Israel feared legal trouble over US advocacy efforts, leaked files suggest
Israeli flags outside the Knesset in Jerusalem in 2022. Photograph: Christophe Gateau/Dpa Picture Alliance via Alamy
Exclusive: officials concerned by foreign agent law proposed creation of American nonprofit to avoid scrutiny
by Lee Fang and Jack Poulson
The Israeli government sought legal advice on a US federal law requiring the disclosure of foreign-backed lobbying campaigns, out of concern that mounting enforcement of the law could ensnare American groups working in coordination with the Israeli government, leaked documents reviewed by the Guardian suggest.
Emails and legal memos originating from a hack of the Israeli justice ministry show that officials feared that the country’s advocacy efforts in the US could trigger the US law governing foreign agents. The documents show that officials proposed creating a new American nonprofit in order to continue Israel’s activities in the US while avoiding scrutiny under the law.
A legal strategy memo dated July 2018 noted that compliance with the Foreign Agents Registration Act (Fara) would damage the reputation of several American groups that receive funding and direction from Israel, and force them to meet onerous transparency requirements. A separate memo noted that donors would not want to fund groups registered under Fara.
Fara requires people working on behalf of a foreign government to register as foreign agents with the US justice department.
In listing reasons for avoiding Fara, the memo says that the law compels registrants to “flag any piece of ‘propaganda’ that is distributed to two or more parties in the US, with a disclaimer stating that it was delivered by a foreign agent and then submit a copy of the ‘propaganda’ to the US Department of Justice within 48 hours”.
To prevent Fara registration, and the stigma and scrutiny associated with it, the legal advisers suggested channeling funds through a third-party American nonprofit.
Liat Glazer, then a legal adviser to Israel’s ministry of strategic affairs, writes that even though the nonprofit would not be formally managed from Israel, “we will have means of supervision and management” – for example, through grant-making and “informal coordination mechanisms” including “oral meetings and updates”.
The discussions around circumnavigating Fara focused on a “PR commando unit” formed by the strategic affairs ministry in 2017 to improve Israel’s image abroad. The group, a private-public partnership, was originally known as “Kela Shlomo” (which translates to “Solomon’s Sling”) before being rebranded as “Concert” in 2018 and “Voices of Israel” in 2021. Its initial mission was to undermine the BDS movement targeting Israel with boycott, divestment and sanctions campaigns in protest of its policies towards Palestinians.
Over the course of its history, the group has supported American nonprofits advocating for anti-BDS laws and coordinated campaigns to push back against pro-Palestinian activities on US campuses.
The emails and documents were released by Distributed Denial of Secrets, or DDoSecrets, a US-based nonprofit responsible for disseminating a number of high-profile hacks in recent years. The original source for the documents was a group calling itself “Anonymous for Justice”, a self-described “hacktivist collective” that announced in April it had infiltrated Israel’s ministry of justice and retrieved hundreds of gigabytes of data.
Amnesty International’s security lab analyzed the data set and “determined the files are consistent with a hack-and-leak attack targeting a series of email accounts”. The group said: “It was not possible to cryptographically verify the authenticity of the emails, as critical email metadata was removed by the hackers during a pre-processing step before release.”
It added: “Technical indicators in other files from the leak, including a sampling of PDFs and Microsoft Word documents reviewed by Amnesty International did not show obvious signs of having been tampered with.”
Previous reporting in the Guardian on the hacked archive revealed Israeli government attempts to thwart discovery in a lawsuit brought by WhatsApp against the infamous spyware company NSO Group. Following the leak, Israel imposed a gag order to prevent the documents from being publicized.
Earlier this year, the Guardian exclusively reported that Voices of Israel was rebooted shortly after the outbreak of the Gaza war following the 7 October terror attacks by Hamas. Amichai Chikli, the Likud minister of diaspora affairs, who oversees the latest iteration of the project, informed the Knesset that the group was set to go “on the offensive” against American students protesting against the Gaza war.
The heightened concern over Fara around 2018 was sparked in part by a series of enforcement actions against Trump administration officials for unregistered lobbying for foreign interests.
The July 2018 Israeli legal memo noted that “in the past, Fara was applied to countries hostile to the US”, such as Russia and Pakistan. Glazer warned that the new atmosphere of enforcement, given the ties between the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump, could lead to a formal investigation by the US justice department.
In response, the documents show, the Israeli government retained Sandler Reiff, a prominent election and campaign law firm in Washington, to analyze the Fara risks posed by Concert and other Israeli advocacy efforts to shape American policy and opinion. The two primary contacts for the engagement were Joseph E Sandler, the former in-house general counsel to the Democratic National Committee, and Joshua I Rosenstein, a widely cited expert on Fara.