You criticize the Israeli government. Within hours, a tweet goes up with your name, your face, your employer, your phone number.
The replies pour in. Some are threats. Some are calls to your boss. Within days, you are fired. Your spouse’s job comes under attack.
Strangers show up at your house. Your YouTube channel gets mass-reported. If you are not a U.S. citizen, federal agents may now have your address.
This is not a worst-case scenario. This is the documented playbook of an entire ecosystem of pro-Israel groups operating openly inside the United States — and they are very, very good at it.
The Pattern
Independent journalists. Students. Professors. Pilots. Nurses. Volunteer protesters. Comedians. YouTube hosts.
They have one thing in common: they spoke critically about the Israeli government’s conduct, and an organized network decided to make them pay for it.
Hosts of independent news programs on YouTube have described receiving death threats, watching coordinated campaigns attempt to get their spouses fired, and seeing organized waves of mass-reporting aimed at killing their channels outright.
None of this is improvised. It is the work of well-funded organizations that have been refining these tactics for the better part of a decade.
Civil rights groups have been warning about it since the day Israel began its bombardment of Gaza.
Palestine Legal — a Chicago-based legal aid group that defends people’s right to speak about Palestine — received nearly 200 reports of suppression in the first month after October 7, 2023 alone, almost matching its caseload for the entire previous year.
By mid-2025, the group had logged more than 2,900 requests for legal support since the war began.
Civil liberties attorneys keep reaching for the same word to describe what is happening: McCarthyism.
Meet the Pro-Israel Group Machine
Three organizations sit at the center of the operation, each with its own specialty.
Canary Mission
Canary Mission is the oldest. It launched in 2015 as an anonymous website that builds detailed dossiers on students and professors who criticize Israeli policy.
The dossiers include photos, social media accounts, graduation years, organizational affiliations, and quotes ripped out of context.
The stated goal — printed on the site itself — is to prevent the people listed from getting hired.
The Intercept interviewed 13 people profiled by Canary Mission who described receiving death threats, racial and homophobic harassment, and lasting anxiety.
Most spoke only on condition of anonymity, terrified that speaking up would invite more abuse.
The operation is run from a padlocked building in Israel, and U.S. donors who fund it may be operating as undeclared agents of a foreign power.
StopAntisemitism
StopAntisemitism runs the modern social media side of the operation.
Founded in 2018 by Liora Rez, the group posts videos and screenshots of people it accuses of antisemitism to an audience of over 300,000 followers on X, often including the target’s full name, employer, and other identifying details.
Rez has openly bragged about getting people fired — “StopAntisemitism gets results,” she boasted in a LinkedIn post, attaching photos of recent targets and asking donors to send money.
The Washington Post documented nearly 40 cases of people fired or suspended after being featured by the account.
Rez insists the group never asks anyone to harass its targets. The targets describe a different reality: floods of threats and disturbing messages every time their face appears on the feed.
Betar US
Betar US is the most openly violent of the three.
Named after a paramilitary Zionist movement founded in 1923, the modern American chapter revived itself in 2023 and quickly distinguished itself by going further than anyone else.
Betar members showed up to a vigil for Hind Rajab, the six-year-old Palestinian girl killed by Israeli forces, and chanted “ICE, ICE, ICE” at mourners.
They used facial recognition to identify attendees.
They posted home addresses online.
The group uses the slogan “For every Jew, a .22” — borrowed from the late Meir Kahane, whose movement the U.S. government once designated a terrorist organization — and has openly explored alliances with the Proud Boys.
While not part of this deep dive, the history of Meir Kahane is too interesting not to share. You can skip over it if you aren’t interested.
Meir Kahane
From the Institute for Middle East Understanding:
Kahane’s followers have murdered dozens of people and injured hundreds of others in numerous violent attacks against Palestinians, Americans, and others in Israel, the occupied Palestinian territories, and the United States.
As a result, his Kach party, Jewish Defense League and offshoots were labeled terrorist organizations by the US government.
Kahane himself was arrested approximately 70 times in the US and Israel for planning and carrying out violent attacks but never received any serious punishment for his crimes.
(That sounds about right. An Israeli official was recently caught soliciting a 15-year-old during a sting operation in Las Vegas. He was released and allowed to fly back to Israel while the Americans arrested in the same sting operation were charged.)
Many accused American pedophiles have fled to Israel, taking advantage of the Law of Return, which grants automatic citizenship to Jewish individuals and their families, with minimal barriers.
During Kahane’s lifetime, his movement was marginal in Israel. However, decades after his assassination in New York he remains an inspiration for Jewish extremists and his racist ideas are more mainstream and popular in Israel than ever.
