[For years the Israel on Campus Coalition—a little-known
organization with links to Israeli intelligence—has used student
informants to spy on pro-Palestinian campus groups.]
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ISRAEL’S WAR ON AMERICAN STUDENT ACTIVISTS  
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James Bamford
November 17, 2023
The Nation
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_ For years the Israel on Campus Coalition—a little-known
organization with links to Israeli intelligence—has used student
informants to spy on pro-Palestinian campus groups. _

Students gather in support of Palestine at Harvard University.,
Joseph Prezioso / AFP via Getty

 

As 2,000-pound bombs crash down on crowded refugee camps in Gaza, the
seismic reverberations are increasingly being felt on campuses
throughout the United States. “When a 2,000-pound bomb hits the
ground, the earth turns to liquid,” Marc Garlasco, a military
expert, told _The Washington Post_
[[link removed]].
“It’s like an earthquake.”

On October 11, a boxy white truck pulled up in front of the main
entrance to Harvard University, a black wrought iron gate adorned with
a stylish Georgian Revival wreath. Attached to the truck’s sides and
back were three garish billboard-style LED screens displaying the
images of dozens of students. Beneath their faces were the words
“Harvard’s Leading Antisemites
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and the putative URL “HarvardHatesJews.com.”

The doxxing truck was sponsored by the right-wing group Accuracy in
Media
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its targets were students who had signed a letter
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by the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee. “Today’s events did
not occur in a vacuum,” it said. “For the last two decades,
millions of Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to live in an
open-air prison. Israeli officials promise to ‘open the gates of
hell,’ and the massacres in Gaza have already commenced.” Leaving
Harvard, the truck began a McCarthyite search and destroy mission,
driving to the homes of each of the students to out their locations
and ruin their future job prospects. Some of those targeted would
later receive death threats
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others worried about what might come next, with at least one losing a
job offer. “I have my career on the line,” said one concerned
student. Many other forms of harassment targeting pro-Palestinian
students have been taking place across the country. The question is
whether Israeli intelligence is behind some of it.

Since March, I have detailed in _The Nation_ Israel’s numerous
illegal espionage and covert action operations targeting Americans in
the United States—all without the slightest interference by the FBI.
Among them:

* Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s deployment in 2016 of a
clandestine agent to the US to provide secret intelligence to the
Trump campaign
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return for a promise to recognize Jerusalem as the undivided capital
of the State of Israel—thereby trashing any hope for a negotiated
settlement with the Palestinians.
* Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan’s long career as Israel’s
key nuclear spy
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the US, secretly supplying Israel with highly restricted nuclear
materials, including nearly 1,000 krytrons, the triggers for nuclear
bombs—bombs Israel claims it doesn’t have.
* Israel’s espionage and covert action operations within the US
targeting American activists advocating for Palestinian human rights
included deploying agents from Psy-Group
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a secretive psychological warfare outfit, to spy on and harass
Americans while hiding Israel’s role.

Next, Netanyahu secretly turned his attention to American students,
faculty, and campus groups in the US fighting for Palestinian rights.
Fearing the growing support for the Palestinian cause on college
campuses, he established a covert front to spy on, harass, intimidate,
and disrupt these groups. Critical to this effort is the little-known
Washington-based Israel on Campus Coalition (ICC). For years the
organization, with links to both Israeli intelligence and AIPAC, has
used student informants belonging to Jewish and pro-Israel campus
organization in the US to gather intelligence on pro-Palestinian
students and groups.

“The ICC pools resources from all of the campus organizations. So
that they’re tapped in on all angles,” Lila Greenberg, the senior
national field organizer for AIPAC at the time, told Tony Kleinfeld
[[link removed]] in
2016. At the time, Kleinfeld, who is Jewish, was posing as a
pro-Israel activist while working as an undercover reporter for an Al
Jazeera documentary. He also met with Jacob Baime, currently the
ICC’s chief executive officer and the former national field
director [[link removed]] for AIPAC. In his
Washington headquarters, Baime boasted to Kleinfeld about the power of
his organization to secretly attack American students who support
Palestinian rights. “We built up this massive national political
campaign to crush them,” he said.

To Kleinfeld’s hidden camera, Baime described ICC as basically a
clandestine Israeli military command. “It’s modeled on General
Stanley McCrystal’s counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq. We’ve
copied a lot from that strategy that has been working really well for
us, actually. And one of the pieces is this Operations and
Intelligence Brief.” That intelligence brief, containing secret
details about targeted American students and faculty, is then passed
on to Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, according to Ian
Hersh [[link removed]], then ICC’s director
of operations and now its chief operating officer. Like Baime, Hersh
is a former top AIPAC official. “In terms of information sharing, we
did add the Ministry of Strategic Affairs to our Operations and
Intelligence Brief,” he said
[[link removed]].
Baime told Kleinfeld that he also “coordinates with” and
“communicates with” the ministry. Kleinfeld asked if he might be
able to join in on the conversations occasionally, but Baime said no.
“It’s a pretty sensitive conversation.”

