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On July 10th, it was announced social media giant Meta would broaden the scope of its censorship and suppression of content related to the Gaza genocide. Under the new policy, Facebook and Instagram posts containing “derogatory or threatening references to ‘Zionists’ in cases where the term is used to refer to Jews or Israelis” will be proscribed. A welter of Zionist lobby organisations - many of which aggressively lobbied Meta to adopt these changes - cheered the move. Emboldened, the same entities are now calling for all social media platforms to follow suit.
The Times of Israel noted that “nearly 150 advocacy groups and experts provided input that led to Meta’s policy update.” This prominently included Tel Aviv-based CyberWell, mundanely described by the outlet as “a nonprofit that has been documenting the swell of online antisemitism and Holocaust denial since Hamas’s October 7th attack on Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza.” These malign activities have had a devastating impact on what Western audiences see and hear about the Gaza genocide on their social media feeds.
In January, CyberWell published an extensive report on how it was seeking to censor many prominent X accounts that expressed doubts about the official narrative of October 7th, including the widely disseminated, repeatedly proven-to-be-false libel Hamas fighters beheaded dozens of infants. Users in the firing line included popular anonymous Zei Squirrel, Al Jazeera, The Grayzone chief Max Blumenthal, and famous rapper Lowkey, of MintPress News. CyberWell claimed their wholly legitimate scepticism was comparable to Holocaust denial.
The impact of these lobbying efforts isn’t clear. Almost simultaneously though, Zei Squirrel was abruptly suspended from X without warning or explanation, sparking widespread outrage. It was only due to relentless backlash that the account was reinstated. More recently, CyberWell submitted formal guidance to Meta on censoring the Palestine solidarity phrase “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” which Zionists falsely claim is a clarion call for the genocide of Jews.
That intervention is part of a broader effort by the firm to force the social network to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) highly controversial working definition of antisemitism. This definition, which has been condemned by many sources - including academic David Feldman, who helped draft it - for falsely conflating criticism of the Zionist entity and antisemitism, is a major inspiration for CyberWell. So too it seems is a sinister Israeli government psychological warfare blitzkrieg, concerned with “mass consciousness activities” in the US and Europe.
On June 24th, independent journalists Lee Fang and Jack Poulson reported that CyberWell was one component of this insidious effort to shape and spread pro-Israeli narratives across the Western world, known as Voices of Israel. In response to the exposé, CyberWell repudiated any affiliation with the long-running, Israeli-funded hasbara operation or receiving government funding “from any country.” As we shall see though, there are unambiguous grounds to doubt these denials.
It is vital to clarify the political, ideological, and financial forces guiding CyberWell’s operations and the malign interests that its censorship activities serve. The non-profit is now a “trusted partner” of Meta, TikTok, and X, ostensibly assisting these major social networks to combat “disinformation.” In reality, this grants a shadowy private firm with open links to Israel’s intelligence apparatus and evident ambitions to take its censorship crusade global, unrestrained power to prevent the reality of the Zionist entity’s genocide from emerging publicly. ‘Nothing Wrong’
In response to the exposures of Fang and Poulson, CyberWell - which had hitherto operated with a reasonable degree of transparency - went scurrying underground. Many sections of its website were pruned of incriminating information or deleted outright. This included a highly illuminating entry on the individuals running and advising the outfit. Now, visitors to CyberWell’s website are offered no indication of who or what is behind the initiative, which promises to deliver “more data, less hate” by tackling “antisemitism” online via artificial intelligence.
In a comment released to Fang and Poulson, CyberWell claimed they were “forced to remove the ‘Our Team’ page for safety reasons” due to the pair’s reporting “generating false and misleading information.” The statement further alleged:
“Following the publication of your story, our analysts were attacked and identified by name on X. Users shared your article and our employees’ names with a wider network and we became concerned for our staff’s safety.”
A review of the now-purged resumes of CyberWell’s founders and staff points to a rather different rationale. Many members of the non-profit’s “dynamic team” of “academics, retired generals, intelligence alumni and innovative tech professionals” have extensive Israeli Occupation Force (IOF) backgrounds and Israeli government ties. US-born founder Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor emigrated to Tel Aviv as a teenager, and volunteered to serve in the IOF as a “lone soldier.” She then entered the intelligence sphere via Israeli firm Argyle Consulting, which provides private spying services to international companies and “other entities.”