During the 2019 and 2021 Israeli election campaigns, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud party entered into political agreements with Kahane’s followers in the Jewish Power party to help elect them to the Knesset (parliament), prompting condemnation even from some of Israel’s staunchest supporters.
In December 2022, a devoted follower of Kahane, notorious Jewish Power leader Itamar Ben-Gvir, became Minister of National Security with expanded powers under Netanyahu, in control of Israel’s police and its paramilitary border police in the occupied Palestinian West Bank.
Even the Anti-Defamation League — itself frequently accused of policing legitimate criticism of Israel — added Betar US to its glossary of extremist hate groups in February 2025.
It is the only Jewish organization on the ADL’s list.
From Blacklist to Detention Cell
The harassment is bad enough on its own. What made it qualitatively more dangerous was the moment these private blacklists became inputs for the federal government.
In early 2025, the Trump administration signed executive orders directing federal agencies to identify and deport foreign nationals deemed sympathetic to Hamas or hostile to Israel.
Betar US almost immediately began boasting that it was feeding names to the administration.
Spokesman Daniel Levy told CNN the group had handed over hundreds of names of pro-Palestinian activists to the Department of Homeland Security.
Executive Director Ross Glick said Betar had compiled dossiers — photos, video, surveillance — and delivered them directly to federal officials, including Stephen Miller, Marco Rubio, and Pam Bondi.
It was not just rhetoric.
In July 2025, ICE Assistant Director Peter Hatch testified under oath that the agency’s so-called “Tiger Team” had used Canary Mission’s database to identify deportation targets, rapidly compiling more than 100 reports from a list of 5,000 names.
Hatch confirmed in court that Betar’s deportation list was also used to select people for arrest.
Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia graduate and green card holder who became the public face of these ICE operations, was on Betar’s list before he was on the federal one.
So was Rümeysa Öztürk, the Tufts student snatched off a Massachusetts street by masked agents — Canary Mission had built her profile after she co-wrote an op-ed, and Betar boosted it shortly before ICE detained her.
This is the part civil rights attorneys want people to understand.
Private harassment campaigns and federal deportation policy are now functionally the same operation.
The Smear That “Antisemitism” Has Become
None of this should be mistaken for actual work against antisemitism. Real antisemitism exists. It is rising. It is dangerous, and it deserves to be fought relentlessly.
That is precisely why the weaponization of the term against political dissent is so corrosive: it burns through the credibility of the people doing the genuine work.
These groups routinely target Jewish people who criticize the Israeli government. Betar’s harassment campaigns have included Jewish New Yorkers among their victims.
StopAntisemitism has been called out for labeling Jewish-led anti-war groups as antisemitic.
The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee has documented a parallel surge of anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian attacks, with bomb threats forcing Muslim civil rights events to relocate or cancel.
Israel’s Top Antisemites List
The 2025 version of the list includes children’s content creator, Ms. Rachel. Her only crime is caring about children in Gaza.
Since when is it a crime to have humanity? Does Israel realize that by attacking the kindest, most caring people, they’re driving antisemitism?
Real antisemitism is when Jews are targeted for being Jewish.
Calling for an end to the bombing of children is not antisemitism.
Saying that Israel has obligations under international law is not antisemitism.
Wearing a keffiyeh is not antisemitism, no matter how many times Betar members have called it a “rape rag” while assaulting the people wearing one.
The First Crack in the Wall
In January 2026, New York Attorney General Letitia James announced a settlement shutting down Betar US’s operations in New York.
Her office’s investigation documented a “widespread persecution” of Muslim, Arab, Palestinian, and Jewish New Yorkers — including physical assaults, one of which Betar leadership filmed and celebrated on social media.
The group agreed to dissolve its nonprofit status in the state and faces a $50,000 penalty if it resumes its harassment.
“New York will not tolerate organizations that use fear, violence, and intimidation to silence free expression,” James said.
It is one victory. It does not undo the dossiers already in federal hands. It does not bring back jobs already lost or channels already destroyed.
It does not stop Canary Mission, which operates from outside U.S. jurisdiction, or StopAntisemitism, which is still tagging people daily on X.
And it does not protect the independent journalists right now opening their inboxes to death threats because they said something true about a war.
What it does is establish a baseline: harassment campaigns dressed up as antisemitism advocacy are not protected speech, and the people running them are not above the law.
The next attorney general, the next civil suit, the next subpoena gets to build on that.
Until then, the cost of telling the truth about the Israeli government in America is somewhere between your job, your family’s safety, and — if you happen to have been born somewhere else — your freedom.
The people paying that cost are not extremists. They are journalists, students, and ordinary people who refused to look away from a genocide. They deserve better than the country we have built around them.
