Right-wing group infiltrates human rights NGOs


January 15, 2016
Sarah Benton
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Ezra Nawi, front, with a group protesting about home demolitions, 2010. Photo by Oren Ziv/Activestills.org

Human rights groups smeared over actions of one man

Ezra Nawi, a prominent figure in direct-action anti-occupation group Ta’ayush, was secretly recorded talking about having a Palestinian man killed for selling land to Israeli settlers. In response, the prime minister, defence minister and education minister take aim at the entire Israeli Left.

By Edo Konrad, +972
January 08, 2016

A damning investigative report has Israel’s human rights community in the crosshairs once again. Channel 2′s flagship investigative report show, “Uvda” (“Fact” in Hebrew) aired a 35-minute segment Thursday night featuring the work of a clandestine right-wing group that tries to infiltrate the ranks of Israel’s left-wing NGOs.

The group, named “Ad Kan” (loosely translated to “No More”), arms its members with hidden cameras in order to capture high-profile leftists doing or saying things they probably should not be doing or saying. This way, Ad Kan’s founders claim, it can be proven once and for all that Israeli human rights groups actually care very little about human rights.

Two employees of Ad Kan successfully infiltrated the well known anti-occupation group, Ta’ayush, which brings Jewish and Palestinian volunteers to the West Bank to work alongside Palestinians in nonviolent direct-action activities such as re-building wells that have been destroyed by the army, re-planting olive groves that have been torched or felled by settlers, or escorting Palestinian herders who have been harassed and assaulted by settlers.


A Jewish member of Ta’ayush uses his body to protect Palestinian shepherds from Israeli settlers in the south Hebron Hills, 2008. Photo by Keren Manor/Activestills.org

One of the infiltrators, “Arik,” a fake name, eventually grows close to Ezra Nawi, one of the most prominent figures in Ta’ayush and the radical Israeli Left in general. Nawi, an Israeli Jew of Iraqi descent who is openly despised by settlers and generally revered by Israeli activists, tells Arik that he often receives calls from Palestinian land brokers who wish to sell property in the West Bank to Israelis, but who cannot do so on the open market because doing so is a capital offence under Palestinian law.

Nawi is then secretly filmed pretending to act as a middleman, telling “Arik” that he is doing so in order to report the Palestinian broker to the PA’s Preventive Security Force, which he says will torture and kill both the seller and middleman.

Throughout the 35-minute report, we see Nawi meet with the middleman, “Musa,” to discuss the details of the deal. Unknown to the latter, however, Nawi has already set up a plan — along with a field worker from Israeli human rights organization, B’Tselem — to turn him in to Palestinian security forces.

Even — or perhaps, especially — for those most loyal to Nawi’s cause, it is difficult to see him laughing with “Arik” about the torture and murder of another person. Musa eventually backs down from the deal and we are later told that nobody was harmed.

The responses to the report were quick to follow. B’Tselem accused Uvda of “choosing to [publish] materials that were gathered in shady ways through impersonations and based on the absurd assumption that Ta’ayush activists are part of a dangerous organization whose activities are illegitimate.The show ignored the power dynamics in the area, as well as the question of who this right-wing group serves and who is behind it.”

If that weren’t enough, the highest echelons of the Israeli government also had something to say about Nawi’s reported actions. But instead of focusing their rage at the person who most certainly appears to deserve it, they leveraged the report to attack and smear the entire spectrum of left-leaning and human rights organizations.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Uvda’s report “revealed the true face of the extremists among us, whose hatred for the settlements drive them crazy and has brought them to the point where they turn in innocents who will undergo torture and the death penalty.”

In true form, Netanyahu went on to chastise the Palestinian Authority for having such a law on its books in the first place, and for the “brutal behaviour” that comes as a response to selling land to Jews. (Palestinian law, which is actually a leftover Jordanian law, prohibits selling land to Israelis, not specifically to Jews.) Netanyahu also directed his ire at Nawi, writing that “anyone who supports murder cannot continue to hide behind the hypocrisy of ‘caring for human rights’.”

