Mr. AIPAC Goes to Europe
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.”
More Important Than Ever
Today, ELNET maintains six European offices (in Paris, Berlin, Brussels, London, Warsaw, and Rome), as well as offices in Tel Aviv and New York. While each office is officially its own independent entity, a small circle of American and Israeli allies sit on nearly every board while the U.S. Friends of ELNET provide the majority of each office’s funding, ensuring the umbrella organization’s continued influence. The self-described European network employs dozens of staffers and has an annual budget of up to $20 million, much of it from U.S. donors who make use of a tax exemption that would have prevented them from financing lobbying activities in the United States but not abroad. As a recent report in The Intercept demonstrates, many of these donors also fund AIPAC, and several have given money to Trump and other far-right causes.
ELNET’s primary activity is the facilitation of delegations — inviting European parliamentarians, military staff, journalists, and other key decision-makers to highly curated trips to Israel — as well as organizing closed-door informational “strategic dialogues” with Israeli officials. Since 2010, the organization has been instrumental in securing European backing for the occupation of the Palestinian territories and its concomitant atrocities, as well as advancing some of Israel’s largest-ever arms sales. Yet, in contrast to its well-known U.S. counterpart, AIPAC, ELNET has operated in near-total obscurity.
In recent months, however, a team of journalists from Israel, France, Germany, Greece, and the United States has begun to shed light on ELNET’s activities, drawing upon the documents revealed in the Handala leak; public records; and interviews with dozens of politicians, former staffers, and experts in the field.
Larry Hochberg, the businessman who was ELNET’s co-founder and a former leader of the U.S. group Friends of the IDF, met Prosor in December 2015 in South Africa, about a month after Rosen had reached out to him about the fundraiser in Los Angeles. Emails in the leak suggest ELNET was particularly keen to recruit Prosor, one of Israel’s most hawkish diplomats. In an email arranging the meeting, Hochberg laid out what he described as the urgent need to expand pro-Israel lobbying on the continent. At the time, the U.S. President Barack Obama was entering the final year of his second term, and voiced increasing frustration with Israel’s official positions and its supporters in Washington. “Knowing what we do now, pro-Israel advocacy in Europe is more important than ever,” Hochberg wrote.
Rosen’s message, which contained “a confidential report for [Prosor’s] eyes only,” also made clear what “citizen engagement” meant in practice: bringing wealthy, primarily Jewish supporters of Israel with open checkbooks into private, behind-closed-doors contact with senior politicians.
After another request to speak at an ELNET fundraiser in early 2016, Prosor asked for $40,000. ELNET agreed, while also making clear what it expected in return: Prosor would meet with at least eight potential donors in the New York area. An accompanying list of around 20 names included the billionaire and former mayor Michael Bloomberg, fashion designer Ralph Lauren, the actor Ron Perlman, and members of the Tisch family. (The email leak does not contain confirmation of such meetings actually taking place.) Neither Prosor nor ELNET responded to requests for comment from the Diasporist.
As Rosen wrote to Prosor in early 2016, ELNET’s attempts “to stimulate citizen engagement in the democratic process have faced significant cultural barriers.” At the time, ELNET was focusing on its operations in France, home to the biggest Jewish community in Europe. Rosen’s message, which contained “a confidential report for [Prosor’s] eyes only,” also made clear what “citizen engagement” meant in practice: bringing wealthy, primarily Jewish supporters of Israel with open checkbooks into private, behind-closed-doors contact with senior politicians. As Rosen put it, “The kinds of involvement that are familiar and comfortable for supporters of Israel in the United States, [sic] are sometimes seen as daunting and unfamiliar in the French environment.”
But in the confidential report, which Rosen indicated had not been cleared by ELNET’s attorneys, he maintained the organization was succeeding in changing that. Among the discreet efforts Rosen claimed ELNET coordinated in France were a “community meeting” with former French President Nicolas Sarkozy in early 2016, hosted at the “lavish offices” of ELNET donor Sydney Ohana — the “cosmetic surgeon of the stars” and a personal friend of Carla Bruni, Sarkozy’s partner. At the time, Sarkozy was considered to be the favorite for the conservative party’s presidential candidacy and had been a staunch advocate of Israel when in office. Another ELNET event with former French prime minister and then-mayor of Bordeaux Alain Juppé, Sarkozy’s major opponent in the conservative camp, was hosted by Michel Ohayon, “said to be the 82nd wealthiest person in France,” Rosen wrote. After each of these events, the hosts “encouraged attendees to give political support and contributions” to their favored politician.
Emails sent to Gabi Ashkenazi, the former chief of staff of the Israeli army, indicate that ELNET’s efforts were not confined to one side of the French political spectrum. In 2012, Hochberg wrote to the retired general: “We are making decent progress with François Hollande and that is largely due to the work of French Jews who have established close relationships with him.”
