How Republican-linked ads stir Israel tensions to undermine Kamala Harris

One advertisement says: “Kamala Harris stands with Israel.”

The other proclaims that the “two-faced” vice president and Democratic candidate “is campaigning for Palestine and trying to get away with it”.

Those contradictory messages have aired in the weeks leading up to a close presidential election in the United States.

And both were produced and paid for by the same group: a shadowy Republican-linked political action committee (PAC) bankrolled by an organisation that has hosted events with Republican candidate and former President Donald Trump.

But the advertisements targeted two separate sets of voters. The first, touting Harris’s pro-Israel bona fides, went out in areas of Michigan with large Arab American presence, according to Google data.

Experts say the messaging blitz is designed to stoke divisions over Israel’s war in Gaza and Lebanon — and play on ethnic and religious tensions.

Maya Berry, the executive director of the Arab American Institute think tank, called the advertisements “extraordinary”.

“What we’re looking at here is the targeting of specific communities — Arab Americans in Michigan, Jewish Americans in Pennsylvania — with disinformation that is also, I would suggest, both anti-Semitic and anti-Arab,” Berry told Al Jazeera.

She and other experts warn that the sophistication of the advertisements highlights the power of “dark money” in the election system, as political groups use trickery to zero in on specific communities to discourage them from backing a candidate or voting altogether.