora Affairs Ministry has allocated at least $550,000 to AI projects intended to spread pro-Israel narratives, including automated commenting systems.
Netanyahu himself has publicly thanked outlets for fighting the “eighth front,” framing the battle as one of “truth” against “lies” . But the logic of an information war cuts both ways: if opposing voices are presumed to be bots, then genuine dissent can be dismissed as manipulation.
The polling suggests Americans are not waiting for Netanyahu’s AI countermeasures to make up their minds. They are forming judgments based on what they see: a war that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, a humanitarian catastrophe that international experts have labeled genocide, and a government that responds to criticism by blaming the algorithms.