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"The Missing Piece"
A Conversation with Yossi Bartal
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In this week's newsletter, Diasporist intern Hugh Kane spoke with Yossi Bartal, the author of a recent investigation into ELNET, Europe's largest pro-Israel lobby. The two discussed how the year-long investigation came about and its undertaking by an international investigative consortium, and addressed the "what now?" question about Israel's relationship to Europe post-Orban.
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Hugh Kane (HK): Talk me through what prompted this investigation — how did you first become aware of ELNET’s growth and influence?
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Yossi Bartal (YB): When I moved to Germany in 2006, it was not, in a total sense, a pro-Israel state. Things started to change in the 2010s: the more rightwing Israel became — the more Netanyahu-led — the more German political support for Israel and for Israeli policies increased. This increase was not translated into popular support, but came specifically from the political and media establishments.
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This poses the question of why and how the Israeli government managed to convince so many German politicians to support it. The only other existing investigation into the German Israel lobby came out in Der Spiegel five years ago, focusing on two smaller, local organizations. The people who authored it received remarkable pushback including defamation campaigns. Yet that investigation ignored ELNET, although it was already the biggest Israel-Lobby organization in Europe. Until recently, ELNET was still an unknown even in the pro-Palestine movement, or really anywhere outside of very specific policy making circles.
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HK: There’s so much material in this reporting. Could you sketch out your reporting process for this and how you sifted through all of the information?
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YB: First of all, I was part of a team and got a lot of support, specifically from Guli Dolev-Hashiloni and our French colleagues. Even though most of the information we worked with was open-source, it took sifting through hundreds of pieces of information to map out ELNET’s operations size and who was actually involved. In doing so, we came to understand that this is probably the biggest foreign state lobby operation to ever exist in European politics.
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More than 116 Bundestag members as well as other local parliamentarians in Germany went on ELNET sponsored trips to Israel. We spoke to several of them, and it helped us understand how those parliamentarians changed their tune about Israel based on those trips, hear what arguments that they were using with regards to Israel, and see how the visits influenced their way of seeing reality.
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HK: This piece in the Diasporist is the final instalment of reporting done by an international investigative consortium. How does this fit in with other reporting done by partner outlets?
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YB: I think the main focus of this article is how much ELNET is actually an AIPAC project. Building off reporting by colleagues at the Intercept, I wanted to specifically focus on that aspect of the story. ELNET is not an organically growing organization in Germany or in France or in other European countries but a very meticulously planned project, backed by some of the most influential AIPAC supporters and donors — very far away from the supposed think tank image that ELNET is trying to project here in Germany.
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HK: That fits nicely into my next question: What do you think is the most important thing to take away from this piece?
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YB: I see this article is the missing piece of the puzzle of the radical change in European policies toward Israel over the last decade. We’re seeing a kind of uncritical embrace of Israel and militarism through European institutions, specifically German ones — progressive parties as much as conservative. This shows that AIPAC’s big European operation, which cost millions of millions of dollars for many years, was bearing fruit.
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HK: Since you’ve first started reporting on this, a lot has changed in the global political landscape. What questions do you think we should be asking right now, both in a general and subject specific sense?
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YB: German foreign policy is a lot of things at the same time. And what the Israel lobby is working on, ELNET specifically, is building the connections between German institutions and Israeli institutions — making Germany so dependent on Israeli technology and Israeli military that their bond will soon be unbreakable. This will also make it impossible for Germany to be more critical of Israeli policy and to support European policies that reduce their dependence on Israel.
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Right now, Europe is trying to distance itself from the Netanyahu government. One of the big worries of the Israel lobby is not having the same influence on the continent. Especially now that Orban is gone, Germany is really the most important country that they have. The way they try to keep that influence is through collaboration, making it unseverable in the economic, military, and scientific spheres.
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To me, that seems the most important thing to pay close attention to now. ELNET and AIPAC are going to put immense pressure in order to guarantee support in Germany, and German politicians very well may bend, even if it means alienating themselves from much of the rest of Europe.
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Yossi Bartal
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In October 2015, Steve Rosen — an 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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