David Ellison coordinated with former Israeli military commander-in-chief Benjamin Gantz by email on a nascent Israeli government cyber sabotage campaign in 2015, according to leaked emails
A widely noted dataset of purportedly leaked emails from former Israeli Minister of Defense Benjamin Gantz appears to show that David Ellison, the new head of media conglomerate Paramount, was coordinating with the recently retired commander-in-chief of the Israeli military on a nascent campaign to sabotage critics of the Israeli military’s activities in Palestine.
The previously unreported emails appear to show David Ellison being recruited in December 2015 as a core American supporter of a nascent Israeli government effort, which Gantz labeled the “Counter-BDS Initiative.” The original concept of the program, according to leaked emails and PowerPoint presentations, was to raise $1 million each from twelve prominent Jewish philanthropists in order to fund “state-of-the-art cyber technology as a soft weapon” and to contract the controversial private intelligence firm Black Cube to spy on and disrupt activists.
David and his father, Larry Ellison – the centi-billionaire founder of the enterprise database company Oracle – have come under increased scrutiny as a result of their joint financing of an $8 billion merger between Paramount and David’s own media company, Skydance. The purchase took place alongside Paramount agreeing to pay $16 million to President Trump over editorial choices regarding an interview with former Vice President Harris. Focus further increased on September 10, when Larry Ellison was reported to have overtaken his business partner Elon Musk as the world’s richest man.
Larry Ellison’s ties to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a prominent opponent of Gantz, are well known. According to reporting in Haaretz in 2021, the Oracle founder went as far as offering Mr. Netanyahu a seat on his company’s board.
The New York Times further reported on September 10 that David Ellison is considering appointing the former New York Times opinion columnist Bari Weiss as co-president or editor-in-chief of the CBS News division of Paramount.
The possible role comes alongside Ellison’s widely reported consideration of a roughly $100 million acquisition of Weiss’s ‘anti-woke’ media outlet, The Free Press, which prominently criticized CBS for its handling of a contentious interview conducted by its anchor Tony Dokoupil with author Ta-Nehisi Coates on September 30. “The sad truth is that Coates is not speaking truth to power,” editorialized The Free Press, in response to Coates having criticized the Israeli military’s ongoing assault on the Gaza Strip.
Paramount has also received criticism for its recent appointment of Kenneth R. Weinstein, a former head of both the conservative think tank Hudson Institute and the U.S. Agency for Global Media, as the conglomerate’s new ombudsman for CBS News.
The previously unreported emails between David Ellison and former Israeli military chief Benjamin Gantz are part of an archive originally released by the hacktivist group ‘Handala’, which is widely believed to be associated with Iranian intelligence, with the U.S.-based nonprofit Distributed Denial of Secrets serving as the primary intermediary for journalists.
A related repository of leaked emails from former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, also published by Handala, led to recent reporting on Barak and the convicted child trafficker Jeffrey Epstein discussing potential investments in the now-defunct data analytics firm Fifth Dimension, which Gantz chaired from 2015 to 2018.
All-Source Intelligence has successfully authenticated the veracity of some of the more obscure information in the newly leaked emails, which contain attachments such as slide decks and previously nonpublic confidential investment memoranda. That a large repository of Gantz’s emails was hacked is easily confirmed; the uncertainty lies in the possibility of Handala having selectively edited isolated files for political purposes. All attempts at authenticating the contents of the leak have so far succeeded, as was the case with last year’s ‘Anonymous for Justice’ leaks of Israeli Ministry of Justice Emails, which were similarly speculated to have been obtained by Iran.
As part of a sequence of exchanges during Hanukkah on December 11, 2015, between Gantz and the television executive Adam Berkowitz regarding a potential collaboration with Ellison on opposing Israel’s critics, Berkowitz also brought up the question of whether Gantz had ended up visiting the private intelligence firm Black Cube. “Did u ever visit the black cube?” Berkowitz purportedly asked Gantz by email regarding the controversial firm, which previously listed former Mossad director Meir Dagan as its honorary president.
“I am curious because I wanted to know your feedback [on Black Cube] since I have heard mixed things about them and am not sure if there is the company I want to help,” continued Berkowitz’s email.
The focus of the exchanges between Gantz and Berkowitz was on strategies for disrupting the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which models its resistance to the Israeli occupation of Palestine on tactics used to end apartheid in South Africa in the early 1990s.
Black Cube had promised Berkowitz that it had “sensitive” capabilities for disrupting the BDS movement, according to an email from Black Cube which Berkowitz apparently forwarded to Gantz.
“What is shocking here is that a prominent head of a major media corporation in the US was caught blatantly offering assistance to a foreign government to spy on Americans and undermine their civil rights,” stated Olivia Katbi, the North America coordinator for the BDS Movement.
“Benny. I spoke to David Ellison, who is very interested in helping out with the BDS movement. Happy to make an introduction whenever you want. He is Larry Ellison’s son,” continued the purported December 11, 2015 email chain between Berkowitz and Gantz.
Black Cube’s contracts to silence reporting on the media executive and now-convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein became widely known as a result of explosive reporting in The New Yorker less than two years later. Berkowitz was similarly fired in 2018 from Creative Artists Agency (CAA), the firm he apparently communicated with Gantz through, allegedly for groping a television executive from the J.J. Abrams-affiliated production studio Bad Robot.
According to a biography of Berkowitz shared with Gantz the previous month by Udi Miron, the founder of the now-Paramount-owned Israeli media company Ananey, Berkowitz had been “instrumental in packaging and selling” television shows such as Seinfeld, True Detective, and Netflix’s House of Cards.
