pro-Israel surveillance and smears

 

Zionist Groups in US Operate Campaigns to Quash Palestine Solidarity on Campus

Surveillance of and smear campaigns against student activists are common features of pro-Israel lobbying operations.

from TruthOut

YouTube video: The Palestinian exception to freedom of speech

As the world bears witness to the violent dispossession of Palestinians at the hands of Israel’s apartheid regime, this very same regime is conducting a parallel project of suppression, censorship and surveillance in the United States. An extensive network of U.S.-based pro-Israel lobbying groups, working hand in hand with Israeli intelligence agencies, continue to fund multimillion-dollar campaigns to destroy Palestinian liberation struggles and ensure professional, legal and financial consequences for Americans who dare to speak out against Israeli apartheid.

College campuses have become a central battleground of the lobby’s suppression efforts. Groups like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) pose a major threat to long-term bipartisan support for Israel as their campaigns unsettle pro-Israel political narratives and introduce young people to the violent realities of the occupation.

While pro-Israel organizations that intervene in campus activism often try to do so under the radar, their counterinsurgency strategies and patterns are being exposed. Truthout spoke with three SJP chapters across the country about their efforts to advocate for Palestinian liberation and the challenges of organizing grassroots campaigns in opposition to a multimillion-dollar lobbying and surveillance regime.

Surveillance and Smear Campaigns

In 2016, Al Jazeera sent an undercover journalist to intern and network within the Washington, D.C.-based Israel lobby. His reporting confirmed what many advocates for Palestine already suspected: The lobby is funding complex surveillance operations to undermine Palestine activists, particularly those on college campuses.

Jacob Baime, the executive director of the Israel on Campus Coalition (ICC), was caught on undercover footage boasting about the organization’s multimillion-dollar surveillance technologies and smear campaign tactics. The group’s strategy, he revealed, is fabricating allegations of antisemitism against activists in order to create a sense of crisis. The ICC conducts “oppositional research,” defames activists using anonymous websites and promotes these defamations using targeted Facebook promotions. Baime’s associate, Noah Pollak, admits that defamation is a major feature of the lobby’s strategy to suppress criticism of Israel, noting, “you discredit the messenger as a way of discrediting the message.”

Organizers in all of the SJP chapters Truthout spoke with emphasized the personal risks they shoulder in publicly condemning apartheid. Organizers cited these risks in their requests to participate in this article anonymously. Many activists end up with profiles on Canary Mission, a blacklisting website that publishes the private information of anti-apartheid student activists and academics. When this occurs, their names are publicly associated with allegations of antisemitism and “terrorist” affiliations. The website’s explicit aim is to prevent critics of Israel from accessing professional opportunities. Al Jazeera’s investigation revealed the Canary Mission website is operated by Baime and financed by convicted American-Israeli real-estate mogul Adam Milstein. Milstein is the founder is the Israel-American Council and sits on the board of prominent pro-Israel lobbying organizations, including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), StandWithUs, Birthright Israel and the Israel on Campus Coalition.

For Palestinian students, the risk is even greater. A member of SJP at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign explains, “Many of us are ourselves Palestinian and of course run the additional risk of being banned from Palestine by the Israeli government when we are vocal about the atrocities in Palestine.”

Running surveillance and smear campaigns against student activists is a common feature of pro-Israel lobbying operations. Last year, SJP members at Tufts University were nonconsensually recorded and subsequently doxxed by Israel lobbyists attending a private, virtual event. Tufts SJP — which was campaigning to end a university program that sent Tufts University police officers on training trips to Israel — was targeted by pro-Israel lobbying groups with a barrage of attacks and accusations of antisemitism. Some of these organizations included StandWithUs, the Anti-Defamation League, the Louis D. Brandeis Center and a variety of pro-Israel news sources.

“Many of us are ourselves Palestinian and of course run the additional risk of being banned from Palestine by the Israeli government when we are vocal about the atrocities in Palestine.”

A member of Tufts SJP says that the organization is being targeted because of how effective it has been at changing the narrative about Palestine on campus. She explains, “We [SJP members] now have to be very careful to conceal our identities and have become adapted to dissociating our names from our work.” But by building a broad coalition of social justice organizations at Tufts, “we have been able to connect Palestinian struggles for freedom to the struggles of others working towards collective liberation.”