There, Cohen Montemayor served under Zohar Gorgel, “a decorated IDF intelligence officer with over a decade of experience in various cyber and technology roles.” Together, they struck upon the idea of “driving enforcement and improvement of community standards and hate speech policies across the digital landscape to fight against online antisemitism,” so they launched CyberWell, “encouraged by colleagues and mentors.” Elsewhere, the organisation employs Yonathan Hezroni, “a former analyst and team leader” in the IOF’s military intelligence research department.
Dina Porat, chief historian of Zionist entity-funded Yad Vashem, who heavily influenced the IHRA working definition, is named as a CyberWell advisor. So too is Major General Amos Yadlin, a 40-year high-ranking IDF veteran who once led the IDF’s spying wing and was previously defense attaché to the US. Alongside them is Lieutenant Colonel Peter Lerner, a longtime IDF spokesperson. His position raises grave questions about the non-profit’s denials of any connection to Voices of Israel.
Israeli corporate records list Lerner as a shareholder and director of Keshet David. As Voices of Israel chair and founder Micah Lakin Avni explained in a December 2018 Times of Israel interview, Keshet David—initially called Israel Cyber Shield—is the research and intelligence arm of his Israeli government-funded organization, then known as Concert. It was headed by Yossi Kuperwasser, former Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs director general, and lead IOF military intelligence researcher.
Israel Cyber Shield attracted significant public controversy in May of that year, after it was revealed to have compiled and circulated a “dirty dossier” on prominent BDS activist Linda Sarsour. The intention was to discredit her, and encourage universities and other organizations not to feature her as a speaker. As Avni acknowledged in his Times of Israel interview, creating a hostile environment for Palestine solidarity activists and events was precisely his unit’s founding purpose:
“If a person puts up a post, a public post on Facebook, and says I’m a big supporter of this or that anti-Israel organization, not only that but I’m organizing a demonstration on my campus tomorrow - if they put that public post out for the whole world to know, that’s public information, so there’s nothing wrong with being aware of that post and making sure that the Jewish students on their campus are aware of it…Concert funds Keshet David and we get all the information.” ‘Tightly Knit’
CyberWell’s deep and cohering - if well-concealed - ties to Voices of Israel and the Israeli government don’t end there. The non-profit’s 2022 annual report lists its Chief Financial Officer as Sagi Balasha, the very first CEO of Voices of Israel when the operation was still named Concert. He took up the post after leaving the influential Zionist lobby group, the Israeli-American Council (IAC), right around the time IAC donated thousands of dollars to Keshet David under its former name, Israel Cyber Shield.
Fast forward to 2021, CyberWell was founded under the title Global Antisemitism Research Center (Global ARC). Almost immediately, the wholly unknown non-profit received a $30,000 joint donation alongside Keshet David from Merona Leadership Foundation. The organisation was and remains run by Gila Milstein, wife of wealthy CyberWell board member Adam Milstein. He cofounded IAC in 2007 at the express direction of Israel’s then-consul general in Los Angeles, Ehud Danoch.
From 2018 onwards, former Israeli police officer Eran Vasker has served as chief executive of Keshet David. Simultaneously, he led Argyle Consulting, the private spying firm where Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor and Zohar Gorgel met, and founded CyberWell. Cohen Montemayor admitted in a podcast interview in January this year that while at the company, she “provided analysis” to Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, the same agency that founded Voices of Israel. CyberWell audit committee member Arik Becker is an Argyle alumni. As Fang and Poulson observe:
“In other words, the chief executive of CyberWell and two of its board members previously worked at the same private intelligence spin-off from Voices of Israel, a director of the spin-off is an advisor to CyberWell, and the CEO of Voices became the CFO of CyberWell.”
