Israel Has Formed a Task Force to Carry Out Covert Campaigns at US Universities

A major Israeli news site says Israel’s foreign affairs and diaspora affairs ministries are behind the operation.

William I. Robinson-TRUTHOUT

March 23, 2024

https://truthout.org/articles/israel-has-formed-a-task-force-to-carry-out-covert-campaigns-at-us-universities/

As worldwide protest escalates over Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, academic freedom and free speech are under all-out attack on university campuses in the United States, not just from university administrations and pro-Israeli groups, but now directly from the highest levels of the Israeli state. In a story that has been largely ignored in the Western press, the Israeli news website Ynetnews, one of the largest media outlets in the country, reported that the Israeli government has launched what appears to be a wide-ranging covert campaign to harass and intimidate students, faculty, and administrators into silence.

According to the report, the Foreign Affairs and the Diaspora Affairs ministries have established a task force to carry out “shaming and pressuring” operations at U.S. universities. The task force, chaired by Foreign Minister Eli Cohen and led by senior government officials, drew up a multifaceted “action plan,” according to Ynetnews, involving political and psychological operations against its critics.

The plan aims at “inflicting economic and employment consequences on antisemitic [read: pro-Palestinian/anti-genocide] students and compelling universities to distance them from their campuses.” The plan specifies that actions taken “should not have the signature of the State of Israel on it.”

The first plank in the plan is described as the “consciousness axis.” It calls for “personal, economic and employment repercussions for the distributors of antisemitism.”

According to the plan, the inter-ministerial task force will carry out “naming and shaming” by “publicizing the names of those generating antisemitism on campuses — both students and faculty and impacting the employment of those identified as the perpetrators of antisemitism.” Those targeted “will struggle to find employment in the U.S. and will pay a significant economic price for their conduct.”

The plan specifies that “the Foreign Ministry and [Israeli] representatives in the U.S. are in contact with professional unions to recruit them to act against antisemitism and exert pressure on university heads.” It notes that pressuring employers to blacklist pro-Palestinian students “has already happened in major law firms in the U.S.,” and that “if a university knows that the chances of its students finding employment have decreased, the university administration will act against those antisemitic students to avoid harming the university’s ranking.”

In the most high-impact instances of this plan of action, the presidents of Harvard University (Claudine Gay) and the University of Pennsylvania (Elizabeth Magill) were both forced to resign in early 2024 and late 2023, respectively — not because they opposed the Israeli-perpetrated genocide or came out in support of Palestinian lives but because, in defense of free speech, they did not crack down hard enough on Palestine solidarity actions on their campuses.

Such censorship has swept university campuses across the U.S. and some professors have even lost their jobs. Among other cases, a professor at Texas Tech University was suspended in early March for his pro-Palestine social media posts, and a tenured professor of political science at Indiana University was barred from teaching in January because he booked a room for a pro-Palestinian activity.

Off campus, there has been a wave of repression by corporations against employees who have posted their opposition to the genocide on social media, and Truthout has previously reported on retaliation by law firms against their employees and recruits. Artists have had their exhibitions canceled for merely posting pro-Palestinian messages on their social media and authors have had their book talks suspended for signing petitions against the genocide.

Such silencing incidents are now commonplace across the U.S.

Under the heading “Legal Axis,” the Israeli government plan calls for “taking legal action outside the law [what ‘outside the law’ means exactly is not specified in the Ynet article] against activities and organizations that pose a threat to Jewish and Israeli students on campuses, such as Students for Justice in Palestine.”

It adds that “Israel will hold discussions with elements from the U.S. Department of Justice to map out legal tools that can be used.” The suspension in December by Columbia University of the campus chapters of Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine was the most well-publicized case, but such crackdowns on pro-Palestinian student activism have taken place at many universities.

On my own campus, the University of California at Santa Barbara, the administration recently indefinitely closed the Multicultural Center (MCC) and threatened to sanction pro-Palestinian students. The MCC had put up a signage where students had written messages against Zionism and the Israeli-perpetrated genocide in Gaza, in solidarity with the Palestinian freedom struggle, and in opposition to the university administration’s pro-Israel tilt and refusal to condemn the genocide.