They were striking revelations, indicating that Israel is illegally
operating a secret nationwide campus spying operation within the
United States, while Baime and his staff may potentially be acting as
covert foreign agents for Israel. Once the data on pro-Palestinian
students is passed on to Israeli intelligence, it can be used for
covert operations to “crush” them, in Baime’s words.

In 2016, for example, Israel’s Psy-Group, a psychological warfare
organization linked to Mossad, launched Project Butterfly. Secretly
financed by wealthy Jewish donors
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the United States, among its objectives was to use phony information
to attack and destroy the reputations of its targets and brand them as
terrorists. Ram Ben-Barak, then a top Psy-Group official and a former
deputy director of Mossad, was enthusiastic about Butterfly and said
the operation was like “a war.”

Among the many victims was Hatem Bazian
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a lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley and a leader in
the pro-Palestinian movement. One morning, as he was about to drive
his daughter to school, he discovered a flyer on the windshield of his
and other cars parked along the street of his quiet North Berkeley
neighborhood. To his horror, the flyers contained his picture along
with the caption in bold capital letters “HE SUPPORTS TERROR.” A
dossier was also compiled on Bazian that included false and misleading
data as well as phony charges of “anti-Semitism.”

“Bazian,” noted a secret Psy-Group report, “got our full
attention in the last few weeks.” The document noted, “a HUMINT
[on‑the-ground human intelligence] operation is conducted on each of
the [targeted] individuals.”

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According to Baime
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the ICC’s war-room-like command center with its wall of flat-screen
monitors uses the most advanced intelligence technology on the market.
At the time it included Radian6, which monitored online conversation
in real time from more than 650 million social media sources,
including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs, and other online
communities.

A dashboard provided geolocation data and other details. “We’re
phasing that out over the next year and we’re bringing on more
sophisticated technology that is developed in Israel,” Baime said.
“The research operation is very high-tech. When I got here a few
years ago the budget was $3,000. Today it’s like a million and a
half, or more. Probably it’s 2 million even at this point. I don’t
even know, it’s huge. It’s a massive budget.” It has since grown
to $9 million.

The group even paid over $1 million to a high-powered Washington
political consulting firm, FP1, to promote social media posts
attacking students who supported Palestinian rights. Hidden behind its
opaque digital wall, the ICC is free to name and shame, leveling
spurious and outrageous charges of anti-Semitism and terrorism—just
like the doxxing truck at Harvard (although there is no indication
that that was an ICC operation). Intimidation is the goal—all
without fear of being held to account, or disclosing their direct
links to the Israeli government. Secrecy is therefore paramount. “We
have a lot of communications capabilities, and what’s most
interesting about it, I think,” said Baime to the hidden camera,
“is that 90 percent of the people who pay attention to this space
very closely have no idea what we’re actually doing, which I like.
We do it securely and anonymously and that’s the key.”

Once collected, data from the ICC’s web of campus spies and
high-tech Israeli surveillance equipment then flows to the
Anti-Defamation League
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Despite its name, the ADL largely acts as a pro-Israel propaganda
organization, with director Jonathan Greenblatt spending much of his
time doing media interviews about students and groups opposed to
Israel’s illegal occupation and human rights violations. “These
radical actors
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and unapologetically regularly denigrate and dehumanize Jews,”
Greenblatt said in 2022—pointing the finger at two peaceful student
groups, Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine.

The ADL then uses the information from the ICC’s campus spying
operation, along with other data, to create an annual report:
“Anti-Israel Activism on U.S. Campuses.” Despite the endless
fearmongering, the results for 2021–22
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negligible: “One physical assault; 11 instances of vandalism; and 19
instances of harassment” among millions of students at 359 campuses
across the country. Nevertheless, money is apparently no problem for
the ICC. Seeing the massive numbers of young people taking part in
pro-Palestinian rallies around the world, organizers of this week’s
March for Israel rally in Washington were apparently concerned few
students would show up for the event. The ICC therefore offered
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student $250 to attend
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Which leads to the question, where does the ICC’s money come from?

Much of the financing comes from Adam Milstein, a shadowy convicted
crook with very close ties both to Israel and to the late Sheldon
Adelson. In 2015 Milstein was at Adelson’s side in Las Vegas
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Benjamin Netanyahu, the billionaire casino owner formed a secret task
force
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fight the pro-Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS)
movement. “We know what happened during the Nazis in Germany,”
Milstein said. “The boycott movement is not about borders, it’s
not about policies, it’s about eradicating the Jews living in
Israel.”

Listed as the sole board member
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major donor to the ICC, in 2009 Milstein was convicted of federal tax
evasion and sent to prison. Then, soon after his release, he made a
very odd request to the Justice Department. He wanted to fly to Israel
where, among other things, he would “meet with Israel’s Prime
Minister,” Benjamin Netanyahu. The Justice Department granted the
request.