Defence Minister Moshe Ya’alon somehow managed to connect the Uvda report to the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign (BDS), writing on his Facebook page that the majority of “human rights” activists that he has met over the years were busy with sullying Israel’s name as part of the movement to boycott Israel. They’ll do anything to trash the Jewish state, he wrote, even going as far as “endangering the lives of Palestinian land sellers.” According to Ya’alon, these “so-called peace groups” are part of a larger campaign that Israel is struggling against.

But it was Education Minister Naftali Bennett who dedicated three whole Facebook statuses (and counting) in a single day to Uvda’s report.

First Bennett accused the New Israel Fund and the European Union of funding Israeli human rights activists who turn in innocent Palestinians, urging his followers to share the status because the media silences opinions such as these. (Yes, the same media that aired the report in the first place.)

Two hours later, Bennett published a second status in which he claimed he had spoken with both the British and French ambassadors to Israel, urging them to cease transferring funds to Ta’ayush and B’Tselem. Bennett then followed up with yet a third status, in which he attached a three-minute video summary of Uvda’s report, urging the “heads of the Left,” including Isaac Herzog, Tzipi Livni, Yair Lapid, and “even Zehava Galon” to condemn such actions. “Murder is murder is murder,” Bennett wrote.

Israeli human rights groups — not individuals — are a threat to the very existence of the state

(While strongly condemning any action, especially by a human rights defender, that intentionally leads to another human being’s torture or death, it is important to note that there is no evidence anybody was actually harmed as a result of the incidents portrayed in the Uvda report. That is not a defence of Nawi’s reported actions, however, which are unjustifiable.)

Instead of simply condemning Nawi’s indefensible actions, Israel’s leadership is exploiting this political moment to its fullest. At a time when human rights organizations are already under concerted attack, for Israeli leaders, Uvda’s report serves as yet further proof that Israeli human rights groups — not individuals — are a threat to the very existence of the state.

It should come as no surprise then that such fear mongering is nearly exclusively aimed at left-wing organizations (Netanyahu, Ya’alon, and Bennett kept mum when human rights activists were the subject of a recent campaign of incitement) and that there is an entire network of organizations, from Ad Kan to the proto-fascist Im Tirzu, that are, if not working in tandem with, then directly inspired by right-wing politicians who seek to quash any and all dissent.



‘Ad Kan’ undercover agent Amir Beit Arieh speaking to Channel 2 about infiltrating the left.

Israeli Government Body Funds Astro-Turf Group Spying on Human Rights Activists

By Richard Silverstein, Tikun Olam
January 14, 2016

Today, Mint Press published my expose of the conspiracy by Israeli settlers, the IDF, State prosecutors, and at least one member of the Internal Security Ministry to destroy several Israeli human rights NGOs and one of their most effective, and controversial activists, Ezra Nawi. After Uvdah aired its deeply flawed segment which documented the planting of right-wing spies in the South Hebron Hills-based Ta’ayush, Ezra Nawi came under physical assault and threats of death.

When friends in Europe offered him refuge there, he boarded a flight to Europe. After passing through border control and taking his seat on the plane, Shabak agents removed him, despite the fact that there was no order for his arrest, nor even for questioning. Nor had he been added to any list preventing him from leaving the country.

Then rumors were bruited about by security forces that Nawi had “contacted a foreign agent” in pursuit of an unspecified crime. He was arrested and yesterday he appeared in court. Shabak has prohibited him from contact with his lawyer. Now they’ve put the entire episode under gag order. So while yesterday, reporters could report on the case and name Nawi, now they must obscure their prior knowledge. Israeli readers, presumably, have been commanded by the security services to forget what they knew only yesterday. Only in the national security state.

Ad Kan, the group founded to smash Israel’s human rights NGOs, is what’s known as an astro-turf organization. They were established to hide the involvement of other powerful right-wing groups and government entities which preferred to go under the radar. Among those are the Shomron Regional Council, the IDF, and a government security ministry. Walla reported today that the settler council had contributed “tens of thousands of shekels” to Ad Kan in each of the three years of its existence. The Shomron Council is the same body which produced the odious video, the Eternal Jew (YouTube), which portrayed human rights NGOs with Der Sturmer-style caricatures. Among other things, it accused the NGOs of betraying Israelis and leading to their murder at the hands of unspecified anti-Semites. At the conclusion, the NGO leaders gladly take their 30 pieces of silver from their EU masters.