“Lawfare”

Coordinated media attacks play a particularly important role for the pro-Israel lobby. By accusing SJP’s student activists of antisemitism, these organizations legitimize the lobby’s assertion that advocacy for Palestinian rights on college campuses creates an unsafe learning environment for Jewish students. The lobby is leveraging this narrative to accomplish something much more consequential — to redefine civil rights legislation and anti-discrimination policies to include criticism of Israel as a form of antisemitism.

“Lawfare,” or legislative warfare, is a key aspect of pro-Israel lobby strategies. Organizations like the Brandeis Center lobby university administrators and tech companies, as well as local, state and federal legislatures, to adopt definitions of antisemitism that explicitly include critiques of Israel. These definitions ultimately punish students standing in opposition to Israeli apartheid.

In September 2020, the SJP chapter at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) successfully passed a student government resolution calling on the university to divest from companies operating in illegal West Bank settlements. The resolution garnered national outrage from pro-Israel news outlets, and the names of activists involved in the campaign were eventually added to Canary Mission’s public blacklist.

Two months later, two students in collaboration with the Brandeis Center, a pro-Israel lobbying organization based in Washington, D.C., filed an official complaint with the U.S. Department of Education alleging that the UIUC administration had failed to protect students from antisemitism.

Filing complaints with the Department of Education became a highly effective tool for Israel lobbying organizations under the Trump administration. Kenneth Marcus, the founder of the Brandeis Center — the very organization filing antisemitism complaints against universities — was nominated by President Trump to act as assistant secretary for civil rights within Betsy DeVos’s Department of Education. There, Marcus announced the department would adopt a new “working definition” of antisemitism that would include criticisms of Israel. In practical terms, Marcus paved the way for pro-Israel students and organizations to leverage the financial and legal power of the Department of Education against universities that fail to take action against Palestine advocacy on their campuses.

The Brandeis Center complaint filed against UIUC bundles instances of explicit antisemitism — like the presence of swastika graffiti on campus property — with criticism of Israel and advocacy for Palestinian liberation. A Brandeis Center lobbyist even admitted during a campaign at the University of Tennessee that the real antisemitism that Jewish students faced on the campus was from Christian evangelicals in the community trying to proselytize them, not the pro-Palestine activists at the center of the Brandeis Center’s lobbying efforts.

Filing complaints with the Department of Education became a highly effective tool for Israel lobbying organizations under the Trump administration.

The UIUC university administration, under increased legal scrutiny, ultimately released a joint statement with pro-Israel organizations. The statement expressed a commitment to combating antisemitism on campus, which would include anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel.

On May 14, 2021 — amidst the height of bombings of Gaza and one of the largest Palestinian uprisings since the intifadas — Illinois General Assembly Minority Leader Jim Durkin introduced new legislation calling upon the University of Illinois to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which pro-Israel organizations like the Brandeis Center endorse. This definition expands conceptions of antisemitism to include criticism of Israeli government policy and challenges to Zionism. Durkin told the Jewish Insider, “this resolution, I hope, puts the university on notice that we’re watching, and we want you to resolve this in the appropriate way.”

The progression of pro-Israel lobby suppression campaigns on college campuses.

Jewish-led organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow have continuously rejected the lobby’s efforts to conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism. On the contrary, prominent Jewish activists and scholars such as Noam Chomsky and Judith Butler have argued that conflating anti-Zionism and antisemitism can itself be antisemitic: For instance, provocations by Christian Zionists and evangelicals who suggest Jews living in the United States ultimately belong in Israel. Similarly, the suggestion that critique of Israeli state violence is antisemitic necessitates the belief that Israel, and its violent colonial expansion, reflect the will of the Jewish people as a whole rather than Israeli government policy.

Regardless, the pro-Israel lobby’s coordinated campaigns to target SJP’s activism have achieved their desired effect. As a Palestinian member of SJP UIUC explains, “The media and legal scrutiny have made many students afraid to speak out,” which raises the “stakes” for pro-Palestine advocacy. Student activists are forced to reallocate their energies away from effective advocacy for Palestine and towards addressing suppression campaigns.

What’s Next?

