Has the Strategic Affairs Ministry achieved its goals?

When the new government was sworn in last week, a strategic affairs minister was not among its members.

The ministry, created in 2006, has been phased out. It had different iterations over the years, coordinating intelligence and diplomatic information on the Iranian threat at first, and from 2015 onward was dedicated to countering delegitimization and boycotts of Israel. Now, Deputy Foreign Minister Idan Roll is responsible for incorporating that work into the Foreign Ministry.

Tzahi Gavrieli, who served as deputy director-general and then director-general of the Strategic Affairs Ministry in the years after it became Israel’s anti-BDS force, called the shift “unfortunate,” but said its efforts can be salvaged.

“We need to maintain the task force that can be built. The form doesn’t matter; the substance is what matters, as long as we continue having a task force with the abilities and assertive approach against delegitimization and boycotts of Israel,” Gavrieli argued. “We built something that is proven to be effective. It needs to be given its rightful place.”

Israel needs a unit to counter delegitimization, because it faces unique threats.

“There is no other BDS against any other country. There’s nothing to compare it to,” Gavrieli said. “There used to be no one leading this effort, and now we’re a player, we’re aggressive. I know our efforts worked.

“If we go back to a situation where this important issue is scattered between different ministries, we’ll deteriorate… The team shouldn’t be dismantled,” he added.

GAVRIELI CAME to the Strategic Affairs Ministry in late 2015, as the Palestinian Authority pressured FIFA to boycott Israel and telecom company Orange dropped its Israeli affiliate amid boycott calls. Musical artists like Lauryn Hill, Elvis Costello and the Pixies refused to perform in Israel.

Israel’s cabinet decided to task the Strategic Affairs Ministry with countering the boycott threat and dedicated a NIS 100 million budget to the task. Ministry staff got working, interviewing over 250 people to examine how to respond.

“This is about Israel as a brand. PR and hasbara were not enough anymore. We needed technology, data, a civil society engine and digital assets. We needed infrastructure and a coordinated plan,” Gavrieli recounted. “We built a task force focused on one mission: to defend the brand of Israel as the Jewish state.”

To explain how the ministry worked, Gavrieli gave the example of the Eurovision Song Contest in Israel in 2019. He recounted that the head of its situation room called him in, and showed what looked like an orchestrated campaign on Twitter, calling on Eurovision participants to drop out of the contest if it is in Israel.

“They were smearing Israel by using a very large brand like the Eurovision, the world’s biggest live show with 200 million viewers,” Gavrieli explained. “This was the goal of the BDS movement’s leaders. They started to demonstrate in front or every broadcast union among the 41 participating states.”

The ministry “reverse engineered” the campaign to find who is behind it, identifying hundreds of fake social media accounts “creating a façade of a fake campaign to persuade contestants not to perform in Israel and also build resentment among voters,” he said.

The ministry presented its findings to Twitter to remove the inauthentic accounts, and most were taken down three weeks before the contest took place, Gavrieli said. They also encouraged a counter-offensive, providing information to hundreds of pro-Israel organizations around the world.

That same year, the ministry released its “Terrorists in Suits” report, reaffirming and adding to what pro-Israel organizations had found about the terrorist affiliations of pro-Palestinian non-governmental organizations active in Europe.

“More than 50 bank accounts were closed,” Gavrieli recalled. “States, organizations, financial institutions, civil society organizations started to ask very serious questions about the true face of some of these supposed human rights organizations.”

Another major development, which former strategic affairs minister Gilad Erdan had focused on, was the EU adding a clause to its funding procedure for NGOs, prohibiting third-party connections to terror organizations.

“The EU understood it should scrutinize its funding much more – where it goes, who is using it, to what end,” Gavrieli said.

Now, the Strategic Affairs Ministry is being dismantled leaving behind “a very bruised BDS movement with almost no achievements and funding problems, with worries about the actions of the ministry,” Gavrieli asserted.

