Leak indicates billionaire funders of Israeli cyber campaign targeting anti-apartheid activists
Sid Shniad
Leak indicates billionaire funders of Israeli cyber campaign targeting anti-apartheid activists
Leaked emails purport to show how former Israeli defense minister Benjamin Gantz's '12 Tribes' cyber-sabotage campaign morphed into the program widely known as 'Israel Cyber Shield.'
A leaked archive of emails from former Israeli defense minister Benjamin Gantz appears to detail the origins and initial billionaire funders of an infamous Israeli government cyber campaign to sabotage its critics. As one of several document dumps curated by the American nonprofit Distributed Denial of Secrets from the hacktivist group Handala, which is conjectured to be linked to Iranian intelligence, the documents are believed to be authentic.
The previously unreported email exchanges with Gantz provide a detailed backstory for an Israeli cyber intelligence campaign which was reported by Haaretz in 2018 to have spied on the Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour, subsequently sharing a folder of information on her with the pro-Israel advocacy group Act.IL. Then publicly known as ‘Israel Cyber Shield,’ the cyber campaign’s official names have included ‘Keshet David’ (David’s Bow) and the alternate ICS acronym definition of ‘Innovative Collaboration Strategies.’
Led by a slew of former Israeli intelligence officials, the primary targets of ICS were members of the international Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which models its opposition to the Israeli occupation of Palestine on the successful efforts to end apartheid in South Africa. The voluminous correspondence in the Gantz archive appears to explain how ICS began as an initiative led by the former Israeli military chief, originally under the names ‘Counter-BDS Initiative’ and ‘12 Tribes,’ before temporarily merging into an Israeli propaganda program which itself operated under the sequence of names ‘Kela Shlomo’ (Solomon’s Sling), ‘Concert,’ and then ‘Voices of Israel.’
An annual reported published by what was then Concert further documents that the merger only lasted for roughly a year, noting that the ICS operations — said to be funded by philanthropists from around the world — split off into a separate legal entity formed on January 11, 2018.
Emails and attached presentations from the Gantz archive described ‘12 Tribes’ as working to develop “state-of-the-art cyber technology as a soft weapon” and include purported correspondence with the controversial private intelligence firm Black Cube regarding methods to spy on and disrupt activists, as first reported by this publication last week.
The leaked emails further indicate that a prominent Canadian billionaire couple — Indigo Books CEO Heather Reisman and her spouse, Onex Corporation founder Gerald Schwartz — were the first to agree to back Gantz’s counter-BDS cyber campaign. The Australian shopping-center magnate Frank Lowy also appears to have been central to the campaign, both directly and through his Tel Aviv-based think-tank, the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS).
While not household names in the United States, Mr. Schwartz and Ms. Reisman have long been a focus of the BDS movement as a result of their support for Israeli soldiers through their nonprofit, HESEG Foundation. Reisman was also an executive producer of the popular 2020 Netflix film ‘The Social Dilemma,’ and the couple pledged $100 million to The University of Toronto the previous year, establishing the Schwartz Reisman Center for Technology and Society.
“The Schwartz family from Canada that expressed their willingness to support - are they aware of how much money is being asked from each donor?” asked the prominent Israeli national security journalist Yoav Limor in a purported email to Gantz’s spokesperson-turned-business-partner Melody Sucharewicz on July 20, 2015. The asking price was $1 million, spread out over five years.
The archive contains an extensive body of emails which, if authentic, document the journalist’s central role in the creation of the anti-BDS intelligence operation, including leading its initial legal consultation, liaison with a former commander of Israel’s cyber intelligence agency, and as co-lead of fundraising.
Gantz’s vision was to collect $1 million each from twelve prominent Jewish philanthropists — initially labeling it his ‘12 Tribes’ initiative — in order to fund a technology company employing former members of Israeli intelligence services to expose damning information on the BDS movement. The ‘12 Tribes’ organization was envisioned as a command center for the ‘Blue Network’ — a name given to a loose international coalition of pro-Israel actors countering the ‘red’ network of BDS supporters — and was said to have been subsumed into an effort led by Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, becoming the intelligence arm (ICS) of what is now known as Voices of Israel.