The biography also described Berkowitz as being “very active” in the prominent pro-Israel lobby American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and chair of the entertainment division of the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles.
(Paramount – while previously operating under the name ViacomCBS – acquired Ananey in April 2020, the same month that the company closed its acquisition of a 49% stake in Weinstein’s Miramax.)
“I hope you will take me up on my offer to be your behind the scenes man in Hollywood whether it involves your speaking engagements, your book or anything else that is in my purview of expertise,” stated a purported email from Berkowitz to Gantz from November 28, 2015, as part of forwarding an email from the previous day between Berkowitz and the private intelligence firm Black Cube, regarding how to counter the BDS movement.
Berkowitz’s colleague at the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles, Israel office head Aaron Goldberg, was similarly listed as a recipient of the purported anti-BDS strategy email from Black Cube.
“The unique information that we are able to retrieve regarding the BDS groups will allow us to disrupt and disband their funding sources, dissolve their organisational hubs, and expose their true nature of violence and hate,” wrote Black Cube employee Tamar Kornitzer, according to the documents. “Knowing their next moves before they make them is what will allow the rise of pro-active initiatives for the defence of Israel and the rights of Jews,” the purported email continued.
“Although we have been working in this field of collecting intelligence on the BDS organizations for nearly two years, we haven’t found the right partners until we met you, last week,” continued the apparent message from Kornitzer to Berkowitz, before later noting that, “information regarding the BDS project is extremely sensitive.”
Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, Amichai Chikli, similarly met with the CEO of Black Cube as recently as June of last year as part of a discussion regarding potential surveillance of the U.S. activist group Students for Justice in Palestine, according to reporting in The Times of Israel. Another Israeli private intelligence firm, the now-defunct Psy-Group, worked to disrupt the BDS movement through its “Project Butterfly” initiative, in collaboration with former Mossad deputy director Ram Ben-Barak. (Psy-Group was reborn in recent years as Percepto International.)
“Benny, meet David. David meet Benny,” opened a purported email from Berkowitz on December 23, 2015, before Berkowitz added that he “told David briefly about your [Gantz’s] 12 tribe idea, which you can expound on to him, which he seemed very interested in.” Other slide decks and text documents in the leaked Handala archive include proposals from Gantz from a similar time period for a “Counter-BDS Initiative,” which he hoped to have funded through 12 prominent Jewish donors.
“Funding for this initiative shall be provided by an exclusive group of the twelve most influential Jewish philanthropists [sic, emphasis theirs], symbolizing the twelve Jewish tribes; Israel’s government shall act as a thirteenth, facilitating ‘tribe‘,” read the June 10, 2015 proposal purportedly drafted by Gantz’s spokesperson, Melody Sucharewicz. The two primary slide deck summaries of the CBI concept coupled the donor analogy with a popular pictorial representation of the 12 tribes, with each of the 12 lead donors being asked to commit $1 million over a five-year period.
The slide deck for the Counter-BDS Initiative promised that the effort would be “unprecedented in the use of state-of-the-art cyber technology as a soft weapon against BDS & Co,” including through employment of “former IDF intel & cyber officers.” CBI further claimed that it would develop cyber intelligence technologies to “detect, target & counter sources of delegitimization (e.g. individuals, websites).”
The Israeli government’s intense opposition campaign to the BDS movement — motivated in the CBI slide with the slogan that “140 letters [are] worth 1000 Uzis” — was subsequently led by Gilad Erdan in his capacity as Israel’s Minister of Strategic Affairs. Erdan’s anti-BDS ‘PR commando unit’ followed Gantz’s CBI in the sense of becoming a public-private partnership and operated under the names of Kela Shlomo (Solomon’s Sling), Concert, and — most recently — Voices of Israel.
The cyber intelligence arm of Voices of Israel has similarly been known by several monikers, including Keshet David (David’s Bow), Israel Cyber Shield, and the official English name of Innovative Collaboration Strategies.
The Israeli content moderation activism group CyberWell, a now-active partner of numerous major social media platforms, was similarly exposed as an unofficial offshoot of Keshet David.
“Evidently, despite [Israel’s] most ferocious attempts to crush it, the BDS movement’s impact has grown exponentially across the world, including in the US,” stated BDS North America director Katbi, adding that, “In new polling, the majority of Americans say Israel is committing a genocide against Palestinians and support an arms embargo.”
“Fighting BDS is a major priority for all of us on this email!” concluded Berkowitz in his apparent introduction of Gantz and David Ellison on December 23, 2015.
The leaked emails similarly purport to show Berkowitz simultaneously arranging an introduction between Gantz and prominent fellow Los Angeles-based anti-BDS activist Adam Milstein the previous day. “I have reached out to David Ellison to put the two of you in touch with each other, and as soon as he says ok, I will connect both of you,” Berkowitz reportedly wrote to Gantz, before asking, “On another front, do you know Adam Milstein? He is working with another group that is challenging BDS.”
“Mr Gantz, it is a pleasure to meet you over email. I very much look forward to discussing everything you are working on, and in the meantime, hope you are enjoying the holiday season,” wrote David Ellison on Christmas Day of 2015, using his Skydance email and including the company’s logo in his email signature.
David Ellison, Paramount, Adam Berkowitz, Benjamin Gantz, and Melody Sucharewicz did not respond to requests for comment.
Jack Poulson is an independent journalist focused on the intersection of technology and national security.
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