TITLE: Israel Secretly Targets U.S. Lawmakers With Influence Campaign on Gaza War
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/05/technology/israel-campaign-gaza-social-media.html
EXCERPT: Israel organized and paid for an influence campaign last year targeting U.S. lawmakers and the American public with pro-Israel messaging, as it aimed to foster support for its actions in the war with Gaza, according to officials involved in the effort and documents related to the operation.
The covert campaign was commissioned by Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, a government body that connects Jews around the world with the State of Israel, four Israeli officials said. The ministry allocated about $2 million to the operation and hired Stoic, a political marketing firm in Tel Aviv, to carry it out, according to the officials and the documents.
The campaign began in October and remains active on the platform X. At its peak, it used hundreds of fake accounts that posed as real Americans on X, Facebook and Instagram to post pro-Israel comments. The accounts focused on U.S. lawmakers, particularly ones who are Black and Democrats, such as Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader from New York, and Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia, with posts urging them to continue funding Israel’s military.
ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence-powered chatbot, was used to generate many of the posts. The campaign also created three fake English-language news sites featuring pro-Israel articles.
The Israeli government’s connection to the influence operation, which The New York Times verified with four current and former members of the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and documents about the campaign, has not previously been reported. FakeReporter, an Israeli misinformation watchdog, identified the effort in March. Last week, Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, and OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT, said they had also found and disrupted the operation.
The secretive campaign signals the lengths Israel was willing to go to sway American opinion on the war in Gaza. The United States has long been one of Israel’s staunchest allies, with President Biden recently signing a $15 billion military aid package for the country. But the conflict has been unpopular with many Americans, who have called for Mr. Biden to withdraw support for Israel in the face of mounting civilian deaths in Gaza.
The operation is the first documented case of the Israeli government’s organizing a campaign to influence the U.S. government, social media experts said. While coordinated government-backed campaigns are not uncommon, they are typically difficult to prove. Iran, North Korea, China, Russia and the United States are widely believed to back similar efforts around the world, but often mask their involvement by outsourcing the work to private companies or running them through a third country.
“Israel’s role in this is reckless and probably ineffective,” said Achiya Schatz, the executive director of FakeReporter. That Israel “ran an operation that interferes in U.S. politics is extremely irresponsible.”
TITLE: The Corporate Power Brokers Behind AIPAC's War on the Squad
https://inthesetimes.com/article/squad-aipac-israel-corporate-dark-money
EXCERPT: Hardline supporters of the Israeli government were confident that the political fallout from October 7 would finally spell doom for the Squad, the group of diverse, Bernie Sanders-inspired left-wing members of Congress that includes Lee and fellow progressive Reps. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), Cori Bush (D-Mo.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Greg Casar (D-Texas) and Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.). Members of the Squad had come under fire after calling for a cease-fire in Gaza, suggesting U.S. military funding to Israel should be conditional, and voting against a House resolution that backed Israel and blamed the rising Palestinian death toll solely on Hamas.
“This is a scarlet letter that far-left candidates will have to wear,” Democratic strategist Jake Dilemani told Jewish Insider at the time.
Mark Mellman, another Democratic strategist and one of the founders of Democratic Majority for Israel — a Super PAC that, like AIPAC’s United Democracy Project, was created to boost pro-Israel primary challengers against left-wing congressmembers — believed “the savagery of Hamas has moved the center of gravity in a pro-Israel direction.”
After October 7, United Democracy Project (UDP) began running digital ads against Lee and Bowman, maligning them for their refusal to back the singularly pro-Israel House resolution.
Eliding the fact that Lee and other Squad members had vocally condemned the Hamas attack, one such ad read: “Fourteen hundred Israelis slaughtered by Hamas. Women raped. Babies beheaded. Over 200 hostages. But Summer Lee was one of just 10 votes in Congress against condemning Hamas’ terrorism.”
Before long, Slate reported that AIPAC was expected to spend the gargantuan sum of $100 million during the 2023-24 cycle to unseat high-profile Israel critics in Congress, including Lee and other members of the Squad.
AIPAC wading into elections was nothing new. The lobby has been a powerful and influential force in U.S. politics for many years — and, according to James Zogby, co-founder and president of the Arab American Institute, “AIPAC coordinated the PACs that existed prior to dark money.” In such cases, Zogby explains, “These 15 PACs will give to this guy, and these 20 to that guy, and by the way, each one of these PACs has someone on their board who’s on AIPAC’s board of advisors.”