So in that sense, the work of Ad Kan is an extension of the propaganda enterprise the Council started with the video accusing NGOs of collaborating with Nazis and Jew haters.

Walla adds that the right-wing spy group also targeted Rabbis for Human Rights and Breaking the Silence, but appears to have come up empty-handed regarding them. BtS just revealed that an infiltrator named Amir Beit Arie offered it false testimony which it never used in its public reports. Beit Arie disappeared from the group after he was caught taping a staff meeting and reprimanded. It seems likely he was also an Ad Kan stoolie.

The news site reports on one Gilad Ach, L, one of the founders of Ad Kan. Ach received funding  for two previous organizations, at least one of  which was designed to infiltrate the Israeli left.  The first was the Forum for a Green Israel and  second, Defence of a Jewish Democratic Israel. Though the latter group performed the actual spy work, Ach wanted to shield this group so he founded the astro-turf organization, Ad Kan. Though Ach denies it received funding from the settler council, he did admit that the council funded the Green Israel group. However, a review of council funding shows it did not fund any projects devoted to environmentalism. So it appears Defence of a Jewish Democratic Israel did receive the funding mentioned above. Walla reports that this funding in turn supported the spying activities of Ad Kan.

The settler council is funded by an official government body, the Shomron Regional Council. That is why Ach needed to hide its funding behind an astro-turf group. The Regional Council does not want its support made public. And it loudly denies any connection to Ad Kan. But in reality, there is only one degree of separation between the Regional Council and Ad Kan.

All this means that Israeli taxpayer funds are transferred officially by the government to Ad Kan and its various organizational manifestations. So if you’re an Israeli, you funded, directly or indirectly both the reprehensible video mentioned above and the attempt to destroy Israeli human rights work in the form of the Uvdah “expose.” The settler council also was the principal force pressuring to transform Israeli bus routes in the West Bank into an apartheid transportation system. After an international outcry, the defense minister, who had supported the proposal wholeheartedly, backed off.

Aviram Zeevi former security ministry official, now operations director for Israeli settler spy group Ad Kan.

Ach also created a group of election observers  who  monitored Arab polling places in the last  elections. Their work was intended to expose  voter fraud in the Arab sector and intimidate  voters in much the way that GOP poll-workers  do in U.S. minority election polling stations. He  provided the observers their own security force  in case they were attacked. This project, the  Shomron settler council does admit supporting financially.

I tried earlier unsuccessfully to find any sort of online footprint for Ad Kan. A friend just located its website, which was first registered in October 2015. This is the same time that the group registered officially as an Israeli organization. It is also roughly when the group handed over its spy videos to an Uvdah producer for possible airing. In both cases, the individual who registered the group and the website was Aviram Zeevi. Yossi Gurvitz discovered that as of 2011, Zeevi worked for the Internal Security ministry. This is the body which oversees the police and various other domestic law enforcement agencies.

I reached Zeevi by telephone and tried to pose some questions to him, but he told me I must first approach Ad Kan’s public relations staffer, Liran Weiss. At least Zeevi confirmed he used to work for the ministry but now appears to work mainly for Ad Kan.

I also e mailed a series of questions to Uvdah about the segment it aired and the producer, Gabriela Bistritzky, refused to respond to them. Here is her reply:

The documentary speaks for itself. As a respectable journalist outlet we do not respond on queries regarding our sources.

The art of the non-response response. This is an example of media practicing the art of obfuscation and opacity.


Yulia Tarontorova, known as Tarantula on her social media accounts, infiltrated pro-peace NGO’s for Ad Kan, a far-right Israeli organization with close ties to the Israeli state security apparatus. Photo from Richard Silverstein.

The two infiltrators mentioned above were Itzik Goldway, a sergeant in the IDF who was decorated for service during Operation Protective Edge; and his girlfriend, Yulia Tarantarova. The Facebook account of Israeli activists features this photo of Tarantarova holding the spy video camera used to film Nawi and others. She is surrounded by an IDF officer and Border Police. Though this isn’t definitive proof, it’s unusual for activists to be alone while surrounded by security forces. Unless of course, she’s collaborating with them.

