The Israeli government sought legal advice on how to bypass US federal law governing the spreading of propaganda among the US population by foreign states, an investigation published Saturday by The Guardian in collaboration with journalists Lee Fang and Jack Poulson shows.
US federal law requires the disclosure of foreign-backed lobbying campaigns, but leaked documents reviewed by The Guardian show the Israeli government sought legal advice concerning the law out of concern that Jewish and Christian Zionist lobbying groups working in coordination with the Israeli government would be required to register as foreign agents and disclose their ties to Israel.
The documents, which include emails and legal memos originating from a hack of the Israeli justice ministry, show that Israeli officials proposed creating a new US nonprofit in order to continue Israel’s activities in the US while avoiding scrutiny under the law.
Lee Fang and Jack Poulson write, "A legal strategy memo dated July 2018 noted that compliance with the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) would damage the reputation of several American groups that receive funding and direction from Israel and force them to meet onerous transparency requirements. A separate memo noted that donors would not want to fund groups registered under FARA."
The memo says the Israeli government was worried about FARA because it compels registrants to "flag any piece of ‘propaganda’ that is distributed to two or more parties in the US, with a disclaimer stating that it was delivered by a foreign agent and then submit a copy of the ‘propaganda’ to the US Department of Justice within 48 hours."
To prevent FARA registration and the stigma and scrutiny associated with it, the legal advisors suggested channeling funds through a third-party US nonprofit.
Liat Glazer, a legal advisor to Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, wrote that even though the new US nonprofit would not be formally managed from Israel, "we will have means of supervision and management" through grant-making and "informal coordination mechanisms" such as "oral meetings and updates."
The Israeli government sought legal advice from Sandler Reiff, a prominent election and campaign law firm in Washington, DC. Joseph E. Sandler, the former in-house general counsel to the Democratic National Committee, and Joshua I. Rosenstein, a widely-cited expert on FARA, provided the legal advice on behalf of the firm.
Fang and Poulson add that the Israeli government was specifically concerned that a US-based nonprofit, "Kela Shlomo" (which translates to “Solomon’s Sling”) would be forced to register under FARA.
The group was formed in 2017 by Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs to distribute Israeli propaganda.
Rebranded as "Concert" in 2018 and "Voices of Israel" in 2021, the group focused on undermining and warring against the BDS movement, which leads boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaigns against Israel in protest of its illegal occupation of Palestine and 'apartheid laws'.
The emails and documents were released by Distributed Denial of Secrets, or DDoSecrets, a US-based nonprofit. The documents were obtained by "Anonymous for Justice," a self-described "hacktivist collective" that announced in April that it had infiltrated Israel’s Ministry of Justice and retrieved hundreds of gigabytes of data.
