Interviewing a researcher who had uncovered a $6 million Israeli contract with an American firm tasked with shaping how AI chatbots answer questions about Israel, John Kiriakou asked his guest to speculate about the campaign’s ultimate purpose, and grounded the question in a poll published two days earlier.
The figure
There was a poll released by the Washington Post on 5 October 2025, he said, in which “for the very first time a majority — a majority — of American Jews believe that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.”[1]
The question he built on it
His question followed directly. Was the whole purpose of the new contracts to turn that around — “to bring back the unquestioning pro-Israel sentiment of a majority of Americans”? And was the effort short-term or long-term?[1]
The answer
His guest said the pattern was clear from the firms themselves. Six had registered for Israel in the preceding month — more than in the previous two years combined — and most had been hired to target Generation Z, the segment whose support had broken most sharply. He cited a separate Gallup poll from that July finding that only 9 per cent of American adults aged eighteen to thirty-four supported Israel’s military action in Gaza.
Rather than changing the conduct producing the collapse, the guest argued, the strategy had been to go all in on infiltrating social media. Kiriakou did not contest that reading, and used it to move on to whether the American taxpayer was ultimately paying for the campaign.
A note on sourcing
The poll is reported here as Kiriakou characterised it on air. He gives the publisher and the date and describes the finding in a single sentence; he does not cite a sample size, a margin of error or a question wording, and no figure other than “a majority” is offered.[1]