Making this nexus even murkier and more incestuous, CyberWell at one stage partnered with notorious Act.IL, which is closely associated with IAC and the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs. The latter leads Zionist entity anti-BDS efforts globally. CyberWell’s 2022 annual report noted that the non-profit “served as the data provider to Act.IL’s community for their end of year call to action on the state of online antisemitism.” Excerpt from CyberWell’s 2022 annual report
In a bitter twist, in 2022 Act.IL ceased operations. Having secretly for years corralled Zionist activists to target boycotts, justify Israeli oppression and slaughter, and harass human rights groups and Palestine solidarity activists online under the bogus aegis of organic and spontaneous response, the platform abruptly shuttered without much in the way of explanation. This may have been triggered by the crusading work of Canadian academic Michael Bueckert, who amply exposed Act.IL as an Israeli government propaganda connivance from day one. ‘Hateful Rhetoric’
CyberWell’s pressing desire to disassociate itself from Israel’s security and intelligence apparatus is undoubtedly motivated by fears the outfit could similarly go the way of Act.IL if its true nature was exposed and well-known. Markedly, both Argyle and CyberWell executives and Adam and Gila Milstein refused to respond to further requests for comment from Fang and Poulson on their relationship and shared funding with Keshet David.
Yet, CyberWell’s Israeli government origins hide in plain sight. In February 2021, Tel Aviv’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs and the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs produced a report, “The Hate Factor: policy outline for combating antisemitism online”. Little noticed at the time, among its proposed strategies, was the exploitation of artificial intelligence - CyberWell’s USP - to root out and neutralize users on social media platforms posting and sharing content critical of Israel. It is no coincidence that CyberWell launched months later.
It is vitally incumbent for Palestine solidarity activists to mount pressure on CyberWell and demand answers to the questions that its executives now stonewall. They - and, of course, the spectral actors lurking behind them - clearly have grand plans. On July 3, CyberWell circulated a dubious study on alleged antisemitic posting related to that month’s UK general election. Content critical of now-Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s unrepentant Zionism was specifically cited. An accompanying press release declared:
“As elections are being held this year in a number of countries including the UK, France, and the US, CyberWell anticipates that antisemitic conspiracies, accusations, and hateful rhetoric will continue to rise online and in the real world. Unfortunately, one of the few things that opposing parties and sides have agreed on throughout history is the use of antisemitic tropes to blame the other for perceived failures and harms.”
We can expect similar “studies” to circulate in the wake of every election and political incident in the years to come unless CyberWell’s Israeli intelligence-run operations are brought to a rapid - and wholly deserved - halt.The last working-class hero in England.
Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016 Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018 Jasper the Ruffian cat ? ? ? - 4 November 2021
Klarenberg: Zionist Extortion Racket Refuses to Die
Zionist Extortion Racket Refuses to Die Kit Klarenberg Aug 04, 2024
All my investigations are free to access, thanks to the generosity of my readers. Independent journalism nonetheless requires investment, so if you took value from this article or any others, please consider sharing, or even becoming a paid subscriber. Your support is always gratefully received, and will never be forgotten. To buy me a coffee or two, please click this link.
On July 18th, independent media outlet Mondoweiss reported that an anonymous collective of tech professionals, known as Zionism Observer, had successfully led a campaign to shut down a horrific “extortion” website managed by Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF), for the third time since its April launch. In a remarkable and inspiring example of effective grassroots anti-Zionist activism, multiple major online hosting, domain registration and software companies were publicly pressured into purging the monstrous resource from the web. But today, it’s operational once more.
Known as Alkasheff Gaza, the website hosts a searchable database of Palestinians, along with their names, government identification numbers, addresses, places of worship, and more. It is claimed the individuals listed spied for Hamas. This information is drawn from local municipal police files seized by IDF operatives. The resource burst into public view in May, when Zioniost forces rained down leaflets on Gazans featuring pictures and names of 130 purported local spies, and a QR code for visiting an accompanying, contactable Telegram channel.
Even more sinisterly, these leaflets threatened that the IDF would publish damaging details on even more Gazans if they didn’t first call the IDF on a number provided:
“Hundreds of thousands of reports on you, the people of Gaza, have been collected…Do you want to know if you were spied on and reported? Go to the website, enter your ID number, and find out who reported you.”
The pamphlet further warned, “collaborator with [Hamas] General Security! Have you found out if your ID number is on the website? We will soon reveal your details to everyone. You can still save yourself – call us.” Adjacent, the photo and name of a Palestinian featured, along with the caption, “today’s snitch.” They reportedly provided information to Hamas on an individual who frequently visited Egypt to have sexual relations with a married woman, whose husband spent extended periods away from home in the Gulf States.
