Lede: Israeli gov-led Zoom calls, WhatsApp chat logs, and other docs provide a
window into the massive effort to shape online discourse and silence
pro-Palestinian voices.
As the Israel-Hamas war began to heat up in late October, Courtney Carey, a
Dublin-based employee of the Israeli website building company Wix, posted the
Irish words "SAOIRSE DON PHALAISTIN" -- "Freedom for Palestine" -- on her
LinkedIn page.
Within 24 hours of Carey's LinkedIn post appearing, Alon Ozer, a Miami-based
investor, took a screenshot of the post and shared it with a WhatsApp group of
more than 300 like-minded investors, tech executives, activists, and at least
one senior Israeli government official. Ozer took care to note that Carey worked
for Wix.
Oded Hermoni, a tech journalist-turned-venture capitalist, piped up to assure
everyone that Batsheva Moshe, Wix's general manager for Israel and a member of
the group chat, had been "on it since Sat[urday] night."
Moshe then chimed in to assure her peers that the issue with Carey had been
"taken care of since it was published."
"I believe there will be an announcement soon re our reaction," she added.
Wix terminated Carey the following day.
Moshe was apparently aware of Carey's LinkedIn comments, which also included a
denunciation of the "Zionist ideology which promotes an exclusivist state,"
before Ozer flagged them in the WhatsApp group.
The interaction nonetheless reflects the heightened coordination among
pro-Israel forces in Silicon Valley and the global tech sector.
Following Hamas's terror attack on Oct. 7, a loose network of pro-Israel
investors, tech executives, activists, and Israeli government officials have
stepped up their efforts to combat the slightest deviations from the pro-Israel
script.
The WhatsApp group where Carey's case came up serves as a kind of switchboard
where the various independent players in Silicon Valley's pro-Israel community
swap ideas, identify enemies, and collaborate on ways to defend Israel in the
media, academia, and the business world.
We have obtained access to thousands of the group's WhatsApp messages dating
back to mid-October, and an intricate spreadsheet where group participants
request and claim tasks ranging from social media responses to IDF support
shipments. Separately, we have viewed a number of video meetings charting best
practices for "hasbara" - an Israeli term of art for "public diplomacy" whose
detractors see it as a euphemism for propaganda -- that offer a window into
Israel's public-relations war that is not limited to the tech sector.
In addition to Moshe, the WhatsApp group includes prominent Silicon Valley
venture capitalist Jeff Epstein - a former CFO of Oracle - and Andy David, a
diplomat-cum-venture capitalist who also serves as the Israeli foreign
ministry's head of innovation, entrepreneurship, and tech.
The WhatsApp group, officially named the "J-Ventures Global Kibbutz Group," is a
project of J-Ventures, a U.S.-Israeli investment fund that calls itself a
"capitalist kibbutz" -- a reference to Israel's historically collectivist
farming communities. Hermoni, the WhatsApp group's founder, is a managing
director of J-Ventures, and David, the foreign ministry official, is internally
listed by J-Ventures as a member of the "PR/Political Team" that makes decisions
on messaging and lobbying.
The WhatsApp group, spreadsheet, and various video discussions offer a rare
public glimpse of how Israel and its American allies harness Israel's
influential tech sector and tech diaspora to run cover for the Jewish state as
it endures scrutiny over the humanitarian impact of its invasion of Gaza.
Conversations of this kind are not unusual for any important interest group, but
they reveal the degree to which, in the tech-oriented hasbara world, the lines
between government, the private sector, and the nonprofit world are blurry at
best. And the tactics that these wealthy individuals, advocates, and groups use
-- hounding Israel critics on social media; firing pro-Palestine employees and
canceling speaking engagements; smearing Palestinian journalists; and attempting
to ship military-grade equipment to the IDF -- are often heavy-handed and
controversial.
"This is a peek under the hood of how U.S. foreign policy is steered in order to
produce policy outcomes," said Eli Clifton, a senior advisor to the Quincy
Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
Clifton noted that the White House has strongly communicated an interest in
limiting civilian casualties during the war, but appears unable to muster the
political resources to change the IDF's current direction.
"President Biden seems incapable of using the one policy tool that may actually
produce a change in Israel's actions that might limit civilian deaths, which
would be to condition military aid that the United States provides to Israel,"
Clifton added. He partially attributed the inability of the U.S. government to
rein in Israel's war actions to the "lobbying and advocacy efforts underway."
-- Cont'd at https://www.leefang.com/p/inside-the-pro-israel-information
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