Previous reporting from this publication demonstrated that the former Israeli police investigator Eran Vasker — earlier identified by Haaretz — was simultaneously leading both ICS and the Tel Aviv-based cyber intelligence firm Argyle Consulting Group as of early 2017, seemingly in fulfillment of Gantz’s technology firm proposal. Argyle’s website boasts that the organization has “exposed inauthentic social media activity and negative elements targeting governments, religious communities, companies, high-profile individuals, decision-makers, and the international reputations of entire countries.”1
One unofficial offshoot of ICS and Argyle, the antisemitism-focused social media content moderation advocacy organization CyberWell, has since become a prominent partner of major U.S. technology platforms.
As exclusively reported by this publication last week, the Gantz archive contains apparent copies of the former Israeli military chief’s solicitation of financial support for the cyber intelligence scheme in late 2015 from Skydance CEO David Ellison, the son of Oracle co-founder and world’s-richest-man Larry Ellison. The purported email chain introducing Gantz to Ellison is interwoven with discussion of a consultation with the controversial Mossad-affiliated private intelligence firm Black Cube regarding its then-ongoing operation to sabotage the BDS movement.
An initial list of potential billionaire donors to the counter-BDS initiative was attached to a purported July 18, 2015 email in the archive from Sucharewicz, with Larry Ellison and Google co-founder Sergey Brin listed as two of four possible American backers — “Israel-support? tbd” read Brin’s annotation. The other two potential American donors were named as Haim Saban, who co-founded the Israeli-American Council with Israel’s Los Angeles consulate general Ehud Danoch in 2007, and the late real estate investor Eli Broad, one of the two namesakes of Harvard and MIT’s Broad Institute.
In addition to Ms. Reisman being listed as the sole potential initial Canadian donor for the ‘12 Tribes’ initiative — with the spreadsheet noting that she ‘already agreed’ — an attachment to an email dated March 23, 2017 listed Mr. Schwartz as one of Gantz’s seven personal references. Other emails in the archive extensively detail Schwartz’s Onex Corporation arranging an advisory role for Gantz with their then-active portfolio company, SIG Group, a Swiss packaging company which was until 2000 the manufacturer of hand-guns and machine-guns now sold through the SIG SAUER brand. SIG Group CEO Rolf Stangl is likewise listed as one of Gantz’s seven personal references, alongside the controlling shareholder of the Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems, Michael Federmann.
The families of the three potential Australian donors to Gantz’s ‘12 Tribes’ operation — Frank Lowy, technology investor Kevin Bermeister, and the Donald Trump-affiliated recycling industry billionaire Anthony Pratt — were collectively visited by Gantz, Limor, and then-CEO of United Israel Appeal (UIA) Greg Masel during a roughly two-week fundraising trip to the country beginning in late February 2016, according to a detailed itinerary in the archive attributed to the operations division of UIA.
Limor is also documented by the archive as emailing out, during the start of the fundraising trip to Australia, a six-page document from the law office of Gideon Koren regarding a legal strategy for forming ‘12 Tribes.’ The GMail address included for Mr. Limor in the document is also used for both his public journalism and his purported correspondence with the ‘12 Tribes’ team in the archive.
Purported meeting notes in the archive from a subsequent April 20, 2016 “12 Tribes brainstorm session” with Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs further describe Limor and UIA’s Masel as having led the effort’s fundraising.
The leaked archive further details one of the central partners of Gantz’s ‘12 Tribes’ initiative being the Tel Aviv-based Institute for National Securitiy Studies, whose chairman, Frank Lowy, was in January awarded Israel’s Presidential Medal of Honor. David Lowy, a son of Lowy Sr. and rhythm guitarist for the rock band The Dead Daisies, is also an INSS board member.
The point person at INSS for collaboration on the ‘12 Tribes’ counter-BDS campaign was repeatedly documented to be Assaf Orion, whose public profile with the institute notes that he “directed the BDS and de-legitimization program” after retiring from the Israeli military as head of the general staff’s planning directorate. According to a purported email from Orion through his INSS account on May 9, 2016, a meeting between the 12 Tribes team and Lowy Sr. was set to occur in New York eleven days later, prior to a sequence of meetings with officials from Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs.
The only two direct addressees of Orion’s purported email were Gantz and Amos Yadlin, a former commander of Israel’s military intelligence directorate — frequently referred to by its Hebrew acronym, Aman — who was then nearly half-way through his roughly decade-long tenure as executive director of Lowy’s INSS. Recipients were listed as including both the journalist Yoav Limor and four INSS members, including former Mossad research and evaluation head Sima Shine.
