By Wyatt Reed and Max Blumenthal – Grayzone
Israel’s former top general sought donations from David Ellison and his father, Larry, as part of a billionaire coterie to fund digital paramilitaries aimed at sabotaging pro-Palestine activists. The leaked documents show one planner explaining, “In the jungle, we need more guerrillas and less IDF.”
With Paramount and CBS News now under his control, the younger Ellison has installed self-described “Zionist fanatic” Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief.
The new owner of Paramount, David Ellison, participated in an Israeli government-led plot to surveil and suppress pro-Palestine activists in the US, leaked emails show. Originally dubbed “12 Tribes,” a reference to the dozen Jewish billionaires solicited to underwrite the operation, the scheme sought out American faces to fund surveillance firms run by Israeli intelligence veterans on behalf of Tel Aviv, as it targeted American citizens participating in the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.
The emails documenting the foreign influence campaign to counter BDS were first identified by journalist Jack Poulson, who discovered them in a trove leaked by the Handala hacking collective in 2024. The files show former Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz was tasked with recruiting wealthy Westerners to fund surveillance firms operated by Israeli intelligence veterans as they stalked and harassed people whom the government of Israel suspected of harboring pro-Palestinian sympathies.
In the emails, Hollywood talent agency executive Adam Berkowitz identified Ellison as “very interested” in “helping out with [undermining] the BDS movement.” Berkowitz introduced Ellison to the Israeli general in a group email: “Benny meet david. David meet Benny,” Berkowitz wrote on December 23, 2015, explaining that he “told david briefly about your [Gantz’s] 12 tribe idea which you can expound on to him which he seemed very interested in.”
Two days later, Ellison replied, “Mr Gantz it is a pleasure to meet you over e-mail. I very much look forward to discussing everything you are working on, and in the mean time hope you are enjoying the holiday season.” He added, “I will be back in LA on January 3rd and look forward to connecting in the New Year.”
A planning spreadsheet names other Zionist billionaires sought for the Israeli effort. They included David’s father, Oracle founder and Friends of the IDF board member Larry Ellison; Israeli-American billionaire and top Democratic Party sugar daddy Haim Saban; and Google founder Sergey Brin, whose “Israel-support” was still “tbd.” One of those named, Canadian bookchain owner Heather Reissman, had “already agreed” to donate.
The document also listed other hyper-wealthy Zionist activists as potential 12 Tribes members, alongside the following descriptions:
- Eli Broad ($5.7 billion, real estate giant, philantropist [sic] supporting pro-Israel causes),
- Selmo Nissenbaum (Art collector, Partner of Personale Investimentos Ltda since 2008. Director of Uhf Incorporated; financ. supports Weizmann Institute)
- Dorothea Steinbruch ($5.8 b, steel industry)
- Safra family
- Kevin Bermeister (technology innovator, real estate investor, philanthropist, founding investor of Skype)
- Frank Lowy (co-founder of the Westfield Group, operator of over 100 shopping centres in Australia, NZ, the US and UK, net worth US$4.60 bn)
- Anthony Pratt (a net worth of about US$7.1 billion, packaging industry)
- Édouard Cukierman (French-Israeli business man)
- Rotchild [sic] family (Banking dynasty)
- Lord Stanley Fink (Net worth $180m, former hedge fund manager, pro-Israel philantropist [sic])
- Sir Ronald Cohen (British businessman and political figure, known as “the father of British venture capital)
- Lord George Weidenfeld (British publisher, philanthropist, newspaper columnist; pro-Israel supporter)
- Poju Zabludowicz (Finnish-born London-based business magnate, investor, art collector and pro-Israel philanthropist (one of the main supporters of UK pro-Israel group BICOM))
Those afforded the dubious honor of being selected to donate $1 million to the official Israeli propaganda slush fund would be anointed one of the “12 Tribes” of Israel, all of whom would be guided directly by the Israeli government, according to a promotional document.
“Funding for this initiative shall be provided by an exclusive group of the twelve most influential Jewish philantropists [sic], symbolizing the twelve Jewish tribes; Israel’s government shall act as a thirteenth, facilitating ‘tribe.’”
Internal planning documents from Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, a nominally independent thinktank which serves as an extension of the Israeli military, show how the 12 Tribes envisioned itself: “strategically, we want to be a non-hierarchical mothership, working for the people and the state” of Israel.
However, the effort’s masterminds were heavily preoccupied with maintaining a facade of independence from Tel Aviv. “Government money is also a political constraint,” one organizer stated, adding, “in order to act on all target audiences, independence is required.” Another planner agreed that the scheme would be more effective if it posed as autonomous: “In the jungle, we need more guerrillas and less IDF.” A third volunteered, “This will not be a covert project, but the connection to the state and the government needs to be very controlled.”
