Israel’s War on American Student Activists
Students gather in support of Palestine at Harvard University. (Joseph Prezioso / AFP via Getty)
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.
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. “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” and the putative URL “HarvardHatesJews.com.”
The doxxing truck was sponsored by the right-wing group Accuracy in Media and its targets were students who had signed a letter sponsored 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 while 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 in 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 in 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, 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 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 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, 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. 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.