Back in March 2011, the Israeli consulate in New York City had a problem. A group of soldiers from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) were coming to the U.S. on a PR trip, and Israeli officials needed help persuading influential media outlets to interview the delegation.
Luckily for the consulate, a new organization called Act For Israel, led by Israeli-American actor Noa Tishby, was prepared to swing into action. “[I]n mid March 2011, the New York Consulate requested our assistance,” Tishby’s organization wrote in a document revealed in a recent trove of leaked emails.
“Act For Israel quickly arranged seven interviews with the top ranks of U.S. blogs and radio shows,” the document explained, highlighting that their efforts helped promote “Israel’s narrative” in Red State, which it described as the “most read blog by US Senators and Congress representatives.”
The previously unreported campaign appears to have violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which mandates that American citizens and organizations publicly disclose any work that seeks to influence American politics on behalf of a foreign power. “That sounds like a slam-dunk case of activities that should have required FARA registration,” said Ben Freeman, a FARA expert at the Quincy Institute, which publishes RS.
The leak provides a rare window into how some pro-Israel activists have skirted rules aimed at providing transparency about foreign influence over American politics — a practice that has helped obscure the scale of Israeli propaganda efforts in the United States. In public, Act For Israel appeared to be no more than a group of pro-Israel Americans advocating for a stronger U.S.-Israel relationship. But the leaked emails and documents show that representatives of the organization sought to shape U.S. public opinion while boasting privately of their intimate collaboration with the Israeli government.
A bio of Tishby contained in the leak, for example, describes her as working “closely with Israel’s Government, Israel’s Embassy and consulates to advocate for Israel.”
The documents come from a leak of the emails of Gabi Ashkenazi, a former IDF chief of staff who joined Act For Israel as a board member starting in mid-2011. RS was unable to independently verify the authenticity of the emails, which were leaked by a pro-Iran hacking group called Handala. But many of the details found in the documents comport with publicly available information about Act For Israel. Neither Tishby nor Ashkenazi responded to requests for comment.
FARA experts have long suspected that “there was more work being done on behalf of the Israeli government” than public disclosures revealed, according to Freeman. “There was an underlying assumption that Israel didn't have to play by the rules,” he said. “With this, we're getting a sense that our suspicions were right.”
A ‘strong partnership’ with Israel’s foreign ministry
2011 was a stressful year for conservative commentator Joshua Trevino. A few years after founding the influential political blog Red State, Trevino had launched another platform called Malaysia Matters, and rumors had started to circulate saying that Trevino was running this blog on behalf of Malaysian officials.
Trevino strenuously denied any secret work for Malaysia at the time. “I am confident I am within the law,” he said. Two years later, though, he changed his tune and agreed to retroactively register as a foreign agent for Malaysia, all while claiming to have been unaware of FARA.
In retrospect, it turns out that this wasn’t Trevino’s only work that may have violated FARA.The leaked emails suggest that he was also doing PR on behalf of Act For Israel — and, by extension, the Israeli government.
Various documents show that Trevino worked with Act For Israel as an adviser and “media director” starting in late 2010. This work appeared to include efforts to place pro-Israel content in popular American blogs, including Red State. It is not clear whether the organization paid Trevino for this work, though even unpaid activities are covered by FARA, according to Freeman. (The statute of limitations for FARA violations is five years, meaning that neither Trevino nor anyone else in this story faces legal risk for any activities carried out on behalf of Act For Israel.)
Trevino also appears to have helped put together at least one media junket to Israel with the organization. Even as he denied acting as a foreign agent on behalf of Malaysia, Trevino revealed that he “also offer[ed] people paid trips to Israel.” This seems to be a reference to the Act For Israel Media Fellowship, a fully-funded excursion that the organization described in previously undisclosed documents as part of a “strong partnership with Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.”
International press trips are not uncommon, but this one stood out because it required participants to “produce a minimum of 6 articles on national publications as a result of the fellowship,” according to a leaked document. Act For Israel claimed that this led to the publication of 48 articles in a dozen “distinguished media outlets.” (RS was unable to find these articles but did find several blog posts.)
