In charge of Netanyahu’s secret war in the United States was Gilad Erdan, then head of the highly secret Ministry of Strategic Affairs and now Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations. His deputy was Sima Vaknin-Gil, a reserve brigadier general. In a talk to a group of Israeli-Americans in Washington, Vaknin-Gil outlined another high-tech spying tool Israel was secretly using to target Americans within the US. In her talk, she said that Israel was waging its covert war so that the “narrative in the world won’t be that Israel equals apartheid.” Thus, the ministry needed to quickly silence the growing boycott movement and its messengers, before what happened in apartheid South Africa happened to apartheid Israel.

To those ends, General Vaknin-Gil issued a stark warning. “In order to win,” she said, “we must use tricks and craftiness.” They would include threats, intimidation, harassment, covert influence operations, troll farms, fearmongering, blacklists, and espionage. The key was turning thousands of Americans into clandestine Israeli agents to spy on and carry out the operations against their fellow citizens. Secrecy, emphasized Vaknin-Gil, was therefore critical. “We are a different government working on a foreign soil, and we have to be very, very cautious,” she said.

Then she outlined plans to set up a sophisticated covert intelligence unit to spy on Americans involved in the boycott movement and take action against them. According to Vaknin-Gil: “Ambiguity is part of our guidelines, that’s why I’m not going to say anything too much about each one of the legs. The first one is intel, intelligence, or data, or information. What we’ve done is mapped and analyzed the whole [boycott] phenomena globally. Not just the United States, not just campuses, but…labor unions and churches. We started to establish a project called Israel Cyber Shield. This is actually a civil intelligence unit that collects, analyzes, and acts upon the activists in the BDS movement, of its people, organizations, or events. And we give it everything we collect. We are using the most sophisticated data system, intelligence system in the Israeli market.”

Israel Cyber Shield, therefore, was a clandestine Israeli intelligence organization designed to spy not just on American students but also Christian churchgoers and labor unionists. And it was the recipient of Israel’s massive intelligence resources. Once its targets were identified, according to Vaknin-Gil, the ministry then “acts upon” them using covert operations. Key was hiding all Israeli government links to the operation and its targeting of Americans.

Around the same time, Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs budgeted another $570,000 to create a computer and smartphone application that would turn thousands of Americans into a robotic army of Israeli trolls. Assigned “missions” from troll headquarters near Tel Aviv, they would hide their links to Israel and launch online attacks against their US targets, including critics of Israel, boycott supporters, and human rights activists.

“Call it a human ‘botnet,’” said journalist Josh Nathan-Kazis in the The Forward, who reports that “it has thousands of mostly U.S.-based volunteers who can be directed from Israel into a social media swarm.” “We work with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, consult with them and manage joint projects,” said Yarden Ben-Yosef, the head of the troll farm. “The same with the intelligence agencies,” he added. “We talk with each other. We work together.”

Despite the enormous extent of Israel’s illegal covert operations within the US targeting innocent and unsuspecting Americans, the clandestine agents involved are granted virtual immunity from arrest by pressure on top politicians from wealthy and powerful pro-Israel groups like AIPAC. It is a situation that greatly frustrates many in the FBI. It means bureau personnel are constantly required to close their eyes when it comes to criminal activity by Israel.

According to I.C. Smith, a former top FBI counterintelligence officer, “Dealing with the Israelis was, for those assigned that area, extremely frustrating. The Israelis were supremely confident that they had the clout, especially on the Hill, to basically get [away] with just about anything.” Another former top intelligence official said, “You catch them red-handed, and they shrug and say, ‘Okay now, anything else?’”

At one point, as angry senior US intelligence officials were testifying about Israeli espionage in secret sessions before the House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs Committees, that frustration spilled out in public. “US intelligence officials trooped up to Capitol Hill to tell U.S. lawmakers considering visa waivers for Israelis that Jerusalem’s spying here had ‘crossed redlines,’” wrote Newsweek’s Jeff Stein. The extent of the spying was “quite shocking,” one staffer who was there told Stein, adding that he found the testimony “very sobering…alarming…even terrifying.” Others called it “unrivaled” and “unseemly,” and noted that “it has been extensive for years.” And a former staffer who attended a similar classified briefing exclaimed, “No other country close to the United States continues to cross the line on espionage like the Israelis do.”

Over the years, as Israeli intelligence increased its secret war on innocent Americans, it likewise paid less and less attention to Hamas. Relatively quiet behind the high walls and barbed wire in Gaza, they assumed that its members had become docile and submissive. A minor outbreak, and they would simply send in the guns and armored personnel carriers and “mow the grass.”