Such disclosures starkly contrast with the declarations of a nameless IOF official, who, in defending the leaflet drop, told Haaretz that Israel’s military “didn’t put personal stories there” or “provide details about what these people knew or collected.” They further claimed the IOF had “legal permission to engage” in this effort, while dismissing suggestions Alkasheff Gaza was a “means of extortion.” Instead, they claimed the intention was to “awaken the public there, showing it what Hamas has done”:
“People whose photos we’ve published were carefully selected by Hamas, which recruited them for spying and extorting people. These are people from clans which are identified with Hamas. It’s part of the way Hamas uses people. We propose to all civilians and people who’ve had similar experiences to give us information.”
Gravely undermining this explanation, some of the “informants and collaborators” pictured on the IOF’s leaflets were just children, some of whom looked no older than 10, while others appeared younger than five. In addition to allegations that individuals featured on the leaflets had spied for Hamas, they featured an ominous threat to reveal deeply damaging personal information on targets, including criminal records, extramarital affairs and sexual proclivities. These were accompanied by demands for intelligence on Hamas, and the location of remaining Israeli hostages in Gaza.
Mental coercion of civilians in war zones is a brazen violation of established laws of armed conflict, and the Genocide Convention. Yet, these tactics have been a core component of IDF operations since October 2023. Israel has relentlessly bombarded Palestinians with leaflets threatening “surrender now or you will die” or simply mocking their impossibly bleak situation. One airdrop in December even featured a Quranic quote about the fate of “wrongdoers.”
In reality, it appears the purpose of Alkasheff Gaza is psychological torture. To spread distrust, disunity, and disillusionment among the area’s already embattled population, who live under the daily threat of total annihilation. As monstrous as this effort might be though, there are substantial grounds to believe its repeated respawning is reflective of the IOF’s broader catastrophic failure in Gaza. And, in turn, yet another harbinger of Israel’s impending, inevitable extinction.
‘Very Sloppy’
A Zionism Observer activist - a software developer who wishes to remain anonymous - tells me that the ease and speed with which their activist group initially succeeded in purging Alkasheff Gaza from the internet “felt like a substantial victory.” But then, the IOF completely rebuilt the online database, using new tools and hosts. Second time round, the website featured a note stating without irony: “Suspicious people are trying to keep us from exposing Hamas.” Zionism Observer promptly added “suspicious people” to their X bio.
The software developer suspects that the website’s earlier, “scarier” nature was a significant factor in compelling NameCheap, Webflow, and Twitter/X to deplatform Alkasheff Gaza within a matter of days in May. Zionism Observer and many named and unnamed online activists bombarded these companies with requests to remove the site, and they acquiesced. In addition to photos and biographical information on innocent children, “the site had a timer, along with a warning that when the timer expired, damaging information would be released on average citizens without delay.”
Zionism Observer was surprised by the third relaunch, on May 25th, which they then took down again in days. The fourth, its current iteration, remains extant as of July 31st, and can be accessed via .com, .info and .net domains. For a variety of reasons, Zionism Observer is at a loss as to why the IOF persists in maintaining the site, let alone relaunching it whenever it’s taken down:
“The database became useless after the 12th evacuation order, if not before. It lists information on locals, where they are, and where they pray, but do the mosques listed even exist anymore? Israel has been shoving people all over the place. Despite facial recognition cameras throughout Gaza, I don’t think the IDF has any clue where people are. This could just be psychological warfare, intended to make the population not trust each other and terrify individual citizens into believing the Zionists have dirt on them somehow.”
Mossad of course has a lengthy, deplorable history of blackmailing LGBT Palestinians, threatening them with public exposure if they refuse to turn agent and spy on their families, friends, and local communities. “This would be doing that at scale,” Zionism Observer’s software developer says. Although, they aren’t entirely convinced of that explanation. They are also confused by the site’s unsophisticated construction. Despite apparently being a formal IOF project, it isn’t built using the same tools as the Forces’ official websites:
“They’re using ‘no/low-code’ tools that help people who aren’t programmers build software. If professional developers created the site instead, there is a good chance that I wouldn’t even be able to figure out what tools were used to build and power the site, and there certainly wouldn’t be abuse-reporting forms and e-mails to direct people to. This could have been running on a server in an IOF datacenter, completely opaque to researchers. Perhaps someone unqualified to do this kind of thing got the contract, did it in a very sloppy way, and they’re now desperately trying to keep it going?”