It is hard to assess how much of ELNET’s influence translated into policy. Yet the French government, under Presidents Sarkozy, Hollande, and then Emmanuel Macron, refused to recognize a Palestinian state until late 2025, and publicly equated anti-Zionism with antisemitism. A Mediapart report from 2024 also found that around 100 members of the French parliament took ELNET-sponsored trips to Israel, making it the largest foreign provider of organized trips for French politicians by a significant margin.
The German Office
On May 8, 2014, in an office a stone’s throw from the Bundestag in Berlin, seven men — three Americans, three Germans, and one Israeli — came together to officially launch ELNET’s German chapter as a nonprofit association. Among them was Raanan Eliaz, a red-headed boyish amateur poet, who grew up in one of the first settlements in the West Bank and whose background includes roles with AIPAC and the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office prior to co-founding ELNET.
Representing the Americans in the room were Larry Hochberg, as well as his son, Andrew. According to the meeting’s minutes, Eliaz laid out the case for ELNET, highlighting that there was not yet an entity in the world of German-Israeli friendship that worked “specifically to involve decision-makers.” He also pointed to “the positive aspects of an internationally cross linked system of associations with one aim.”
Today, Germany is widely seen as Israel’s closest ally within the European Union, but this was not the case when ELNET began its activities in the country in the early 2010s. While Israel has always held a special place in German politics for historical reasons, at the time there was still space for nuance. The country’s professed commitment to international law often brought it into conflict with Israeli occupation policies. For instance, in 2012, Sigmar Gabriel, then head of the Social Democrats, spoke of Israel’s “apartheid regime” after visiting the Palestinian city of Hebron. Despite the ensuing backlash, Gabriel did not apologize. Two years later, Volker Beck, a member of the Greens who was then the chairman of the German-Israeli Parliamentary Group, advocated for making military aid to Israel conditional on a freeze in settlement activity.
Just a few years later, these positions had become politically untenable. Six years after his visit to Hebron, Gabriel, out of public office and on the verge of leading the transatlantic lobby group Atlantik-Brücke, felt compelled to apologize for using the word “apartheid.” Shortly thereafter, he served as patron of a fellowship program, co-sponsored by ELNET, bringing German journalists to Israel. Beck went on to become one of Israel’s most ardent supporters, participating in several ELNET activities, and was even offered the position of director of the German office in 2019, as several sources confirmed.
From its start in Germany, ELNET has portrayed itself as a politically non-affiliated think tank that maintains close contacts to all parties except the extreme-right AfD.
The shift that happened in German foreign policy over the course of the 2010s cannot be attributed to any single cause. However, the cementing of Israel’s place in Germany’s so-called Staatsräson and the shrinking of German spaces for criticism of Israeli policies — culminating in the highly disputed Bundestag anti-BDS resolution in 2019 — coincided with the rise of several new lobbying enterprises in Berlin. Foremost among them was ELNET.
ELNET’s ambitions in Germany were underscored by the caliber of its founding circle. Among those in the room with Rosen and the Hochbergs was Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, the former German defense minister who resigned from his position following a plagiarism scandal in 2011. Since then, he’d reinvented himself as one of Berlin’s most influential lobbyists for global corporations. Also there was Ulf Gartzke, former head of the CSU’s Hans Seidel Foundation in Washington, D.C. and a fellow of the neoconservative Hudson Institute. Both men would later leverage their ELNET connections to advance the fraudulent Wirecard company, which collapsed in 2020 after fabricating $2 billion in fake cash.
From its start in Germany, ELNET has portrayed itself as a politically non-affiliated think tank that maintains close contacts to all parties except the extreme-right AfD. Its first appointed head of office in Germany was Andreas Büttner, a failed local politician for the liberal FDP who would later join Die Linke and become one of its most staunch pro-Israeli voices, until his departure from the party earlier this year. Following Büttner, ELNET recruited as its new CEO the professional lobbyist Daniele Nati, who had previously worked on behalf of the tobacco company Reemtsma.
As in other countries, ELNET’s primary activity in Germany was organizing delegations for parliamentarians. In its first four years, the organization flew at least 36 members of the Bundestag to Israel on all-expenses-paid trips. In 2015, these delegations included rising conservatives such as Gitta Connemann and Andrea Lindholz, as well as prominent progressive politicians like Beck and Gregor Gysi, then-leader of Die Linke. It has also continued organizing closed-door conferences under the title “Germany-Israel Strategic Dialogue,” frequently in cooperation with the Federal Academy for Security Policy, an institution of the German Ministry of Defense.