For Israel, the war of public opinion, particularly in the West, remains an essential feature of its national security strategy. Israel enjoys unconditional and bipartisan political support within the United States Congress, an asset leveraged to the tune of $10 million each day in military aid. It’s no surprise that the Israeli government invests enormously in preserving public support for Israel and subsequently working to neutralize organizations, groups and individuals engaged in critique of Israel’s illegal occupation and institutionalized apartheid.

Both the Trump and Biden administrations have acted in lockstep with this systemic repression campaign. In September 2020, the U.S. State Department under Trump committed to “target,” “fight” and “kill” the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement (BDS), a nonviolent economic boycott campaign modeled after a similar campaign to fight South African apartheid. The Biden administration also signaled its commitment to disenfranchising Palestine advocates when his Secretary of State Antony Blinken affirmed that the administration “enthusiastically embraces” the IHRA definition of antisemitism.

The consequences of these coordinated suppression efforts are not hypothetical. They consume the political and professional careers of many Palestine solidarity activists. Recently, amid the bombing of Gaza, Emily Wilder, a Jewish journalist with the Associated Press, was fired following a campaign from right-wing groups who condemned her years of advocacy with Students for Justice in Palestine. It’s evident that Israel’s continued investment in surveillance and defamation campaigns is likely to continue to have a chilling effect, not only on the movement for Palestinian liberation but more widely on free speech.

Jeff Klein on AIPAC

Here's a very good description of how AIPAC, the heart of the Israel lobby, manages to pull remarkable unanimous votes in the Senate by Jeff Klein. The bottom line is that in a democracy, if you want debate on any issue, there has to be clout on both sides of it. Palestinians have essentially none in the United States while Jews who are Zionist have a tremendous amount. The description of how Senator Elizabeth Warren has quickly been brought into the herd is particularly interesting.

How AIPAC Rules

by JEFF KLEIN

Last week the Senate passed Resolution 65, mandating a new round of sanctions against Iran and promising to support Israel if it should choose to launch a unilateral war.  The bill contradicted explicit US policy in a number of areas:  it imposed secondary penalties on US allies; it lowered  the bar for military action to Israel’s preferred language of “nuclear capability” rather than acquisition of a nuclear weapon; and it interferes with the attempt to reach a diplomatic resolution to the nuclear impasse at a delicate time.  No wonder Secretary of State John Kerry implored Congress not to pass the bill when he testified before the Senate Foreign relations committee last month. 

Nevertheless, the Senate bill came to a vote on May 22, and the result – in a roll call vote – was 99-0 in favor of the bill.

In the last Congress, another Iran Sanctions measure – an amendment attached to the 2012 Defense Appropriation Bill — was also opposed by the Obama administration. The provision, probably illegal under WTO rules, mandated secondary penalties against foreign banks which did business with Iran’s oil sector (US banks were already banned from doing so).  Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner wrote a letter to the Senate Armed Services Committee “to express the Administration’s strong opposition to this amendment because, in its current form, it threatens to undermine the effective, carefully phased, and sustainable approach we have taken to build strong international pressure against Iran.”  Two State Department officials of the Administration testified against the amendment; Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry also opposed the measure.

 However, when the amendment’s sponsors insisted on a roll call vote, it passed 100-0.  Even Senator Kerry voted for the measure he had earlier opposed.

 To understand how this can happen, it is useful to look at the Israel Lobby’s legislative MO — as well as the larger dynamic around Israel advocacy within the US Congress, in our political system and in the press.

AIPAC, of course, is the premier Israel Lobby organization.  Every March at its annual Conference the group assembles a huge turnout of moneyed and grassroots lobbyists.  Scores of members of Congress from both parties and political aspirants of all stripes jockey to express their loyalty to the Lobby.  It is at these conferences that AIPAC’s major legislative priorities for the year are unveiled.  This always includes renewed (and increased) military aid for Israel and for the last ten years or so various measures to oppose, sanction and preferably make war on to overthrow the Islamic Republic of Iran — Israel’s last remaining serious military opponent in the Middle East.

Here is the way it works.