Another mystery for Zionism Observer is whether the database is working from the IOF’s perspective and, if not, whether it ever did. What “working” would entail is likewise opaque. Have any terrorised Palestinians reached out? That was clearly a core founding objective of Alkasheff Gaza, given accompanying Telegram accounts were registered, and leaflet recipients and website visitors were directed to contact the Forces anonymously through these resources.
Eerily, what’s clear is that Alkasheff Gaza was intended to gather information on all its visitors. Among the back-end revelations Zionism Observer identified, the site’s searchable database of entries forwarded not only any terms entered to the IDF but also a visitor’s IP address, latitude, longitude, and city and region of residence. This would, of course, harvest a wealth of deeply sensitive intelligence on both Palestinians and foreign citizens. The software developer speculates:
“Perhaps that is the site’s value, and why they refuse to give up. Or, is the IOF as technologically incompetent as they are militarily? Maybe all they’re really good at is spying on people, and their operatives spying on people are spending more time jerking off to webcams than they are doing their actual jobs?”
‘Duty to Prevent’
Alkasheff Gaza is not the only ineptly constructed IDF resource over which Zionism Observer has run roughshod. Another, a subsection of Israel’s dedicated “Iron Swords” website, ostensibly provided an interactive “evacuation” - read: forced displacement - map for trapped Gazans. It relied heavily on a secret Israeli military intelligence database, which was openly revealed in the site’s publicly and easily accessible source code. As a result, the IDF effectively leaked its own secrets to every site visitor, both English and Arabic.
Strikingly, the map divided Gaza into 620 “population blocks” - so too did the database, which was created in April 2022. This could just be a coincidence. Or it may suggest the ongoing genocide has been in Israel’s pipeline for a long time. Whatever the truth of the matter, Zionism Observer turned the tables on the “evacuation” site, using its source code to construct a resource of their own - Gaza Maps.
They hope it will soon be interactive, allowing visitors to click on areas of Gaza and see genocidal TikTok videos shot there by the IOF, relevant evacuation orders, and much more. This is one of many Zionism Observer projects under development, and the collective intends to keep going in the name of Palestine solidarity. Like the indefatigable Resistance, time, justice, and virtue are on their side. So too is international law.
Throughout the US, state laws designed to damage or outright proscribe the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement are on local statutes. This could make it illegal for companies to deplatform Alkasheff Gaza, or any other Israeli government-affiliated website. In Arizona for example, where NameCheap is based, for instance, “an amended anti-boycott law in effect…prohibits state contracts with and state investments in entities that boycott Israel or territories occupied by Israel.”
Yet, in the wake of the International Criminal Court seeking arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and his Security Minister Yoav Gallant in May for “crimes against humanity” committed in Gaza since “at least” October 8, 2023, there is now a significant degree of legal protection for pursuing and enforcing boycotts against Israel, that would override such anti-BDS legislation. As this journalist reported in June, an analysis by the US-based University Network for Human Rights spells out the legal obligation to prevent genocide, in the wake of ICC rulings:
“The duty to prevent genocide in Gaza encompasses a range of measures. First, it is imperative that states exercise all means of political and diplomatic pressure towards the cessation of Israeli military operations in Gaza. States exporting arms or military equipment to Israel, or providing other forms of military aid or logistical assistance that contribute to or enable Israel’s military operations against Palestinians in Gaza, have an obligation to immediately terminate all forms of aid and assistance.”
This duty is triggered as soon as a state learns about a serious risk of genocide. The ICC highlighted this serious risk in Gaza in a preliminary finding in January, in a case brought against the Zionist entity by South Africa. All of Israel’s Western allies, who are signatories to the Genocide Convention and provide military and political support to Tel Aviv, are consequently obligated to attempt to stop the violence in Gaza.
There has been little state-level action on this since the genocide began. As such, it falls to concerned citizens and major corporations to fulfil those obligations. The success of Zionism Observer’s efforts to date should give us pause - and the motivation to pressure all companies providing services of any kind to Israel to boycott, divest, and sanction accordingly.The last working-class hero in England.
Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016 Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018 Jasper the Ruffian cat ? ? ? - 4 November 2021
on August 4, 2024, 2:27 pm