Beyond the contents of the archive itself, Yadlin was identified by The Times of Israel in 2018 as a member of the leadership team of Voices of Israel (which then operating under the name Concert), the organization ‘12 Tribes’ was apparently negotiating a merger into during mid-2016.
Orion, Limor, and Sucharewicz had quietly served as Gantz’s primary lieutenants for building out the foundational documents for the nascent 12 Tribes program throughout the mid-2015 to mid-2016 timeframe, including detailed presentation slide decks and personal letters to donors, according to the archive.
One of the earliest advisors to the nascent cyber sabotage campaign — according to the archive — was Nadav Zafrir, a former commander of Aman’s infamous cyber intelligence component, Unit 8200, who subsequently took over as CEO of the Israeli cybersecurity giant Check Point in December 2024.
According to Limor’s purported recollection of an hour-long meeting with Zafrir on July 29, 2015, the former Unit 8200 commander recommended that the ‘12 Tribes’ team leverage the cyber capabilities of existing companies rather than develop its own technologies. Zafrir was also said to have recommended one of the three leaders of the effort to have ‘a specialization in collection, i.e. something close to the world of 8200.’
When reached for comment, Check Point chief of staff Gil Messing stated that, “the only reference you have here is a conversation with yoav Limor the journalist, which is someone nadav is acquainted with, but other than that nadav wasn’t involved in this project or has any information on its origins, donors or actual whereabouts.”
Other central parties in the leaked emails — including Benjamin Gantz, Melody Sucharewicz, Yoav Limor, Assaf Orion, Amos Yadlin, Gerald Schwartz, Heather Reisman, and Frank Lowy — did not respond to requests for comment.
One of the most revealing emails in the leaked archive purports to have been sent by Orion on June 1, 2016, recounting his recent long phone with Sima Vaknin-Gill, who had transitioned from chief Israeli censor to director general of the Ministry of Strategic Affairs toward the end of the previous year. Orion was documented as describing Vaknin’s goal as creating a counter-BDS program with an intelligence arm, with the initial dubious nickname of “אמ"ן לעניים” — loosely, “Aman for the poor.”
The email further argued that Yadlin, who led the Aman intelligence directorate from 2006 to 2010, would be central to explaining why the Ministry’s effort needed its own intelligence program, rather than directly relying upon Aman. Ms. Vaknin-Gill was also described as having decided to appoint Israeli-American Council CEO Sagi Balasha as the head of her new initiative, with Orion asserting that “[IAC co-founder Adam] Milstein will be happy.” (Mr. Balasha was subsequently CEO of Concert into late 2018.)
Another potentially noteworthy email in the archive purports to contain not only former Israeli defense minister Benjamin Gantz’s Google, GMail, and Viber passwords, which were seemingly intercepted as part of saving them to Evernote, but also his candid notes from backroom diplomacy with his former American counterpart, Leon Panetta. The two overlapped in oversight of their respective militaries from 2011 through early 2013, under the leaderships of President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu, and the document appears to include Gantz’s personal notes for a conversation with Panetta regarding what would seem to be a scrapped joint U.S. and Israeli bombing campaign to delay Iran’s nuclear program.
“Im talking on my own,” the purported notes began, before adding, “Pl [Please] don't embarrass me.” The positive aspects of the potential bombing campaign were said to include “unprecedented support for IL [Israel],” further “strengthen[ing] the threat/big stick to Iran,” and allowing the U.S. “to act first/alone in ‘13.”
“Credit should be given to Potus [President of the United States] only rather than IL [Israeli] gov or anyone else,” continued the notes, before concluding with an allegedly planned request from Gantz to Panetta that, “If B2 [bomber] is totally impossible-Tell us whether the B1 can carry it on time.”
Gantz simultaneously chaired the ill-fated and Mossad-affiliated data analytics firm Fifth Dimension (5D) from 2015 to 2018, with Peter Thiel’s controversial firm Palantir extensively described in a confidential April 13, 2015 investment memorandum as the primary competitor. The archive also includes frequent references to Gantz’s longer-lasting investment in 5D’s sister company, the deep learning-focused cybersecurity firm Deep Instinct, which has been relatively succesful but was reported to have layed off 20 employees in April.