US PR Firms raked in millions to make you forget about the genocide in Gaza

US marketing companies are helping to rebrand the genocide in Gaza, with millions of dollars being spent by Israel’s foreign ministry to rewrite the global narrative in real time. This isn’t just about small-time spin doctors; we’re talking about multinational firms with deep political connections, and they’re betting that highly paid marketers and PR people can make the world forget about what many respected international human rights organizations and scholars have called a genocide.

Drop Site News reported on essential work done by an American polling firm, Stagwell Global, which was commissioned by Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs to rehabilitate the country’s global image. If you’re not familiar, Stagwell was founded by Mark Penn, a pollster who helped get Bill Clinton re-elected back in 1996 and then played a part in Hillary Clinton’s 2008 primary loss to Barack Obama.

Penn is a controversial figure, famous for a Clinton campaign memo where he wrote, “The right knows Obama is unelectable except perhaps against Attila the Hun,” even going so far as to propose characterizing Obama as un-American. To be fair, Stagwell told Adweek the work in Israel was run by a “small team” and that its agencies work “across the political and issue spectrum,” but they later confirmed that the work was a “defined project with a specific brief” that has now concluded.

How the genocide in Gaza has been twisted

Per Drop Site, the report from Penn’s firm basically assessed that Israel has a really good chance of making people forget about that nasty little genocide business if they just stoke fear of “Radical Islam” and “Jihadism.” The report’s conclusion is pretty chilling: “Especially once the situation in Gaza is resolved, the room for growth in all countries [when it comes to Israel’s image] is very significant.” It seems like the core strategy here is to make people so scared that they won’t mind when you murder them, and this tactic isn’t just theory—it’s been put into practice.

Once the talking points are ready to go, they need a system to spread them quickly, and that’s where the money really starts flying. It was reported by Sludge News that SKDKnickerbocker LLC, a firm owned by Stagwell Global, signed a massive $600,000 contract to run a “bot-based program” aimed at amplifying pro-Israel narratives across all the big social platforms, including Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, and YouTube. SKDK, which was co-founded by Anita Dunn, described their plan as a strategy to “flood the zone” with their messaging.

This is all just one small part of a much bigger operation. Last year, The Times of Israel reported that the country’s foreign ministry was getting an additional $150 million (£115m) to shape public opinion. This increased hasbara budget, per the Times, “would be used to influence sentiment in the foreign press and on social media.”

It’s worth noting that SKDK did register as a foreign agent for Israel earlier this year, though Politico later reported that the firm supposedly stopped its work and “begun the process of de-registering,” with both SKDK and Stagwell denying they worked on a bot initiative, claiming their work was just “media relations.” This “flooding the zone” strategy isn’t just about changing minds—it’s about breaking them.

Marketing expert Zoe Scaman, who has been outspoken about Stagwell’s work, said, “The ‘flooding the zone’ strategy works because it doesn’t need to convince people genocide is good, it just needs to make them uncertain about what they’re seeing or tired of thinking about.” She went on to stress that “The propaganda isn’t just changing minds – it’s breaking the mechanisms people use to process moral information. When reality itself becomes contested territory, systematic killing becomes just another political disagreement.”