In his latest Haaretz column, Gideon Levy calls all this outrageous right-wing calumny in collusion with the security apparatus, Introduction to the Stasi (Hebrew). He calls it a form of “chasing after demons.” And lest anyone argue that all this is the product of right-wing extremism, Levy reminds us that virtually all sectors from the right to the center, from the media to the security apparatus to ordinary citizens, constitute a smug and self-satisfied “coalition” supporting this witch hunt atmosphere, especially surrounding the persecution of the NGOs and Nawi.

Levy offers an added cogent argument against Nawi’s detention: he is accused of contact with a foreign agent. That is, the Palestinian security services. The same body which the puppet of the Israeli security apparatus. He wonders when all of the Israeli army officers and Shabak agents who regularly liaise with these same foreign agents will themselves be thrown in prison and denied access to their attorneys.

Finally, one of Haaretz’s few remaining progressive columnists rails against Uvdah’s presenter, Ilana Dayan, for declaring that “she works on behalf of no one.” The claim is laughable on its face. All of Israeli media work on behalf of the very same security apparatus-settler lobby which produced such scuzzy journalism.


Israeli Government Body Funds Astro-Turf Group Spying on Human Rights Activists

By Richard Silverstein

Today, Mint Press published my expose of the conspiracy by Israeli settlers, the IDF, State prosecutors, and at least one member of the Internal Security Ministry to destroy several Israeli human rights NGOs and one of their most effective, and controversial activists, Ezra Nawi. After Uvdah aired its deeply flawed segment which documented the planting of right-wing spies in the South Hebron Hills-based Taayush, Ezra Nawi came under physical assault and threats of death.

When friends in Europe offered him refuge there, he boarded a flight to Europe. After passing through border control and taking his seat on the plane, Shabak agents removed him, despite the fact that there was no order for his arrest, nor even for questioning. Nor had he been added to any list preventing him from leaving the country.

Then rumors were bruited about by security forces that Nawi had “contacted a foreign agent” in pursuit of an unspecified crime. He was arrested and yesterday he appeared in court. Shabak has prohibited him from contact with his lawyer. Now they’ve put the entire episode under gag order. So while yesterday, reporters could report on the case and name Nawi, now they must obscure their prior knowledge. Israeli readers, presumably, have been commanded by the security services to forget what they knew only yesterday. Only in the national security state.

Ad Kan, the group founded to smash Israel’s human rights NGOs, is what’s known as an astro-turf organization. They were established to hide the involvement of other powerful right-wing groups and government entities which preferred to go under the radar. Among those are the Shomron Regional Council, the IDF, and a government security ministry. Walla reported today that the settler council had contributed “tens of thousands of shekels” to Ad Kan in each of the three years of its existence. The Shomron Council is the same body which produced the odious video, the Eternal Jew (YouTube), which portrayed human rights NGOs with Der Sturmer-style caricatures. Among other things, it accused the NGOs of betraying Israelis and leading to their murder at the hands of unspecified anti-Semites. At the conclusion, the NGO leaders gladly take their 30 pieces of silver from their EU masters.

So in that sense, the work of Ad Kan is an extension of the propaganda enterprise the Council started with the video accusing NGOs of collaborating with Nazis and Jew haters.

gilad ach
Gilad Ach, founder of ‘vast settler conspiracy’ to destroy Israeli human rights NGOs
Walla adds that the right-wing spy group also targeted Rabbis for Human Rights and Breaking the Silence, but appears to have come up empty-handed regarding them. BtS just revealed that an infiltrator named Amir Beit Arie offered it false testimony which it never used in its public reports. Beit Arie disappeared from the group after he was caught taping a staff meeting and reprimanded. It seems likely he was also an Ad Kan stoolie.

