Israel has Australian politicians, critics and pro-Palestine protestors under surveillance. Jacob Epstein reveals foreign interference by the Ministry for Diaspora Affairs.
Intelligence records from Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs reveal an overseas monitoring machinery that tracks domestic protests, protest organisers, and elected lawmakers, and reframes protests happening outside of the Israeli state as threats to its own security.
The surveillance dragnet
Israel’s Diaspora Affairs Ministry was created to maintain cultural ties with Jewish communities abroad. It has long since expanded well beyond that purpose and, using its cultural role as cover, started running foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI) operations.
FIMI is designed to intervene in the internal affairs of countries all around the world. In Australia and New Zealand, this takes the form of a surveillance and reporting operation that tracks the ongoing activities of the Palestine solidarity movement in an attempt to silence its members.
Israel’s surveillance reaches into Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Wellington, Auckland, and beyond. The Ministry publishes its surveillance reports to its own website and distributes them directly to its various partners in government and civil society all around the world.
Since December 2024, the Israeli ministry has surveilled at least 170 solidarity groups along with more than 60 named individuals over the course
of 259 listed events in Australia and New Zealand.
These counts draw on ministry reports compiled by researcher Wallface* and published by Who Funded Genocide in a collection spanning 57 countries. This investigation extends that collection with further reports through November 2026.
The operational hub for this foreign surveillance is J-SOC (the Joint Special Operations Center), also called the Mashlat. Announced by the ministry on 18 August 2024 to monitor TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Telegram, and X in English, French, Arabic, and Hebrew, J-SOC combines automated scraping with human analysts to log meeting points, named activist accounts, follower figures, and proximity to Israeli diplomatic sites.
The ministry openly states that these reports are built to enable “political, legal, educational and cognitive” activities abroad—turning ordinary democratic assembly in Australia and New Zealand into targets for foreign state intervention.
Figure 1: J-SOC’s 9–16 January 2025 protest forecast, recording protest locations, coordinates, risk ratings, and social-media metrics.
Profiling Australian lawmakers
Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs keeps files on people in Australia and New Zealand while labelling critics of Israel as hateful and dangerous. It reframes democratic assembly and elected lawmakers as threats.
A September 2025 Australian J-SOC dossier profiles five elected representatives: Senators Fatima Payman, Lidia Thorpe and Mehreen Faruqi, Greens leader Adam Bandt, and New South Wales MP Anthony D’Adam – placing them in a category its methodology defines
The dossier’s evidence against Anthony D’Adam reveals the inversion at work. The Ministry cited his calls for a ceasefire, his opposition to Israeli occupation, and a 2022 speech commemorating the Nakba.
Image: Josh Barnett
In the Ministry’s assessment checklist, organising peaceful protests is grouped directly alongside violence, and criticising foreign government policy is classified as ‘Anti-Establishment Views’ tied to extreme rhetoric.
By collapsing anti-war and anti-occupation politics into ‘antisemitism’ and ‘incitement,’ the Israeli state manufactures a pretext to compile intelligence dossiers on sitting foreign legislators.
Canberra complicit
In January 2026, D’Adam formally asked Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke to investigate the dossier as an act of foreign interference, warning that Israel had likely relied on local informants to target elected MPs, while Senator Lidia Thorpe called for a broader inquiry into Israel’s intimidation of lawmakers.
Yet Burke’s office brushed the demand aside
with a generic statement that correspondence is passed to relevant agencies ‘as a matter of course,’ and no investigation or diplomatic reprimand has materialised – an inaction that points to Canberra’s complicity in allowing a foreign state to surveil and target its own lawmakers.
Figure 2: Methodology from the ministry’s September 2025 Australian dossier equating protest mobilisation and policy criticism with incitement and antisemitism.
Domestic New Zealand politics an Israeli security matter
In New Zealand, the Ministry’s surveillance extended into domestic legislative debate that had nothing to do with Israeli institutions. In August 2025, Justice for Palestine and Peace Action Wellington planned a gathering at the UK High Commission and a march to Police National Headquarters to oppose expansions to New Zealand’s Terrorism Suppression Act.
Organisers had warned this would criminalise legitimate political protest as ‘terrorism’ and silence progressive speech. The rally was intended to express solidarity with Britain’s Palestine Action, whose members had been libellously labelled as terrorists.
The Israeli ministry surveilled the organisers of this domestic civil-liberties protest and logged the event in its 7–14 August 2025 intelligence file, tracking its start time, social-media engagement, and proximity to the Israeli embassy while indexing six local organisations: Peace Action Wellington, Justice for Palestine, Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa, Pōneke Antifascist Coalition, Falastin Tea Collective, and Aotearoa Healthcare Workers for Palestine.
New Zealanders protesting their own government’s laws were targeted and catalogued by the Israeli state.
The Wellington entry in J-SOC’s 7–14 August 2025 intelligence file – monitoring a protest over New Zealand counter-terror legislation.