Critical for Israel is hiding all government and financial links to US
organizations covertly targeting Americans. To accomplish this, the
Ministry of Strategic Affairs created a phony, innocent-appearing
front organization, “Concert” (formerly Kela Shlomo). Supposedly a
nonprofit Israeli “charity,” it was funded by approximately $35
million
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the cabinet. A key reason for attempting to hide the ministry’s US
operations behind the phony charity was concern that Americans could
be arrested under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Before
the decision to create the front, the ministry attempted to pass
millions of dollars to American Jewish organizations to pay for
support and cooperation in carrying out its clandestine operations.
One involved flying individuals to Israel to be trained
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covert “influencers,” then back to the United States to spread
pro-Israel propaganda.

Some organizations turned the ministry down, including the Jewish
Federations of North America
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as well as the Jewish Council on Public Affairs. They knew that
without formal registration, such actions would be violations of
both­ FARA and the law against agents of a foreign power, known as
Section 951—serious crimes. The turndowns left officials within the
Ministry of Strategic Affairs “anxious and frustrated,” according
to one of the American Jewish officials approached. They were
“anxious to figure out a way to spend the money.” The result was
the creation of the phony “charity,” Concert.

Israel also secretly hires Jewish Americans as spies to work out of
its Washington embassy and its consulates around the United States to
covertly surveil and monitor fellow Americans, including students.
Thoroughly vetted to ensure loyalty to Israel, many of those hired
have spent years heavily involved in pro-Israeli activities from the
time they were in college and before. Among them was Julia Reifkind,
who led a pro-Israel group at the University of California at Davis
before moving on to become an activist with AIPAC. AFter she graduated
in 2016, she was hired by Israel and assigned to its embassy in
Washington.

Reifkind had good preparation for her assignment. Thinking that
Kleinfeld was a fellow pro-Israel activist, over dinner at
Washington’s Mari Vanna restaurant she revealed that while at AIPAC
she spent much of her time deceiving college students about her covert
connection to the organization. “Obviously, I’m an AIPAC-trained
campus activist,” she said. “When you’re lobbying on behalf of
AIPAC, you don’t say AIPAC, you say, ‘I’m a pro-Israel student
from UC Davis.’ And when you’re meeting with students on campus I
would never say, ‘I am the AIPAC campus rep.’ I’d say, ‘My
name is Julia and I’m a pro-Israel student.’”

At the embassy, Reifkind focused on developing intelligence on fellow
Americans, including students on college campuses. “So nobody really
knows what we’re doing,” she said. “But mainly it’s been a lot
of research like monitoring BDS.”

In a different conversation, Reifkind explained: “It’s mainly
gathering intel, reporting back to Israel. That’s a lot of what I
do. To report back to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of
Strategic Affairs, and make sure they have the right information.”
Among the ways she spies on pro-Palestinian activists and Palestinian
human rights supporters is with phony Facebook accounts. “I have my
fake Facebook that I follow all the SJP [Students for Justice in
Palestine] accounts. I have some fake names. My name is Jay Bernard or
something.”

Once Reifkind collected the intelligence on her targets, she passed it
on to her boss at the embassy. Then it was sent to the Ministry of
Strategic Affairs and other offices over a secure encrypted system
called Cables. It’s “really secure,” she said. “I don’t have
access to [it] because I’m an American.… I’ve seen it, it looks
really bizarre…. And then they’ll send something back and he’ll
translate it and tell me what I need to do.”

Since the brutal Hamas attacks on Israeli civilians on October 7 and
the Israeli invasion of Gaza, the ICC and its US-based spy networks
are no doubt working overtime. But there is little likelihood of
interference by the FBI—well trained to look the other way when it
comes to Israel. It was a situation that even frustrated a former head
of the FBI’s counterintelligence division. When I asked him why no
one would talk to me about Israel’s massive espionage in the United
States, he simply shook his head.

“You don’t think Israel’s a sensitive topic?” he asked,
requesting that his name not be used. “So, Israel has been looked at
and is being looked at and that’s all I can tell you,” he said.
“But nobody’s doing anything.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“You can imagine,” is all he would say, implying high-level
political involvement. I then said that I was planning to write about
the topic. “I hope you do. I hope you do,” he said. Sighing, he
added, “I’ve been there done that. I know it. I’ve brought cases
to the Department of Justice on Israel.” Cases that were never
opened.

_James Bamford is a best-selling author, Emmy-nominated filmmaker, and
winner of the National Magazine Award for Reporting. His most recent
book is Spyfail: Foreign Spies, Moles, Saboteurs, and the Collapse of
America's Counterintelligence
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from which much of the material in this article has been adapted._

_Copyright c 2023 The Nation. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without permission
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Distributed by PARS International Corp
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_Founded by abolitionists in 1865, The Nation has chronicled the
breadth and depth of political and cultural life, from the debut of
the telegraph to the rise of Twitter, serving as a critical,
independent, and progressive voice in American journalism._

_Please support progressive journalism. Get a digital subscription
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The Nation for just $24.95!_

* Israeli intelligence
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* college students
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* spying
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* informants
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