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Hilma af Klint, Group I, Primordial Chaos, No. 16 (Grupp 1, Urkaos, nr 16), from The WU/Rose Series (Serie WU/Rosen), 1906-1907. Photo: Albin Dahlström, the Moderna Museet, Stockholm.
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“Knowing what we do now, pro-Israel advocacy in Europe is more important than ever.”
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When Larry Hochberg, the American businessman and co-founder of ELNET, wrote these lines in 2016, he could not have anticipated the impact his organization would have in European-Israeli diplomacy. ELNET, or the European Leadership Network, has been quietly shaping European politics through closed-door meetings with diplomats and curated trips to Israel for parliamentarians, funded heavily by American donors (many of whom also give to AIPAC). With offices in six European countries as well as in Israel and New York, ELNET has imported U.S.-style lobbying tactics to Europe, even as Israel has ramped up its settler activity in the West Bank and committed mass atrocities in Gaza — and, most recently, launched new offensives in Iran and Lebanon.
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In this major investigation, supported by IJ4EU, Yossi Bartal uncovers the individuals and networks behind ELNET, showing how American money and Israeli politicians joined forces to create Europe’s largest pro-Israel lobby.
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The Diasporist published this story with the hope that, in times of global crisis, transparency can open a pathway toward accountability and change. Investigations like these require time and careful work, and are only possible with the support of our readers. If you can, please consider supporting the Diasporist. Your contribution helps ensure that we can produce more of these stories that matter.
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by Yossi Bartal
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In October 2015, Steve Rosen — American political scientist who served as one of Israel’s most prominent lobbyists in Washington — sent a brief email to Ron Prosor, Israel’s former ambassador to the United Nations, just days after Prosor’s term had ended. Rosen was writing with a clear ask: “Ron, trying to reach you urgently to offer you $10,000 plus all expenses to come to Los Angeles (…) to speak at two fundraisers for ELNET. As you might remember, ELNET is the organization building relations between key European countries and Israel.”
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Prosor did not immediately accept. Rosen tried again, upping the offer: “I can get my people to go to $15,000. Please say yes.” Prosor ultimately declined, citing a packed schedule.
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The exchange with Prosor, who currently serves as Israel’s ambassador to Germany, appears in a leak of tens of thousands of documents from Prosor’s private email account. The leak was part of a broader dump of sensitive material from the inboxes of high-ranking Israeli politicians published in 2024 by a self-proclaimed pro-Palestinian hacker group called Handala, and was made accessible to journalists via the nonprofit whistleblower group DDoSecrets. The emails between Prosor and Rosen illustrate how American money and tactics came together with Israeli politicians and diplomats to discreetly build the most influential pro-Israel lobby group in Europe.
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Rosen, who died two years ago, sent the email to Prosor on behalf of the European Leadership Network (ELNET). At the time of the message in late 2015, the generically named organization — first registered in Europe in 2007, in Israel in late 2010, and in the U.S. in 2012 as Friends of ELNET — was growing rapidly. ELNET was advancing an ambitious project to lead Israel’s advocacy throughout Europe — “very similar to what AIPAC has been so successful in achieving in the USA,” as one ELNET representative put it in another leaked email. Its two main goals, as specified in another message from Prosor’s inbox, were to prevent recognition of a Palestinian state and to encourage European states to adopt more aggressive policies toward the Boycott-Divest-Sanctions movement. Today, it’s clear how successful its efforts were.
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Rosen, who helped establish ELNET on both sides of the Atlantic, was best known for his work at AIPAC, the leading pro-Israel lobbying organization in Washington, where he was widely credited with elevating the group into the indomitable force it has been since the 1980s. AIPAC achieved this by coordinating substantial donations to political candidates and running aggressive media campaigns, a strategy that made support for Israel politically rewarding and costly to oppose. It also cultivated “close, behind-the-scenes ties with government officials,” a form of “executive-branch lobbying” that Rosen helped pioneer, according to The New York Times and The Washington Post, respectively.
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This lobbying success story was intended for replication in Europe through ELNET. The problem: Europe, with its much smaller Jewish community and an electoral system that makes politicians less reliant on direct donations than their U.S. counterparts, was not yet prepared for this specific form of political maneuvering. To overcome these challenges, the organization cultivated wealthy Europeans sympathetic to Israel and encouraged them to participate in political spending campaigns inspired by AIPAC. They also concentrated on other forms of influence, such as bringing elected officials on all-inclusive trips to Israel. As Raanan Eliaz, another of ELNET’s founders said in a 2008 interview, “If … groups like ours working in Europe had 10% of the budget pro-Israel lobbying has in the U.S., we could change the world.”
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