But the sheer scale of AIPAC’s spending — enabled by Supreme Court decisions that have unleashed the distorting influence of big money in elections — and the tactics being used are more recent developments. These pro-Israel groups now directly intervene in Democratic primary races, flooding the airwaves with negative ads defaming progressives in the eyes of loyal Democratic voters.
Former Ohio state senator and Sanders campaign surrogate Nina Turner was among the first targets of this strategy during her 2021 run for Congress. Much like Lee, Turner was the overwhelming favorite for an open blue congressional seat in northeast Ohio but saw a massive early lead vanish under a nearly $2 million avalanche of negative advertising by Democratic Majority for Israel that painted her as a disloyal extremist.
The ads funded by the pro-Israel lobby “kind of say the same thing: Here’s these radicals … who are scary, who are not aligned with President Biden,” explains Usamah Andrabi, communications director for Justice Democrats, a left-wing electoral organization.
Turner recalls a conversation with a former ally who does business in Cleveland: “They told me they didn’t recognize me anymore, that Palestinians have no rights [and] that if I didn’t ‘disavow’ the Squad, they were going to come at me with everything they had. And that is, in fact, what they did.”
Since Turner lost that election, a spate of progressives have been ousted from their seats, including establishment-friendly politicians like former Democratic Reps. Donna Edwards in Maryland and Andy Levin in Michigan, whose sole offense appeared to be criticizing illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank and supporting a two-state solution (both of which are stated positions of President Joe Biden and many mainstream Democrats).
Levin, who comes from one of the country’s most prominent political and Jewish families, lost his seat in 2022 after redistricting pitted him against another incumbent for the new, open seat. AIPAC put more than $4 million toward defeating him.
“We were buried by [that] avalanche,” Levin recalls.
Those backing Israel’s assault on Gaza now hope to deliver another bloody nose to the Left, in particular by defeating Bowman and Bush, the politically vulnerable duo that made up the Squad’s 2021 class and are also outspoken critics of the Israeli government. Bowman has referred to Israel as an “apartheid” state, while Bush has condemned what she calls “Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign” and “atrocities against Palestinians.”
TITLE: Israel's Outgoing UN Ambassador Worries Palestinians Are Winning Narrative
https://www.newsweek.com/israels-outgoing-un-ambassador-worries-palestinians-are-winning-narrative-1908112
EXCERPT: As support for Palestinian statehood continues to gain international ground, Israel's outgoing ambassador to the United Nations warned that Israel was losing the fight for the narrative over a decades-long conflict that has erupted into a bloody, high-stakes war.
"It always concerns us when our approach is not being accepted, like every normal country," Israeli Permanent Ambassador to the U.N. Gilad Erdan said in response to Newsweek's question during a small gathering of journalists last week at the Israeli Mission to the U.N. "So, we have to do more to convince the world."
Erdan, who announced just hours prior to the meeting on Friday that he had declined an ambassadorship to the United States and would leave his post this summer to continue his career in foreign service in another capacity, has established himself as a fiery presence at the U.N., especially since the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, attacks that sparked the longest and deadliest-ever war in the Gaza Strip.
When the U.N. General Assembly just weeks ago overwhelming voted in support of recognizing Palestinian statehood in the wake of a U.S.-vetoed motion at the U.N. Security Council, Erdan fed a copy of the U.N. Charter to a mini-shredding machine at the podium to suggest that supportive nations were defying the U.N.'s founding protocols and held up a picture of Hamas' Gaza chief Yahya Sinwar, alleging he was "sponsored by the UN."
These were only the latest props the Israeli diplomat has brought to the iconic stage after wearing a yellow star to symbolize Holocaust victims last October and brandishing a photo of Nazi German Fuhrer Adolf Hitler meeting with Grand Mufti Amin el-Husseini of U.K.-colonized Mandatory Palestine in 1947. Throughout, Erdan has sought to capitalize on his theatrics in order to draw attention to what he said were serious issues undermining the U.N. from within.
But as he counts down his final weeks in his post amid worries of Israel's diplomatic isolation, Erdan told reporters: "Now, I'm out of gimmicks."
SEE ALSO:
Biden: ‘Every reason’ to think Netanyahu wants war with Hamas to go on
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/06/04/biden-netanyahu-hamas-war-00161414
Israel expands Gaza offensive as mediators’ ceasefire bid continues
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/6/5/israel-expands-gaza-offensive-as-ceasefire-bid-continues
Mass graves and body bags: al-Shifa hospital after Israel withdrew its forces
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c511k1nqx81o