The news site reports on one Gilad Ach, one of the founders of Ad Kan. Ach received funding for two previous organizations, at least one of which was designed to infiltrate the Israeli left. The first was the Forum for a Green Israel and second, Defense of a Jewish Democratic Israel. Though the latter group performed the actual spy work, Ach wanted to shield this group so he founded the astro-turf organization, Ad Kan. Though Ach denies it received funding from the settler council, he did admit that the council funded the Green Israel group. However, a review of council funding shows it did not fund any projects devoted to environmentalism. So it appears Defense of a Jewish Democratic Israel did receive the funding mentioned above. Walla reports that this funding in turn supported the spying activities of Ad Kan.

The settler council is funded by an official government body, the Shomron Regional Council. That is why Ach needed to hide its funding behind an astro-turf group. The Regional Council does not want its support made public. And it loudly denies any connection to Ad Kan. But in reality, there is only one degree of separation between the Regional Council and Ad Kan.

All this means that Israeli taxpayer funds are transferred officially by the government to Ad Kan and its various organizational manifestations. So if you’re an Israeli, you funded, directly or indirectly both the reprehensible video mentioned above and the attempt to destroy Israeli human rights work in the form of the Uvdah “expose.” The settler council also was the principal force pressuring to transform Israeli bus routes in the West Bank into an apartheid transportation system. After an international outcry, the defense minister, who had supported the proposal wholeheartedly, backed off.
Ach also created a group of election observers who monitored Arab polling places in the last elections. Their work was intended to expose voter fraud in the Arab sector and intimidate voters in much the way that GOP poll-workers do in U.S. minority election polling stations. He provided the observers their own security force in case they were attacked. This project, the Shomron settler council does admit supporting financially.

I tried earlier unsuccessfully to find any sort of online footprint for Ad Kan. A friend just located its website, which was first registered in October 2015. This is the same time that the group registered officially as an Israeli organization. It is also roughly when the group handed over its spy videos to an Uvdah producer for possible airing. In both cases, the individual who registered the group and the website was Aviram Zeevi. Yossi Gurvitz discovered that as of 2011, Zeevi worked for the Internal Security ministry. This is the body which oversees the police and various other domestic law enforcement agencies.

I reached Zeevi by telephone and tried to pose some questions to him, but he told me I must first approach Ad Kan’s public relations staffer, Liran Weiss. At least Zeevi confirmed he used to work for the ministry but now appears to work mainly for Ad Kan.

I also e mailed a series of questions to Uvdah about the segment it aired and the producer, Gabriela Bistritzky, refused to respond to them. Here is her reply:

The documentary speaks for itself. As a respectable journalist outlet we do not respond on queries regarding our sources.

The art of the non-response response. This is an example of media practicing the art of obfuscation and opacity.

The two infiltrators mentioned above were Itzik Goldway, a sergeant in the IDF who was decorated for service during Operation Protective Edge; and his girlfriend, Yulia Tarantarova. The Facebook account of Israeli activists features this photo of Tarantarova [above] holding the spy video camera used to film Nawi and others. She is surrounded by an IDF officer and Border Police. Though this isn’t definitive proof, it’s unusual for activists to be alone while surrounded by security forces. Unless of course, she’s collaborating with them.

In his latest Haaretz column, Gideon Levy calls all this outrageous right-wing calumny in collusion with the security apparatus, Introduction to the Stasi (Hebrew). He calls it a form of “chasing after demons.” And lest anyone argue that all this is the product of right-wing extremism, Levy reminds us that virtually all sectors from the right to the center, from the media to the security apparatus to ordinary citizens, constitute a smug and self-satisfied “coalition” supporting this witch hunt atmosphere, especially surrounding the persecution of the NGOs and Nawi.

Levy offers an added cogent argument against Nawi’s detention: he is accused of contact with a foreign agent. That is, the Palestinian security services. The same body which the puppet of the Israeli security apparatus. He wonders when all of the Israeli army officers and Shabak agents who regularly liaise with these same foreign agents will themselves be thrown in prison and denied access to their attorneys.

Finally, one of Haaretz’s few remaining progressive columnists rails against Uvdah’s presenter, Ilana Dayan, for declaring that “she works on behalf of no one.” The claim is laughable on its face. All of Israeli media work on behalf of the very same security apparatus-settler lobby which produced such scuzzy journalism.

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