Rabbi Pesach Wolicki, the executive director of Israel365 Action, said he felt compelled to arrange a high-profile visit to Israel this month for a group of young MAGA influencers because of what he perceives to be Israel’s failure to appeal to the Make America Great Again movement amid slippage in support for the Jewish state from younger conservatives. 

“Let’s put it frankly, the way it came about was that the MAGA movement did not have any authentic voices out of Israel communicating to it in this war,” Wolicki told Jewish Insider in an interview on Wednesday about the trip. “Once you understand the language [that MAGA supporters speak], you realize how much 90% of the Jewish world does not understand it.” 

Israel365 Action, a subset of Israel365, the advocacy group that describes itself as an “Orthodox Jewish institution that believes that Jews and Christians must respect one another,” began organizing the visit late last year, after Wolicki was introduced to a group of pro-Israel individuals involved in managing and promoting conservative influencers. Wolicki declined to reveal the names of the individuals, whom he met in December at America Fest, an annual event put on by the MAGA-aligned campus advocacy group Turning Point USA.

“We met a couple guys there who are involved in the social media business and in the MAGA world, involved with a lot of creators and accounts on the business end of things, who are pro-Israel and concerned. We decided to work together and create a trip for social media influencers from this space to show them Israel, and they would do the recruiting, because they’re in that space,” Wolicki told JI. 

“I’d be there as the persona that I occupy in the movement, as this Orthodox rabbi in MAGA, and we’re going to do this VIP trip to Israel for social media influencers. Israel365 would put the trip on, we’d find the funding for it, and they would recruit the participants. That’s how this came to be,” he continued. 

Some of that funding came through the Israeli Foreign Ministry, which was revealed in July to have approved an $86,000 contract with Israel365 Action to bankroll the trip. 

Among the influencers who took part in the delegation were Jayne Zirkle, Xavier DeRousseau, Cam Higby, Fabian Garcia, Lance Johnston and Avery Daye.

Johnston, who goes by LanceVideos on social media, told JI that he was introduced to the idea of traveling to the Jewish state through Higby, a close personal friend and fellow influencer attending the trip. Johnston said Higby had put him in touch with the trip organizers, whom he told last December that he had never been to Israel but would “love to go at some point.”

“They said, ‘You know what? Maybe we could figure out a trip.’ Things just kind of happened from there. We just got into a bunch of group chats and organized everything. We invited more influencers on the trip and it got really big. It was really, really cool to see. It didn’t take very long for everything to get into place. It all kind of spawned at a dinner where I literally said, ‘Hey, are the girls hot in Israel?’ They said yes, so I said I was down to go,” Johnston said. 

Once there, the group drove from Jerusalem to northern Israel to visit the Golan Heights and the border with Syria, and later in the week toured the sites of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks in southern Israel later. Israel365 sponsored a barbecue at the IDF’s Yahalom base at the conclusion of the trip where they were joined by soldiers who had served in Gaza, including an elite combat engineer who gave them a tour of the grounds. 

The influencers also met with an array of politicians, journalists and everyday Israelis, including U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee; Israeli Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli; and Khaled Abu Toameh, a journalist who was previously the Palestinian affairs correspondent for The Jerusalem Post. 

Wolicki noted that trip organizers encouraged all those invited to meet with the influencers to spend the day with their group and engage socially, allowing participants to form meaningful connections with individual Israelis.

“One of the big things that we did on this trip was that everywhere we went, we tried as hard as we could to just simply add in people to the trip, not guides, but first person stories from real people,” Wolicki told JI. “These are people who are communicators of stories. These are social media influencers. So when I’m thinking about the itinerary, [I’m asking myself] what people can I add that tell Israel’s story?”

Johnston said his experience with Israeli soldiers at the barbecue disabused him of prejudices he previously held about the IDF, believing them to be anti-Christian. 

“We actually had lunch with these guys and just hung out. They were really, really nice to us and it was a really, really, a stark contrast of what I’d been told online. People were literally saying to me in America: ‘I do not trust the IDF, and I believe if I met them in person, they might beat me up or hurt me just because I’m an American or even Christian.’ I was openly wearing my Christian crosses, and I have a Christian tattoo right on my arm, and I was wearing a short sleeve shirt. They didn’t mention it at all,” the Gen Z influencer said. 

“They don’t care that we’re Christian or Americans. They were just like guys our age fighting in a war. And I would like to go out and grab a beer with them. They were just kind of like homies. It was really, really cool. And it’s like, completely different than what the lefties and even the far right are saying about these people. They’re not that,” he added. 

Zirkle told JI that getting to meet “many locals from different walks of life … really showed what a culturally rich country it is. It’s very much a melting pot, which I think is a side that isn’t often shown in Western media.”

News of the trip began circulating earlier this summer, after the Foreign Ministry contract was confirmed by Israeli media, prompting swift backlash against some of the influencers from within the MAGA movement. “They got backlash from the followers for coming on this trip. They’ve been subjected to attacks for coming on this trip, and that was a subject of conversation among them throughout the trip, was the heat that they were getting from their audiences,” Wolicki explained. 

Zirkle, for instance, was fired from Steve Bannon’s “WarRoom” podcast for her participation in the trip. 

“Jane Zirkle was on Steve’s staff for three-and-a-half years, and she had previously worked for Rudy Giuliani. She’s a well-known figure in MAGA. She was also a field reporter for Bannon, besides running his social media, and was one of the guest hosts who rotated hosting the show while Steve was in prison last year for four months. Because she came on the trip, Steve fired her,” Wolicki said. 

Wolicki said that Bannon’s ire stemmed from the trip being funded by the Israeli Foreign Ministry and noted that Bannon had stopped having him as a guest to discuss Middle East developments in recent months, as the one-time Trump advisor soured on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for striking Iran’s nuclear facilities.. Prior to this summer, Bannon frequently had Wolicki on “WarRoom,” including to criticize prominent right-wing figures such as Tucker Carlson for their anti-Israel leanings. 

Asked about her firing, Zirkle told JI in a statement, “Regarding ‘WarRoom’: I chose to go to Israel and I’m proud to have gone to Israel.” She declined to discuss the matter further. 

“Everywhere we went, we witnessed the resilience of the Israeli spirit. From its founding, Israel has been surrounded by those who wish to destroy it. Yet, instead of being defined by trauma, Israel chooses to be defined by life,” she said when asked for her reflections on the visit. 

A spokesperson for Bannon and “WarRoom” did not respond to JI’s request for comment on Zirkle’s firing or his objections to the Israel365 trip. 

Despite the blowback for some attendees, Wolicki said he witnessed several of the influencers change their attitudes toward the Jewish state in real time. 

“As the trip went on, I kept hearing over and over again, in different ways, from different participants, that, ‘Oh my gosh, everything I’ve been told about Israel and the media is a lie.’ Along with that, which sounds like a positive, there’s also the realization about how bad Israel is at getting its message out,” Wolicki said. “There was a sense throughout the trip that they were witnessing things that other people are not necessarily seeing, and that was meaningful to them.”

Johnston was one of those participants. The Gen Z influencer told JI that he “used to be pretty anti-Israel before the trip” but said he had evolved his views during the visit. 

“I wasn’t antisemitic or anything, I just didn’t want to send a lot of money to Israel to fight wars that apparently we’re not supposed to be involved in,” Johnston explained of his prior opinion. “Now I see that sending them military equipment, not necessarily sending troops on the ground because the IDF is actually doing pretty good of a job, I’d like to say not a perfect job because nobody’s perfect, but they’re doing a pretty good job using our equipment. I’m now more like, I’m fine with sending them weapons.”