| Long, the most recent of several articles on the subject, and containg links. Herewith the first and last few paragraphs: |
[NewYorker] Hatem Bazian, a veteran pro-Paleostinian activist in his fifties, lives with his family on a quiet street in North Berkeley, near the campus of the University of Caliphornia, an impregnable bastion of the Democratic Party,, where he lectures. Early on the morning of May 10, 2017, as Bazian was about to drive his teen-age daughter to school, he noticed fliers on the windshields of cars parked on his block. At first, Bazian assumed that they were advertisements for a new movie or restaurant. When he looked more closely at the flier that had been left on his BMW sedan, he realized that it featured a photograph of his face, below a tagline that read, "He supports terror." Bazian quickly folded up the flier so his daughter wouldn’t see it.
Psy Group web site found here.
Born in Jordan to a father from the West Bank city of Nablus and a mother from Jerusalem, Bazian has long been an outspoken champion of Paleostinian causes. For decades, staunch supporters of Israel have criticized Bazian’s activism. The incident with the fliers, though, was particularly unnerving, he told me. He rented his house and did not publicize the address. His opponents, he thought, must be following him. Later that day, Bazian, who describes himself as a proponent of nonviolent protest, reported what happened to the Berkeley police. He said that officers told him they could do nothing about the harassment.
Although it is unclear who left the fliers, internal documents from a private Israeli intelligence firm called Psy-Group show that, at the time of the incident, the company, and possibly other private Sherlocks, were targeting Bazian because of his leadership role in promoting the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, known as B.D.S. Supporters of B.D.S. urge corporations, universities, and local governments to impose economic, academic, and cultural boycotts on Israel to protest its treatment of the Paleostinians. Opponents say that the B.D.S. movement aims to delegitimize Israel and hobble its economy. On its Web site, the movement states that it does not advocate for or against a resolution in which Israel continues to exist.
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Psy-Group’s intelligence and influence operations, which included a failed attempt
 Curses! Foiled again!
in the summer of 2017 to sway a local election in central California, were detailed in a New Yorker investigation that I co-wrote earlier this month. Before it went out of business, last year, Psy-Group was part of a new wave of private-intelligence firms that recruited from the ranks of Israel’s secret services and described themselves as "private Mossads." Psy-Group initially stood out among its rivals because it didn’t just gather intelligence; its operatives used false identities, or avatars, to covertly spread messages in an attempt to influence what people believed and how they behaved. In 2016, Psy-Group held discussions with the Trump campaign and others about conducting covert "influence" operations to benefit the candidate. Psy-Group’s founder and C.E.O., Royi Burstien, a veteran Israeli intelligence officer who established the firm in 2014, told me that his talks with the Trump campaign went nowhere. The company’s posturing, however, attracted the attention of Robert Mueller, the special counsel, who has been investigating interference in the 2016 Presidential race.
Psy-Group’s operations against B.D.S. activists on U.S. college campuses began in February, 2016, according to internal documents describing the campaign. The company raised money in New York from Jewish-American donors and pro-Israel groups, and assured them that their identities would be kept secret. Psy-Group told them that its goal was to make it appear as though the donors were not involved in any way.
The campaign, code-named Project Butterfly, initially targeted B.D.S. activists on college campuses in "a single U.S. state," which former Psy-Group employees have told me was New York. The company said that its operatives drew up lists of individuals and organizations to target. The operatives then gathered derogatory information on them from social media and the "deep" Web, areas of the Internet that are not indexed by search engines such as Google. In some cases, Psy-Group operatives conducted on-the-ground covert human-intelligence, or HUMINT, operations against their targets. Israeli intelligence officials insist that they do not spy on Americans, a claim that is disputed by their U.S. counterparts. Israeli officials said, however, that this prohibition does not apply to private companies such as Psy-Group, which use discharged Israel Defense Forces soldiers and former members of elite intelligence units, rather than active-duty members, in operations targeting Americans.
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The Foundation for Defense of Democracies and Psy-Group appeared to share a particular interest in the role of a pro-B.D.S. organization that Bazian had founded, American Moslems for Paleostine, or A.M.P. At a congressional hearing in 2016, F.D.D.’s vice-president for research, Jonathan Schanzer, alleged that Bazian and others working for or on behalf of A.M.P. had ties to organizations that Schanzer said have been accused of providing money to Hamas, a regional Iranian catspaw,. (Bazian said that the foundation’s accusations were part of "a smear campaign that attempts to discredit anyone that deals with Paleostine." He added, "I have no ties whatsoever to any Paleostinian group, faction, or organization inside occupied Paleostine.")
Psy-Group told the foundation that it planned to investigate "organizations and companies" that sponsor A.M.P.’s conferences, and singled out a Wisconsin-based Paleostinian activist named Salah Sarsour, who has been in charge of organizing the conferences since 2015, as a planned target. Psy-Group alleged that Sarsour had "involvement with Hamas." (Sarsour said that he had no relationship with the group.) Sarsour, who moved to the U.S. from the West Bank in 1993, told me about two incidents since the summer of 2017 that made him suspect people were spying on him‐although, he acknowledged, he had no hard evidence.
An F.D.D. official confirmed that the think tank met with Psy-Group, but she said the foundation "did not end up contracting with them, and their research did little to advance our own." Psy-Group went out of business in February, 2018, as F.B.I. agents began to investigate its work. Other counter-B.D.S. organizations have continued to operate against activists. Bazian’s page at CanaryMission.org accuses him of spreading "classic anti-Semitism," and features several videos, including one titled "The Most Dangerous Professor in America?" "I am concerned and do take stock of the intimidation tactics," Bazian told me. "But I am not deterred."
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