Minister, Black Cube CEO discussed probing Students for Justice in Palestine – report
Investigation of protest group said scrapped for fear it could harm US-Israel ties; Chikli’s Diaspora Affairs Ministry says intel firm initiated meeting, but sources say otherwise
Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli met in June with Dan Zorella, the chief executive officer of private intelligence firm Black Cube, to discuss a possible investigation into anti-Israel group Students for Justice in Palestine, a Hebrew business daily reported.
The Wednesday report in The Marker, which cited three sources with knowledge of the matter, said Black Cube and the Diaspora Affairs Ministry decided against conducting the probe due to fears it would damage relations between Israel and the United States.
The ministry told The Marker that Black Cube had initiated the meeting between Chikli and Zorella, but sources who spoke to the paper said the ministry had reached out to the intelligence firm.
“Black Cube does not act, and never planned to act, against students or political protest groups in the US,” the company said in a statement.
Throughout the war in Gaza, local chapters of SJP have been prominent organizers of anti-Israel protests in university campuses across the US. Its tactics have led to accusations of antisemitism.
SJP has no known central authority and is not a legal entity, and the report speculated that the potential probe into the group would try to uncover the source of its funding.
The report said the meeting between Chikli and Zorella took place near the end of June, and was also attended by Avi Cohen-Scali, the Diaspora Affairs Ministry’s director general; and former national security adviser Giora Eiland, a retired general who is a member of Black Cube’s international advisory board.
According to the report, the Herzliya home where the meeting took place is the Israeli address of US-based real estate company Vision and Beyond, one of whose owners has cooperated with a confidant of Chikli on a civic venture.
A June report by The New York Times and Israeli disinformation watchdog FakeReporter found that since October 7, the Diaspora Affairs Ministry had waged a covert campaign to influence Black Democratic members of the US Congress through AI-generated social media posts by fake users.
A report in The Guardian that month said that the ministry and affiliated groups “compile weekly reports based on tips from pro-Israel US student groups, some of which receive funding from Israeli government sources.”
According to the Guardian report, much of the funding came through Voices of Israel, formerly known as Concert, and before that as Kela Shlomo. The Marker said the public benefit company is used, in part, as a way to distance the government from Voices of Israel’s campaigns.
Between October and May, Chikli has overseen some NIS 32 million ($8.6 million) in funding for “mass consciousness activities,” the Guardian said.
The London-based newspaper noted that Adam Lehman, chief executive of the Hillel social club for Jewish students in the US, said at a Knesset hearing in February that thanks to the Diaspora Affairs Ministry, the president of MIT “took the step of fully suspending her Students for Justice in Palestine chapter for crossing lines, and for creating an unwelcoming environment for Jewish students.”
Several universities have suspended SJP for breaking campus rules in its demonstrations. The group gained notoriety in 2014, when its New York University chapter posted mock eviction notices on dormitories of Jewish students “to draw attention to the reality that Palestinians confront on a regular basis.”
SJP has also expressed support for Hamas’s October 7 onslaught, in which thousands of terrorists stormed southern Israel to kill nearly 1,200 people and take 251 hostages, sparking the war in Gaza.
Black Cube, which was founded in 2010, bills itself as a “select group of veterans from Israeli elite intelligence units,” and its website lists former Mossad director Meir Dagan, who died in 2016, as its honorary president.
According to its website, Black Cube is committed to “upholding the rule of law.” Three of its employees, including Zorella, were convicted in Romania in 2022 of intimidating the country’s former top corruption prosecutor.
The Tel Aviv-based company has also drawn international attention for allegedly working to discredit White House officials who helped negotiate the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement, as well as to protect the reputation of disgraced Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein.