–In the days before the yearly AIPAC conference in early March, reliable members of Congress from both parties – preferably non-Jews – are prevailed upon to submit AIPAC-drafted bills with a substantial number of initial bi-partisan sponsors.  This year the highlighted legislation included House Res. 850, The Nuclear Iran Prevention Act of 2013,introduced on February 28 by California Democrat Rep. Edward Royce and 31 co-sponsors (16 Democrats and 15 Republicans); and Senate Res. 65, Strongly Supporting the Full Implementation of United States and International Sanctions On Iran, also introduced on February 28 by the every dependable Senator Lindsey Graham [R-SC] and 22 initial co-sponsors (13 Democrats and 9 Republicans).  Another bill, apparently a late entry from the March 2-4 Conference itself, did not follow the preferred pattern.  House Res. 938, The United States-Israel Strategic Partnership Act of 2013 was introduced hurriedly on March 4 by Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen [R-FL27] with only two Democratic co-sponsors.  These three bills embodied AIPAC’s 2013 declared legislative priorities: Prevent Iranian Nuclear Weapons Capability; Strengthen U.S.-Israel Strategic Cooperation;  Support Security Assistance for Israel.

– Then, before leaving Washington, the AIPAC Conference attendees launch themselves on Capitol Hill to recruit more co-sponsors for the AIPAC bills.  Initially, this is mostly pushing on an open door, as many legislators are eager to join the bandwagon;  some were simply not asked earlier in the interest of bi-partisan balance; some were not quick enough to get listed when the initial bills were introduced.  Within a few weeks of the AIPAC Conference Senate Res. 65 had an additional 55 co-sponsors, House Res. 850 added more than 250 sponsors; and House Res. 983 more than 150.

–The effort continues to line up more cosponsors with the aim of securing an irresistible momentum for the bills.  Many legislators simply take more time to pin down; others (few) might have been reluctant holdouts persuaded not to find themselves isolated against the AIPAC juggernaut.  An AIPAC staffer once famously bragged that “in twenty-four hours, we could have the signatures of seventy senators on a napkin”. It took a little longer this time, but Senate Res. 65 already had 91 co-sponsors before it came up for a vote. House Res. 850, still pending, now has 351 co-sponsors; H. Res. 983 has 271.

–Not all AIPAC-initiated legislation follows this pattern.  Other bills or amendments come up during the year and are pushed as opportunities or needs present themselves.  Some of these bills – and the frequent “Congressional Letters” of support for Israel — have little practical impact on policy but are part of AIPAC’s promotion of discipline among US legislators.  I call it “puppy training,” so that members of Congress are reflexively obedient to AIPAC’s legislative agenda.  The 29 standing ovations for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he addressed Congress in 2011 are a good illustration of the outcome.  Pavlov had nothing on the Israel Lobby.

It might be tempting to conclude – as AIPAC and its allies contend – that Congress acts in response to the overwhelming public support for Israel.  However, it is important to observe that votes on the Lobby’s bills are rarely much publicized in the US – as opposed to Israeli –mainstream media.  Of course, the pro-Israel political machine, the Rightwing and Zionist blogosphere do pay close attention, ever-ready to reward or punish legislative misbehavior. Most of the public remains, by design, completely unaware of these political maneuverings.  Not long ago, House Republican Whip Eric Cantor proposed voting separately on military aid to Israel so as to insulate it from potential cuts to Pentagon spending, but he was quickly persuaded to drop the idea.  The Israel Lobby prefers to have the $3 billion plus in annual aid to Israel discretely hidden within the vast Defense Appropriation Bill.

So the power of AIPAC derives not fundamentally from Israel’s vast popularity.  Although opinion polls do regularly confirm the public supports Israel at a much higher level than the Palestinians (no surprise), substantial pluralities still prefer that the US stay neutral in the conflict.  I have seen no polling about support for the billions in military aid to Israel each year.  It is hard to imagine that the majority response would be anything but negative in the light of cuts to funding other popular government programs. Not surprisingly the Lobby prefers “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” on the question of yearly $billions for Israel.

The apparent dominance of the Israel Lobby in Congress stems from what I would call “asymmetric politics”.  AIPAC represents the power of a well-funded and single-issue political machine.  It is quick to punish recalcitrant legislators – or to reward good behavior with dollars and campaign support from the many PACS and rich donors who take its direction.

On the other side, the advocates for Palestinian rights are scattered, poor and little threat to incumbent legislators. The Arab and Muslim communities cannot match the Israel Lobby’s Jewish financial base or it mobilized grassroots numbers. Many of their communities are relatively new in the US, insecure and targeted by the well-funded complex of anti-Arab, anti-Muslim mobilization since 9/11.  The great mass of the public are simply not involved and not paying much attention to the Israel-Palestine conflict or much aware of pro-Israel political power in Congress.