 

LOOKING TO the future, Gavrieli said Israel’s next big delegitimization challenge is the International Criminal Court’s investigation of war crime allegations against Israel, as well as the UN Human Rights Council probe.

“We’re now at a crossroads,” he said. “This ICC decision to start investigating Israel is a case where the civil society engine will be a big player… This isn’t like an academic boycott. It’s a different ballgame and the State of Israel should and must be ready for it.”

Gavrieli said that “as a battalion commander in reserves, I think Israel must promise IDF soldiers that we will do whatever it takes to back them in the strongest way possible.”

He adds that the government should undertake diplomatic outreach toward countries around the world to point to serious questions about the legitimacy of the ICC probe.

“We need to understand that civil society is a key player here. Anti-Israel organizations are writing reports and building coalitions. They are part of the full scope of activity that we need to address,” he said.

The trend, Gavrieli said, “is to document everything – doesn’t matter if it’s illegal or not – and take it to the ICC. The ICC is trendy.

“If we saw in the past, most delegitimization efforts were focusing on economics, academia, and culture, now people are turning into a kind of unofficial proxy of international tribunals like the ICC. We have to understand who we’re dealing with,” he said.

Groups that are viewed more seriously in the international arena than BDS, such as Human Rights Watch and B’Tselem, have accused Israel of apartheid this year.

“You can’t fight lies with bigger lies. You fight lies with the truth, with the facts,” Gavrieli said. “Reality in Israel is sometimes challenging, but this is not by any means an apartheid state. We need to go back to basics and campaign on the facts. The problem won’t end instantly; it’s a long battle.”

As for harassment of Jewish students on college campuses, often using their affiliation with Israel as a cudgel, Gavrieli said: “Israel is a fact, for 73 years. It is the state of the Jews. That’s the reality. If you attack someone because he is supporting Israel as part of his belief or identity, that is antisemitic, on the basis of nationality or religious affiliation.

“The State of Israel must fight that with every tool we have,” he said, pointing to a 2019 ministry report titled “Behind the Mask” that focused on campus BDS groups’ terrorist affiliations, which he said was helpful in fighting attacks on pro-Israel students.

One of the major criticisms of the Strategic Affairs Ministry was a lack of transparency in its budget, though Gavrieli argued that it has been fully transparent since 2018.

“This is an asymmetrical battle. We’re a state, and they have a campaign,” he said. “BDS organizations use the information we publish, which organizations we work with, how much we spend on campaigns and projects. I understand the pressure to disclose… but looking back at the past five years, I am comfortable with what we did. We were open to the public, and what needed to be disclosed we disclosed under guidance from the Justice Ministry.”

IN LAST month’s Operation Guardian of the Walls, Gavrieli identified a new process in which Hamas is taking part in the delegitimization efforts.

“It’s not just military action, Hamas is part of more and more civilian activities, certainly in Europe,” he said. “It creates a situation in which a designated terrorist organization provides a platform for civil society efforts in the Palestinian Authority and around the world… that serves a group of organizations.”

BDS cites human rights concerns, while using the activities and platforms of a terrorist organization against Israel, Gavrieli pointed out.

“In the end, there is a complex reality, in a liberal world that does not want to see wars and a media that doesn’t understand the conflict in depth,” he lamented.

Gavrieli pointed to the fact that no one has been appointed to replace the head of the National Information Directorate Yarden Vatikay, who left in 2019, as a serious problem during Guardian of the Walls. Gavrieli was one of the founders of the National Information Directorate.

“That was kind of the central command that coordinated Israel’s approach” to public messaging, he said. “Without a body like that, which releases messages in a coordinated way, with a 360-degree view creating synergy between government bodies, you end up less effective, because everyone does what he thinks.

“There is only so much we can do, but we have to keep fighting. We have to operate civil society networks, digital efforts, and research, but what was missing was a central message. 

“That won’t solve all of our problems, but it can make the difference.”