Israel's Panic Budget Just Leaked - Wait Till You See The Number

Netanyahu's career, coalition, and freedom all depend on the policies destroying Israel's image. So now he's blowing the budget to save himself. Right, so Israel has just authorised the largest propaganda budget in its history. NIS 2.35 billion shekels. About $730 million in real money. That figure was signed off between Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich for the 2026 budget, with NIS 1 billion of it already greenlit by the government, and the rest on the way. It leaked because budgets have to go through the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, and Knesset budgets are public documents. So when the Jerusalem Post got the line on what Sa'ar and Smotrich had agreed, the number went out. And the number is sheer panic. $730 million. More than four times what Israel spent the year before. About 20 times what it was spending before the war on Gaza started. That is not a marketing budget. That is a state pulling the alarm. Sa'ar himself made it clearer than anyone watching could have hoped. Speaking during the budget debate, he said image spending should be treated like investing in jets, bombs, and missile interceptors. He called the public diplomacy fight an existential issue. An existential issue he says, because it tells you exactly where Israel knows it now sits. The Foreign Minister of a state with one of the most advanced air defence systems in the world is putting Instagram ads in the same category as the Iron Dome. He has also, in the same budget round, won approval for a dedicated public diplomacy unit inside the Foreign Ministry, a permanent infrastructure for their hasbara, which is the Hebrew word for explanation, the polite term Israel uses when it very much means propaganda.