Seen in this light, members of Congress – ever averse to risk, as are all elected officials – are behaving rationally when they defer to the Israel Lobby.  They pay little or no price for playing ball with AIPAC and risk a backlash with no apparent reward if they don’t.

As for the broader anti-war and progressive movements, even when they have adopted good positions on Palestinian rights or opposing the Lobby-supported drive for war with Iran, these issues usually turn out to be “expendable” in comparison to other agendas.

Two recent examples will illustrate this dynamic.

This Spring, a well-established national peace organization, with a significant branch in Massachusetts, decided to endorse Democratic Rep. Ed Markey prior to the special primary election for John Kerry’s vacated Senate seat.   Markey is on the right side of most issues progressive hold dear, but he was also an initial supporter of the Iraq War.  And he has become a very reliable backer of Israel-Lobby legislative priorities, where in Massachusetts he is something of an outlier on these issues. He was among only three Mass delegation co-sponsors of H. Res. 850 and among only two of H. Res. 983.  He is also a dependable signer of whatever letter AIPAC is collecting signatures for, such as the one supporting the assault on Gaza a few years ago.

Some members of the peace organization argued in favor of no endorsement for Markey – at least in the primary – because of his poor record on Iran and Palestine, but they were outvoted.  The majority argued that an endorsement and fundraising for Markey would give them “access” to promote better positions on these issues after the election.  A cynic may wonder whether Markey, or any other progressive legislator would take this seriously.  A long-serving national board member of the group resigned in protest.

Then there is Massachusetts’ celebrity Senator Elizabeth Warren.  Many of her progressive supporters were uneasy over the boiler-plate pro-Israel language on her campaign web site, however there was little doubt that she was a genuine populist on other issues and would bring a rare progressive voice to the halls of Congress.  This, in large measure, she has done.

However, when push came to shove, Sen. Warren was persuaded to add her name as a sponsor to Senate Res. 65 – late to be sure (not until May 7) – and she joined in the unanimous vote in favor of the bill.  Now Warren, a faculty member of Harvard Law School undoubtedly knows the score on the Israel and Iran issues.  It is hard to imagine she hasn’t had certain conversations in the Faculty Club about Palestine, heard about the many events at her school on issues of Human Rights and International Law in the Middle East or understood the role of the Israel Lobby in war-promotion and military spending.

No doubt Warren rationalized her vote pragmatically.  Why risk becoming an isolated Senate freshman and losing her political credibility?  Why not submit to what was required in order to give her space to battle on other political issues she cared about?  For Senator Warren – as for so many progressives and Liberals — her seat is worth the price of a vote for AIPAC.

This is the way asymmetric politics works for the Israel Lobby.  It is the dynamic that puts our country in opposition to most of the world with respect to International Law and peace in the Middle East.  And it may yet succeed in getting us into a war with Iran.

Jeff Klein is a retired local union president, peace and justice activist, Palestinian rights supporter.  He just started a blog at http://atmyangle.blogspot.com/ and can be reached at jjk123@comcast.net

AIPAC under discussion

I've only recently become aware of Hillary Mann Leverett. She was once an employee of AIPAC who, she says, came to her senses. I've found her to be one of the most incisive and trenchant observers of the situation of Israel in relationship to the United States.

In the following video, as usual not from one of the mainstream U.S. media outlets but from Al Jazeera, Leverett looks at the influence of AIPAC along with John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Larry Greenfield of Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs.







Leverett has some comments on this program at her own website The Race for Iran, a blog always worth reading.

Mearsheimer on AIPAC and Israel

John Mearsheimer, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, co-authored The Israel Lobby with Stephen Walt. The book was a breakthrough if only because it brought out in the open what Washington DC insiders have known for decades.

He is always worth a listen because he speaks clearly and concisely and, I believe, makes a good case. In this short (13 minutes) interview, Mearsheimer sums up very well the ongoing power of AIPAC as illustrated by the current humiliation of President Obama. He also explains his view that Israel will become an apartheid state.

Should you want to hear more from Mearsheimer, I recommend a full hour video presentation of his, The Future of Palestine: Righteous Jews vs. the New Afrikaners