With funding from the 12 Tribes, Israel would deploy “state-of-the-art cyber technology as a soft weapon” through firms like Black Cube — the notorious Israeli intelligence cut-out best known for stalking the accusers of disgraced Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein.
Black Cube also acts as an attack dog for the makers of highly invasive Pegasus spyware, Israel’s NSO Group. As President Barack Obama closed in on a nuclear deal with Iran, Black Cube sent agents, again under false cover, to investigate administration officials involved in the negotiations.
Internal Black Cube documents boast that the Israeli company has “developed several unique methods, especially social engineering” to “move freely… in limited access environments,” while harvesting data from the darknet.
The email exchanges also offer a glimpse into the early stage of David Ellison’s emerging role as one of Silicon Valley’s top Israel enforcers. It’s a role he was seemingly born to play, given the zeal displayed by his billionaire father, Larry Ellison, in defending the apartheid state.
Paramount’s pro-Israel pedigree
Further emails from the Handala tranche reveal that Larry Ellison was tasked by Israel with evaluating current Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s allegiance to the apartheid state a decade ago, with Tel Aviv’s then UN Ambassador, Ron Posor, asking Larry in 2015: “How was the conversation with Mario [sic] Rubio? Did he pass your scrutiny? Did you have a chance to talk about Israel?”
Larry Ellison responded in the affirmative, declaring, “Marco will be a great friend for Israel.”
The elder Ellison has maintained an extremely close relationship with Tel Aviv, funneling tens of millions of dollars to Israeli militants via the “Friends of the IDF” group over recent years. In fact, a decade before the International Criminal Court indicted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes in Gaza, Ellison attempted to place him on the board of directors of Oracle.
Now, Larry Ellison is at the helm of a consortium of Israel-tied billionaires taking over major US media properties from TikTok to Paramount, which controls CBS News. With their takeover of Paramount complete, the Ellison family are not only poised to dictate Israel policy to US viewers, but are well-positioned to dictate the situation on the ground in Gaza as well. Indeed, Ellison pledged over $350 million to the Tony Blair Institute, whose founder was named by President Donald Trump as the future director of the so-called Gaza International Transitional Authority – a neocolonial occupation entity that will provide an inevitable windfall to Blair’s tech backers.
Meanwhile, as the new owner of Paramount Skydance, Ellison’s son, David, has installed Bari Weiss as the new editor-in-chief – and Zionist enforcer – of CBS News.
From ‘cancel culture victim’ to ethically conflicted CBS News chief
The 41-year-old Weiss began her career as a pro-Israel activist hounding Palestinian professors on the campus of Columbia University before working for a number of Israeli media outlets. An admitted “Zionist fanatic,” she rose to prominence as a columnist as a neocon diversity hire at the New York Times opinion section before a stormy resignation in which she branded the paper as a woke hive infected with cancel culture – while omitting her long history of attempting to cancel Israel critics.
(Her final attempt to cancel Israel critics at the NY Times apparently resulted in the assassination of one of her targets, the Palestinian scholar and pundit Refaat Alareer, who was murdered by an Israeli drone strike after Weiss falsely accused him of mocking a non-existent dead Jewish baby).
As she struck out on her own, Weiss basked in support from techno-feudalist financial angels like David Sacks and Marc Andreesen, founding an “anti-woke,” ultra-Zionist outlet ironically entitled the Free Press. Today, the Free Press partners with an Israeli propaganda cutout called Center for Peace Communications which attempts to foment divisions within Arab societies, and promotes the militia of ISIS-linked Yasser Abu Shabab, a notorious smuggler in Gaza who operates alongside the Israeli army.
With support from Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, Weiss has also launched an “anti-woke” quasi-university, the University of Austin (UATX), where students read passages from Palantir CEO and university trustee Alex Karp’s harshly panned book, The Technological Republic, alongside Plato’s The Republic. Upon entering the university’s gates, visitors are greeted with a bust of Weiss, the founding mother, donated by Lonsdale.
While journalists have traditionally sought to speak truth to power, Weiss has made a career of doing the opposite, and has been hailed as a kind of scrooge whisperer among the conservative establishment. “She doesn’t just speak to the 1%,” Republican pollster Frank Luntz said of Weiss. “She speaks to the one-hundredth of 1%. And they’ll listen.”
To complete Ellison’s Paramount takeover, his company is purchasing Weiss’s Free Press at an eye-popping price of $150 million. His appointment of Weiss as CBS editor-in-chief raises serious issues about the network’s editorial independence, especially given her proclivity for using Free Press as a vehicle for promoting the interests of her tech donors.
Who were the Free Press investors who profited from the sale to Paramount? Was David Sacks among them? Now that Sacks is a Trump White House Special Advisor on AI and Crypto, his financial relationship with Weiss creates a clear conflict of interest at CBS.
In her first act as CBS editor-in-chief, Weiss issued an October 6 letter to all employees of the organization pledging to advance a commitment to “journalism that is fair, fearless, and factual.”