Participants in the 2011 junket included several notable media figures, such as blogger and former Senate candidate Chuck DeVore; essayist Claire Berlinski; Tim Mak, who went on to work for the Washington Examiner, NPR and the Daily Beast; Seth Mandel, now a senior editor at Commentary Magazine; and Mollie Hemingway, now the editor-in-chief of the Federalist. During the trip, a right-wing Israeli newspaper interviewed DeVore and Berlinski, who criticized international coverage of the conflict and urged foreign reporters to better portray Israeli narratives.
An itinerary obtained by RS shows that the delegation participated in a series of high-level meetings, including conversations with Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon and Mark Regev, then the deputy head of communications in the prime minister’s office. The group also received a briefing on the “Iranian threat” from the Israeli foreign ministry and joined an IDF spokesperson for a tour of Israel’s border with Lebanon.
RS could not confirm whether the participants were aware of the writing requirement. But if they knew about the condition and complied — and were aware of the Israeli government’s relationship to the junket — then they should have also registered as foreign agents, according to Freeman.
Around the time of the trip, Trevino was paying Mandel, Berlinski, and DeVore to write articles about Malaysia as part of Trevino’s efforts on behalf of Malaysian officials. (All three deny any knowledge that the money came from the Malaysian government.)
Trevino appears to have ended his partnership with Act For Israel in late 2011. He now works on domestic policy at the Texas Public Policy Foundation and on Latin American security issues for the America First Policy Institute. Neither Trevino nor the journalists who participated in the junket responded to requests for comment.
Meanwhile, Tishby, Act for Israel’s founder, and Sharone Levinson, the group’s co-founder, continued working hard to raise money from pro-Israel groups in the U.S. to help fund their activities. In their pitch, the pair told prospective donors that “Act For Israel will continue to work in partnership with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to develop a network of pro-Israel ‘Thought Influencers’ who can reach the masses digitally” — an early precursor to a similar pro-Israel influence campaign that RS revealed in September. The group was particularly determined to turn Americans against a series of civilian “flotillas” that were attempting to break the Israeli blockade on Gaza.
These efforts elicited a particularly high-level endorsement from the Israeli government. In a 2011 letter to Tishby revealed in the leak, then-Israeli President Shimon Peres called Act For Israel “a solution to a new form of de-legitimization” of Israel.
“You provide a quick and active appeal to youth around the world,” Peres wrote in the previously unreported letter. “By doing so you are a great help to the Public Relations efforts which are lead by the State of Israel.”
After Act For Israel
Act For Israel appears to have folded in the intervening years. But several of its affiliates have continued working to shape Americans’ views of Israel. Tishby, in particular, has become an influential voice advocating for the return of Israeli hostages while railing against “so-called pro-Palestinian movements” in the U.S. Her pop-history of Israel remains one of the most popular books about the conflict on Amazon. “She is the voice of this Jewish generation,” Yoav Davis, a frequent collaborator of Tishby’s, told the New York Times in 2023. “I keep telling her that God has been grooming her for this moment.”
In 2022, Tishby registered as a foreign agent for the first time during a two-year-long stint as Israel’s Special Envoy for Combating Antisemitism and the Delegitimization of Israel. But the leaked emails reveal that the scope and timeline of her work on behalf of Israeli interests went far beyond the disclosures shared in that registration. And there is reason to believe that some of these activities are ongoing.
One possible clue is the fact that Davis, her collaborator and a former IDF spokesperson, recently registered as a foreign agent for Israel. In a pair of FARA filings, Davis said that the Israeli government is paying him $161,000 to do PR about “Hostage and humanitarian awareness” through his comms shop, Davis Media NY LLC. In the month and a half since that disclosure was filed, Tishby and Davis have collaborated on several hostage-related videos that Tishby has pushed out to her 927,000 followers on Instagram.
RS could not establish any direct link between the contract and these videos, which reflect Tishby’s long-held views. Davis did not respond to a request for comment.
There is also some indication that Davis has done more work for Israel than his recent FARA filing suggests. As early as 2020, Davis listed the Israeli Consulate in New York City as a client of his PR firm, which produces and directs short-form video content. According to Freeman, any PR work done on behalf of the consulate would almost certainly require registration under FARA.
“The folks who are doing this work should take a hard look at whether they should be registered under FARA,” Freeman said. “If they don't register, this might be a case where the Department of Justice wants to take a look.”
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