According to a CV published on his personal website, during his time at ELNET, Eliaz’s “consistent activity… with the senior political echelon in Germany” led to the adoption of an “aggressive policy against the BDS movement.” “Even the far-left of Germany’s political spectrum, Die Linke Party, which agreed to visit Israel in two delegations in 2011 and 2015, later opposed BDS, in an unprecedented public move,” he claimed.
Raising the Profile
ELNET significantly expanded its operations once Carsten Ovens was chosen to lead the German chapter in 2019. Ovens, an ambitious young CDU politician, was elected to the Hamburg parliament in 2015. In 2017, together with future minister of education and ELNET advisory board member Karin Prien, he was the first to introduce an anti-BDS resolution in a German legislature. (In following years, similar resolutions in local parliaments — and later the Bundestag — gained wide support.) In late 2018, Ovens established the CDU’s Israel Friendship Circle and was one of two German speakers at an ELNET conference in Paris. (The other was Beck.) For a year, Ovens served concurrently as ELNET CEO and as a member of Hamburg’s parliament, a situation possible under Germany’s lax lobbying rules.
Ovens had a clear agenda of how to market ELNET and its pro-Israeli agenda to German parliaments. Public documents and sources close to the organization indicate that Ovens concentrated on easily sellable points — technological cooperation in the high-tech and health industries — and created forums to address them, receiving generous sums from German ministries.
This strategy has allowed ELNET to present itself as a local civil society organization, despite being part of an international lobbying enterprise heavily influenced by foreign partners and predominantly financed by U.S. donors.
Under Ovens’s tenure as CEO, the number of ELNET’s parliamentary delegations increased significantly. These trips were tailored to fit the remit of various Bundestag committees, like health, climate change, or smart city planning, or targeted to newly elected members with its Young Leaders program. As of publication, 160 German parliamentarians (mainly from the Bundestag but also from local legislatures and the EU parliament) have participated in ELNET delegations, making ELNET the largest private provider of foreign trips for lawmakers in the history of Germany.
ELNET also led public campaigns claiming to fight antisemitism and advance interfaith understanding in Germany. For example, ELNET’s “Question Wall” campaign — co-financed by local governments across Germany — generated hundreds of posters featuring innocuous questions like “Can Jews eat cheeseburgers?” and “Is Harry Potter Jewish?” On the campaign’s website, however, more pointed questions appear, such as “Is Israel an apartheid state?” or “Is Israel committing genocide on the Palestinians?” — each met with an emphatic “No.” Since 2021, the organization has presented an annual ELNET Award for exceptional commitment to German-Israeli relations and Jewish life in Germany. At the 2025 ceremony, former German President Joachim Gauck and head of the Bundestag Julia Klöckner delivered speeches.
Rather than maintain a low profile, Ovens gradually built a public image of ELNET as an independent think tank. In exchanges with German politicians, ELNET regularly stresses the fact that it receives public funds from German ministries and works closely with state bodies, creating a sense of legitimacy while avoiding questions about financing, leadership, and political directives. This strategy has allowed ELNET to present itself as a local civil society organization, despite being part of an international lobbying enterprise heavily influenced by foreign partners and predominantly financed by U.S. donors.
Politicians who’ve taken part in ELNET-sponsored events report that it has nothing in common with the aggressive strategies of AIPAC. In private conversations with politicians, Ovens, a successful salesman, assured politicians that he backed a two-state solution and held some critical views of Netanyahu. Until 2021, delegations to Israel also included short stops in Ramallah to meet with representatives of the Palestinian Authority.
Yet as ELNET in Germany portrayed itself as supportive of open dialogue, ELNET in general moved further and further to the right.
Shifting Right
Although ELNET maintained strong connections with the political right from the outset, its leadership in Israel and the United States also actively sought engagement with Israeli politicians from the center and center-left. After Raanan Eliaz was removed from his leadership role in 2016 for what internal documents cited as a “serious breach of trust,” this big-tent approach began to shift, corresponding with the broader rightward shift in Israel advocacy following Donald Trump’s election.
As Steve Rosen and Larry Hochberg aged, ELNET’s Israel office was becoming increasingly influential (and right-wing). David Siegel — Israel’s ELNET director from 2016 to 2020 — was affiliated with the bullish right-wing party Israel Beitenu. Shai Bazak, who led ELNET between 2020 and 2022, served as a spokesman for both the extreme-right settlements council and Netanyahu during his first premiership in the late 1990s.
Then came Emmanuel Navon, ELNET Israel director from 2023 to 2025. Navon was a senior fellow at the controversial right-wing think tank Kohelet, which is widely accepted to be the policy mastermind behind 2023’s judicial overhaul. Publicly, Navon has advocated for the annexation of the West Bank and expelling African refugees from Israel, and has spoken, in his capacity as ELNET’s director, about the need to “rebuild the pride of the youth in Western civilisation against the ‘opium’ of wokeism.” His call for deeper collaboration with Europe’s right-wing political forces have been taken up in ELNET’s activities across Europe. Navon later worked on establishing a new think tank for ELNET France, dedicated to “a post-October 7 foreign policy strategy for Israel, to defend the values of Western civilization.” In March 2026, the Israeli government appointed him as the new ambassador to Japan.
