The Australian ad-tech firm secretly fueling 'psychological warfare' against U.S. university students
Public records reveal that the Blend AI controls the Israeli surveillance firm Sensus Ltd, which has been paid $1.9 million by Israel on Campus Coalition for its boutique surveillance software.
“It’s modeled on General Stanley McChrystal’s counter-insurgency strategy in Iraq,” stated the executive director of Israel on Campus Coalition (ICC), Jacob Baime, to an undercover Al Jazeera journalist roughly seven years ago, drawing an analogy between his nonprofit and the elite U.S. special operations unit known as Joint Special Operations Command, which McChrystal led. “We’ve copied a lot from that strategy,” Baime continued, and on another occasion told the same reporter that ICC’s covert surveillance and smear campaigns against U.S. students who criticize the government of Israel are part of “psychological warfare.” Sitting next to Baime, ICC’s director of operations, Ian Hersh, noted that “in terms of information sharing, we did add [Israel’s] Ministry of Strategic Affairs to our operations and intelligence brief.”
“There’s a company called Sensus. S-E-N-S-U-S. It’s very pricey though, you know,” Baime told the uncover reporter. “We had to raise, like, hundreds of thousands of dollars for it,” he continued, which is backed up by roughly $1.9 million in payments from ICC to the Israeli company between 2017 and 2023, per their public tax filings. “We have ways to crawl message boards right now and to monitor them, but it’s disconnected from the event and activity discovery mechanism, so we want that system to be all integrated,” Baime stated.
Founded in 2002 with funding from Schusterman Family Philanthropies and the cultural organization Hillel International, Israel on Campus Coalition has long served as a sort of fusion cell for opposition research and anonymous smear campaigns against U.S. students and faculty who criticize the actions of the Israeli government, particularly in relation to the occupation of Palestine and the associated Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. It is revealed here based upon public records analysis that Sensus is quietly controlled by the Australian advertising technology firm Blend AI, particularly through the company’s chief technology officer, Michael Bezman, and his fellow former coworkers from the now-defunct Israeli radio transcription company VocaVu.
One of the few public references to Sensus is through the portfolio of the Israeli product manager Lea Khasidi, whose LinkedIn profile describes her as a veteran of Israel’s military signals intelligence arm, Unit 8200, and as having worked as a product manager for Sensus for most of 2022. But public records requests through the Israeli Corporations Authority list Sensus Ltd. (סנסוס בע"מ) as the sole shareholder of Blend AI’s Israeli branch, and the three directors of Sensus as Michael Bezman (מיכאל בזמן), Guy Bacharach (גיא בכרך), and Igor Zilberman (איגור זילברמן).
All three Sensus directors are pictured side-by-side in an archived copy of the website of the defunct Israeli radio transcription company VocaVu from 2017, and Mr. Bezman is widely documented to be the CTO of Blend AI. Mr. Bezman was previously listed as a text processing engineer at VocaVu, while Mr. Bacharach was an information systems engineer, and Mr. Zilberman was a software engineer.
In an interview last year between Michael Bezman and Blend AI’s primary investor, the Australia-based venture capital firm EVP, Mr. Bezman stated that “BlendAI first started as a pain point for one of our customers who had difficulties spending their advertising budget.” As explained by Mr. Baime to the undercover reporter: “With the anti-Israel people, what’s most effective, what we found at least in the last year, is you do the opposition research, put up some anonymous website, and then put up targeted Facebook ads.” Sensus would begin selling such capabilities to Israel on Campus Coalition in 2017, roughly three years before the formation of Blend AI.
Neither Israel on Campus Coalition nor Blend AI responded to requests for comment, including on whether the internet surveillance software being purchased relates to Blend AI’s Pulse platform, which promises the ability to track internet users even if they have enabled ad-blockers and disabled cookies.