Jewish groups targeted too
The same surveillance machinery targets Jewish critics of Israeli state violence. Ahead of a 10 October 2026 rally on Wellington’s Parliament Lawn near the Israeli embassy, the Ministry surveilled and targeted Dayenu: New Zealand Jews Against Occupation alongside Palestinian solidarity groups.
If the Ministry’s stated purpose is to protect Jews living abroad, why is it keeping intelligence files on Jewish communities overseas and treating them as dangerous antisemites?
In reality, the Ministry keeps records on anyone – including Jews living abroad – whose politics it dislikes, framing their speech in violent terms without a shred of evidence to substantiate their claims.
That is the core of the pattern: a state carrying out genocidal violence against Palestinians, while surveilling foreign citizens who are exercising basic democratic rights, presents itself as the peaceful party and criminalises people around the world for opposing genocide.
Exporting the smear pipeline
These state files are not passive records; they are designed to feed external political pressure and public stigmatisation in the countries being monitored.
On July 6, 2025, Minister Amichai Chikli published an open letter to Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, using the ministry’s surveillance figures to demand that Canberra crack down on protesters and attacking Australia for denying entry visas to far-right Israeli figures Ayelet Shaked and Hillel Fuld.
In the same social-media thread, Chikli attached the Ministry’s 2024 antisemitism report—a cynical attempt to weaponise manufactured state ‘evidence’ to pressure a foreign government into
silencing its own citizens for opposing a genocide.
Weeks later, ahead of nationwide marches in Sydney and Melbourne on 24 August 2025, the Ministry issued an alert targeting Free Palestine Coalition Naarm, Free Palestine Melbourne, Students for Palestine Australia, and Palestine Action Group Sydney – even though the Ministry’s own text admitted the marches were not directed at Israeli or Jewish institutions.
Ahead of Auckland’s September 13 2025 Harbour Bridge march demanding sanctions on Israel, J-SOC similarly issued a security alert and surveilled foreign citizens on foreign soil for engaging in their democratic right of free speech, including Te Otāne (49,903 followers) and TOITŪ TE TIRITI (76,843 followers).
Jewish Onliner is an anonymous, AI-driven doxxing and disinformation site (The Times of Israel) that regularly publishes the Diaspora Ministry’s govextra.gov.il surveillance files to target pro-Palestine organisers and academics abroad.
On August 21, 2025 – three days before tens of thousands of Australians were set to march across Sydney, Melbourne, and dozens of other cities to demand an end to the genocide in Gaza, The Jewish Onliner falsely accused Palestine Action Group Sydney of operating as a formal affiliate of Palestine Action UK in an attempt to vilify them as terrorists.
How the apparatus was built
The Ministry’s current architecture is the product of a deliberate 25-year merger between outreach to Jewish communities abroad, state propaganda, and covert political warfare.
What began in 1999 under Michael Melchior inside the Prime Minister’s Office as a portfolio for Jewish identity and Birthright trips was merged in May 2009 with the government’s Information Centre, Advertising Agency, and Press Office to form the Ministry of Public Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs.
From the beginning, relations with Jewish communities abroad and state propaganda shared an institutional roof. After a 2013 restructuring added the ‘combating antisemitism’ mandate, the cabinet approved a NIS 128 million matching-funds framework in December 2017 to wage campaigns against what it called Israel’s ‘delegitimisation’ abroad.
By early 2018, the Ministry was running the Anti-Semitism Cyber Monitoring System (ACMS), an online monitoring system. Then Diaspora Affairs Minister Naftali Bennett boasted that it would expose people it flagged as antisemites and
report them to their local authorities for antisemitism.
The Strategic Affairs Ministry, which had until then housed Israel’s overt and covert anti-BDS apparatus, was abolished in July 2021.
The apparatus was then moved for nearly two years, along with its budget of NIS 100 million, to the Foreign Affairs Ministry. Following that, in February 2023, it was moved again to the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism.
Records show that staff, contracts, surveillance infrastructure, budgets, and front entities like Voices of Israel (formerly Concert) came with it, explicitly authorising both overt and covert activity abroad.
Chikli and the far-right
Under Chikli, the Ministry has also been tied multiple times to coordinated inauthentic behaviour (CIB) campaigns online, meaning that Israel has repeatedly been caught using networks of fake accounts that
pose as ordinary people in order to push its own hidden agenda.
In May 2024, OpenAI shut down one of these networks, which was run by an Israeli company called STOIC and used AI to write its posts and comments.
The minister in charge since December 2022 is Amichai Chikli of Likud. He accuses anti-genocide protesters and lawmakers in Australia and New Zealand of antisemitism.
Yet Chikli himself is openly allied with Europe’s far right, including France’s National Rally, Belgium’s Vlaams Belang and Spain’s Vox. In October 2025 he
invited the British far-right activist Tommy Robinson to Israel.
When Jewish community leaders objected in January 2026, he defended the European parties as partners against radical Islam.
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Jacob Epstein is an early career researcher, first generation academic and a freelance journalist with a keen interest in the dynamics of the transnational Jewish far-right.