In 2025, ELNET publicly took a delegation to visit Israeli settlements in the West Bank and their political leaders for the first time.
Navon’s leadership of Israel’s ELNET office coincided with deepening political polarization between Netanyahu’s supporters and opponents. In the first nine months of 2023, Netanyahu’s government pushed forward with its judicial overhaul while expanding the settlement project and disavowing a two-state solution. As liberal Zionists called on Europe and the U.S. to intervene against what they considered the erosion of Israeli democracy by Jewish supremacists, the alignment of the broader Israel lobby with Netanyahu’s settler agenda became unmistakable.
The shift to the right was also reflected in ELNET’s increasingly one-sided Israel tours: Visits to Ramallah began to disappear from the itinerary, meetings with Labor or Meretz Knesset members became rare, and more right-wing thinkers and activists were booked as guests. Often, the only Palestinian representative who participants met was a journalist affiliated with the far right Gatestone Institute. In 2025, ELNET publicly took a delegation to visit Israeli settlements in the West Bank and their political leaders for the first time.
Meanwhile, ELNET also deepened its involvement with the Israeli weapons industry and was quick to capitalize on Europe’s military buildup following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Even as Israel refused to join international sanctions against Russia or to sell arms directly to Kyiv, ELNET marketed the country as the indispensable ally Europe needed in a time of crisis. ELNET credited itself with playing an important part in the biggest weapons sale in Israeli history — resulting in nearly 3.5 billion euros worth of defense systems — after a March 2022 visit by members of the Bundestag’s defense committee.
Lies and Bombs
While the Israeli population struggled to grasp the scale of loss following the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, ELNET’s network, meticulously established over the previous decade, reacted faster than most state bodies. By noon on October 9, ELNET had already brought the French philosopher Bernard-Henry Levy to Sderot, the site of one of the deadliest attacks.
The subsequent weeks and months saw a steady stream of so-called “emergency solidarity missions” coordinated by the organization: visits to destroyed kibbutzim and the Nova massacre sites near the Gaza Strip, with participants wearing protective gear and accompanied by ELNET’s staff, armed with pistols. In interviews, several participants reported being taken to the Shura camp and into morgues to view unidentified bodies, presumably of Israeli victims of October 7. In one video posted by ELNET, an Israeli colonel briefs European parliamentarians saying babies had been decapitated by Palestinian attackers — a claim that has since been proven false on multiple occasions.
In the weeks and months following October 7, the Netanyahu government spoke frankly at times about the need to prepare world opinion for what was to follow. ELNET was there alongside AIPAC to deliver. As the months went on and Israeli destruction in Gaza worsened, resulting in worldwide protest and a rapid decline in popular support for Israel and its government’s genocidal course, ELNET’s impact on political decision-makers became more important than ever. In the words of one delegation coordinator speaking in a promotional video in 2024: “After spending four to five intensive days with the delegation, it really creates a special environment in the group — [which] enables us, in this special bond … to really get the impact going.”
The backing of Western states was essential to Israel’s policy over the course of 2024 and 2025. Netanyahu, overriding popular opinion within Israel, which saw mass protests in support of the hostages and for a peaceful resolution, continued with the destruction of Gaza and sabotaged any hope for a permanent ceasefire. Israel lobbyists on both sides of the Atlantic came under sharper scrutiny for their activities helping to prolong a genocidal war, one even the majority of Israelis don’t support.
While leading Democrats in the U.S. have begun to turn against AIPAC and its political interference, ELNET has managed to maintain a cleaner brand. Even as popular opinion in their home countries has shifted to become critical of Israel’s military operations in Gaza and elsewhere — latest polls show 80% of Germans support sanctions against the Israeli state — progressive politicians across Europe continue to participate in ELNET events and embark on trips paid for by an organization heavily reliant on Trump supporters and often led by settlers.
ELNET’s proclaimed aim of advancing German-Israeli relations “based on democratic values” seems, in any case, outdated. Over time, it has repeatedly shown its interest in wielding influence, and its comfort allying itself with far-right governments and talking points that go directly against the popular majority of both countries.
Looking ahead, ELNET’s next major conference is planned for April in Dubai — to improve Israeli relations with the autocratic United Arab Emirates. Whether it will go ahead is uncertain, given that the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran — which ELNET has publicly endorsed — has since engulfed the entire region in war.
This investigation was supported by a grant from IJ4EU. Guli Dolev-Hashiloni contributed reporting.
