Israel feared legal trouble over US advocacy efforts, leaked files suggest

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.

Another memo from 2018, which summarized a discussion led by then deputy attorney general Dina Zilber, noted increased public attention to Fara due to “the investigation into Donald Trump and officials in his government suspected of operating as ‘foreign agents’ for the Russian government”.

The document notes advice from senior Israeli advisors who assert that “donors are not interested in donating to groups registered under Fara”. The memo recommended creating a new American nonprofit which Kela Shlomo/Concert could funnel money through, thereby providing distance between US nonprofits and the Israeli government – though the head of the nonprofit would also serve in Kela Shlomo’s leadership.

It also notes potential downsides of creating such an American intermediary: both weaker Israeli government control, and a mechanism that could be interpreted for what it was: an attempt to sidestep Fara.

The documents reference concerns on the part of US groups over triggering Fara enforcement, concerns that officials say hindered their ability to conduct advocacy in the US.

In 2018, the news outlet the Forward reported that several Jewish American organizations had rejected funding from Concert due to concerns over Fara risk.

In Glazer’s December 2019 email, she noted that if it became public that Israel sought legal advice on Fara, this could “raise claims that the state of Israel wants to unacceptably interfere in US matters and spark a public debate on a sensitive issue in Israel-US relations”.

To avoid the potential public relations fallout, Glazer urged secrecy surrounding the Israeli government’s hiring of Sandler Reiff, the American law firm retained to study the issue. “Exposing the name of the law firm could thwart the entire relationship,” she cautioned, “as I understand it was agreed with them that the engagement with [Israel] would not be revealed.”

Multiple memos and emails show that Sandler Reiff analyzed Fara-related questions from 2018 through at least 2022. Sandler and Rosenstein did not respond to requests for comment.

Brig Gen Sima Vaknin-Gill, a former intelligence officer and former chief military censor for the Israel Defense Forces who was intimately involved in the creation of Kela Shlomo, was copied on many of the emails and named in key documents concerning how to avoid Fara.

Vaknin-Gill is now a board member of the Kansas-based nonprofit Combat Antisemitism Movement (Cam). Cam was set up one year after the ministry of strategic affairs, where Vaknin-Gill was director-general, proposed its strategy to mitigate Fara risk by setting up an American nonprofit funded by Concert.

Cam has publicly disclosed that it is a partner of Concert and Israel’s ministry of diaspora affairs, but the organization has refused requests from journalists to disclose its funders. When reached for comment, Cam stated that it “was not established by, nor is it influenced by, the Israeli government” and emphasized that Cam is “a global interfaith coalition that unites over 850 partner organizations”.

“If there is a deliberate effort by Israeli governmental officials to influence American policy and/or public opinion on foreign affairs,” noted Craig Holman, a lobbying expert with Public Citizen, “this would constitute a Fara violation not just by the US agents serving the Israeli government, but also by any person or nonprofit organization in the US who is a knowing participant.”

Glazer, the author of one of the Fara memos who helped organize several meetings around the issue, left the government in 2021 and joined Google as one of the company’s lobbyists in Israel. Glazer did not respond to a request for comment through Google.

The secrecy surrounding the ministry of strategic affairs’ US-focused advocacy campaigns was challenged through freedom of information requests by Israeli news outlets, particularly the independent media watchdog Seventh Eye. After years of denied requests, the newsrooms eventually prevailed and obtained a series of Concert-related funding documents from the ministry.

The documents showed Kela Shlomo/Concert grants to several American advocacy groups, including Christian Zionist organizations such as Christians United for Israel and the Israel Allies Foundation. The latter was involved in helping to pass anti-BDS state laws penalizing Americans from engaging in certain forms of boycotts targeting the Israeli government.

In 2018, the ministry of strategic affairs also approved a $445,000 grant to the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (Isgap), which totaled about 80% of the organization’s reported annual budget. The nonprofit initially disputed the precise amount but conceded Israeli government support when reached by the Forward. Fara includes an exemption for “academic” projects that do not entail political activity.

Last year, Vaknin-Gill, the Israeli intelligence officer involved in the formation of Kela Shlomo/Concert and the discussions about avoiding Fara registration, joined Isgap as its managing director.

Isgap has expanded its advocacy role in recent months. The group took credit for influencing the contentious December 2023 congressional hearing with elite college presidents, which preceded Harvard president Claudine Gay’s resignation. In recent months, Isgap has met with congressional leaders regularly as the group has urged investigations of pro-Palestinian student demonstrators.

In an email sent in December 2019, Glazer emphasized the need to find a solution that would alleviate Fara-related concerns on the part of American groups.

“There have already been requests by the US Department of Justice made of a number of pro-Israeli entities in the past,” the email says. “The ministry already faces real challenges in operating with groups in the US, and this could hurt the various groups that are willing to work with the ministry or with [Concert] and ultimately harm the office’s activities in dealing with the phenomenon of delegitimization and boycotts.”