Perhaps the most prominent board member of ICC has been Adam Milstein, a co-founder and chairman emeritus of the Los Angeles-based Israeli-American Council, which was created in 2007 under the guidance of Israel’s then consul general in Los Angeles, Ehud Danoch. ICC is also connected to the influential pro-Israel advocacy organization Anti-Defamation League, whose CEO Jonathan Greenblatt is married to Marjan Keypour Greenblatt, who was assistant director of ICC in 2013 and worked in ADL's Los Angeles office for nearly eight years as an associate director.
ICC’s tax filings also show that, in 2021, beyond the $372,997 paid to Sensus for “consulting/software development,” ICC donated $335,000 to the Rutgers-affiliated nonprofit Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) for a “grant to build social media analysis.” Israeli corporate records further show that the founder of NCRI, Joel Finkelstein (יואל פינקלשטיין), is a director of the secretive Israeli anti-BDS organization Hetz, which is chaired by Israel’s former chief military censor, Brig. Gen. (res.) Sima Vaknin-Gill, and whose fellow board members include U.S. venture capitalist David M. Magerman.
In addition to having served as director-general of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs during the time period when Baime admitted to Al Jazeera that ICC was sharing its intelligence with the ministry, Ms. Vaknin-Gill has also been a strategic advisor to NCRI, as has Mr. Magerman. According to a press release put out by Hetz in late 2019, the idea is to “creat[e] a powerful synergistic and effective ecosystem for fighting anti-Semitism and advocating for Israel.” The managing director of Hetz, Yifa Siegel, was previously the founder and executive director of the lawfare organization International Legal Forum and an attorney at the related Shurat HaDin Israel Law Center.
“We INITIATE, through a global network of high-caliber CONNECTIONS, tailor made ACTIVITIES, in order to positively impact ISRAEL'S NATIONAL SECURITY,” read a fundraising website for Hetz, which further listed its U.S. intermediary as the New York-based nonprofit Central Fund of Israel, which is best known for supporting the ‘doxxing’ website Canary Mission. In an October 2022 conference hosted by the U.S. State Department, Hetz CEO and venture capitalist Eran Teboul noted that: “We deal with the issue of the ICC, the International Criminal Court, and the preliminary investigations into crimes supposedly conducted by Israel against the Palestinians.”
Regarding an unnamed “particular human rights topic,” Teboul bragged that: “We got 3,000 letters sent to members of parliament. We had 39 different organizations engaged and coordinated in their actions about this topic that no one really concerned before. We had 32 news articles about it. There was a demonstration using our posters. We were a brand that no one heard about before, demonstration in the Parliament Square in London. UC Berkeley was covered with posters. Tiny budget, but $8,500 invested in advertising, the rest completely organic, completely viral, completely enabling.”
Ms. Vaknin-Gill confirmed her role at Hetz and her previous role at NCRI, but Mr. Magerman did not respond to a request for comment. When reached, Mr. Finkelstein did not contest his role at Hetz but stated that NCRI’s only government funding has come from the British government’s communications regulator Ofcom and demanded comment on whether The Intercept has ever received funding from the government of Qatar. (The author has no current relationship with The Intercept, with the last article being published in July. Further, the author is not aware of any past or present financial relationship between The Intercept and Qatar.)
The undercover investigation which originally exposed the relationship between Sensus and the Israel on Campus Coalition was suppressed from official publication due to lobbying from the Zionist Organization of America, a U.S.-based advocacy group which became a close ally of President Donald Trump and is frequently to the right of even Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Due to threats that Qatar’s Al Jazeera would be required to register as a foreign agent if it followed through on publication, the closest the investigation came to official publication was through a leak to the Palestine-focused outlet The Electronic Intifada. More than five years later, it appears that the mystery behind the reference to Sensus in the footage has finally been solved.
So, when Bill Ackman says he wants a list of students names who are ‘pro Hamas’, he can easily get one?
Have you heard of a firm HireRight? I just heard about it on System Update with Glenn Greenwald. Apparently, HireRight is a firm that Sullivan &Cromwell are using to weed out pro Palestinian ivy league law students.