“The signage has been removed and campus is conducting a bias incident review based on potential discrimination related to protected categories that include religion, citizenship, and national or ethnic origin,” stated Chancellor Henry Yang in a February 27 university-wide email. “The posting of such messages is a violation of our principles of community and inclusion.” But many faculty do not agree with the chancellor’s characterization of Palestine solidarity as discrimination.

“The MCC has been a critical site for naming and resisting intersectional injustice in our campus community and around the globe,” read a statement released by the Department of Black Studies lambasting the closure. “As such, it is aligned with so much of what we do in our teaching, scholarship, university service, and broader praxes of decolonization.

The MCC’s temporary closure deprives multiple campus communities of a public intellectual space in an increasingly hostile and restricted academic environment.”

Under the heading “Economic Axis,” Tel Aviv’s action plan states that “Israel will identify leading donors within the Jewish and Israeli communities and enlist them in the struggle to serve as a lever of pressure on university heads to act against antisemitism.”

It continues: “Israel will exert pressure on Jewish and non-Jewish donors to withdraw their investments from campuses where antisemitism is not addressed and promote economic sanctions against universities receiving federal or state public funding for non-addressing antisemitism on campuses.” In the Harvard case, in fact, wealthy donors withdrew hundreds of millions of dollars in donations to the university’s endowment to pressure the administration to crack down on pro-Palestinian solidarity.

Finally, the “explanatory axis” involves “creating a toolbox available to pro-Israeli professors and students, assisting them in addressing claims against the pro-Israel side physically and especially on social networks. The Foreign Ministry will explore the option of launching a campaign on social networks focused on campuses.”

This element of the action plan is not new. Training professors and students to repress pro-Palestinian sentiment on their campuses has been taking place for many years. Among other programs, Hasbara Fellowships — hasbara is the Hebrew word for public diplomacy, that is, propaganda — are offered to Jewish students at U.S. university campuses to travel to Israel, where they are indoctrinated into Zionism and taught how to practice hasbara when they return home.

Hasbara offices are maintained in several Israeli ministries, including the ministries of Foreign Affairs, Diaspora Affairs, Strategic Affairs and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). The press office of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., did not respond to Truthout’s request for comment on the action plan.

The Criminalization of Palestine Solidarity

The worldwide campaign in support of the Palestinian freedom struggle has taken off in recent years, spurred on by growing international awareness of Israel’s systematic violation of Palestinian human rights and international law, ethnic cleansing, brutal occupation of Palestinian lands, and systems of settler colonialism and apartheid — all with U.S. government and transnational corporate complicity.

The genocide in Gaza has shocked the world community, sparking an unprecedented outcry and upsurge of protest. Israel may control the military battlefield, but it appears to have already lost the political battlefield of world public opinion. It is this crisis of legitimacy of the Zionist narrative that is leading the Israeli government to undertake a desperate escalation of its attacks on U.S. university campuses as laid out in the action plan.

What is known as the Israel lobby consists of a network of individuals and organizations aligned with the Israeli government that actively works to stifle any criticism of Israel (or U.S. support for it), and to silence any mention of Palestinian rights. It is the most powerful political lobby in the United States bar none, in a category unto itself.

The network of organizations and individuals that participate in the lobby are embedded into the U.S. political system, public institutions, the corporate world and civil society. Unlike other legislative lobbies that ply the halls of power in Washington, the Israel lobby operates throughout the U.S., in both public and private spheres.

Organizations such as the American Israeli Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC) directly finance political campaigns for office at the federal, state and local levels. AIPAC is expected to spend a whopping $100 million in this year’s general elections to oust progressive candidates and to back those that support the Zionist agenda. (Remarkably, AIPAC is not required by the U.S. government to register as the agent of a foreign government.)...

(Continue Part Two...)