For Betar or Worse

Efe Ercelik was preparing for trial in western Massachusetts when Department of Homeland Security agents pounded on his door to inform him that his student visa had been revoked.

His case stemmed from a physical altercation with Jewish students on the University of Massachusetts Amherst campus during a November 2023 event honoring Israeli hostages taken during Hamas’s October 7 attack. Outside of the Student Union, a brick building at the center of campus, Ercelik threw up the middle finger, called the participants “pigs,” and waved a Palestinian flag. Following a verbal confrontation, he attacked an event attendee who had waved an Israeli flag in response. Afterward, Ercelik grabbed the Israeli flag and, using a kitchen knife, proceeded to stab it before police arrived on the scene.

A Massachusetts court charged Ercelik with multiple misdemeanors and felonies as a result of the incident, including vandalism, disorderly conduct, and assault and battery. Less than ten days after Ercelik’s arrest, Canary Mission, an anonymously run doxing website whose stated goal is to investigate groups and individuals “that promote hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews,” listed him and his then-lawyer on their website, adding links to social media accounts under Ercelik’s name, as well as a summary of the incident using third-party reports with links.

Ercelik, who is from Turkey, held a student visa that allowed him to study at UMass and, later, nearby Hampshire College. Yet his actions, including the criminal charges, appeared to have had no effect on his immigration status until spring of 2025, nearly a year-and-a-half after his arrest. On April 8, Betar, a New York-based nonprofit that espouses militant Zionism, called out Ercelik on their profile on X, claiming they submitted his name to the federal government for deportation and citing his Canary Mission profile as evidence. Less than twenty-four hours later, the State Department drafted a memo stating that his visa had been revoked. Throughout April, ICE agents lurked outside of Ercelik’s home before arresting him on May 7 as he left court, shortly after finalizing a plea deal for charges stemming from the 2023 incident. A federal judge handling Ercelik’s habeas corpus case laid out a timeline that indicates Betar “almost exclusively triggered” his detention. Upon his release from ICE custody, he returned to his home in Turkey.

The pattern that Ercelik’s lawyers and the judge alleged in court documents turned out to be a very real one. During a deposition in the American Association of University Professors’ (AAUP) lawsuit against the Trump administration over student deportations, one senior official acknowledged his office used Canary Mission as a source. Peter Hatch, the assistant director of Homeland Security Investigations—an intelligence arm within ICE whose historic focus has been investigating transnational criminals—told lawyers for the AAUP that his group also relied on Canary Mission and Betar. When asked what percentage of the names of student protesters targeted with deportation came from Canary Mission’s website, Hatch responded, “more than 75 percent.” He was unable to say if either group directly submitted any tips to his office, but he described using Canary Mission’s links and source material for profiles in analytical reports: “If Canary Mission alleged that someone was anything, the analyst would go to the source material, review the activities of the person—of the individual—and describe in the Report of Analysis what the facts were.”

For this article, I reviewed dozens of documents from court cases challenging the government’s attempt to deport student activists, lawsuits targeting individuals or institutions that are alleged to have unjustly terminated or otherwise maligned critics of Israel’s genocidal policies, and letters and testimony from right-wing lawmakers or groups that laid the groundwork for the Trump administration’s draconian and misguided war against what it calls antisemitism.

What I found is a pattern of government and mainstream right-wing sources laundering the work of Canary Mission, and even Betar—an organization whose militant Zionism is so radical that the Israel apologists at the Anti-Defamation League designated it extremist. Often without evidence, these groups have smeared their perceived ideological opponents as neo-Nazis, terrorists, and threats to national security. Congresspeople and right-wing think tanks now regularly cite Canary Mission, whose staff lives in Israel, as an authoritative source on alleged antisemitism at American universities. Lawyers and supporters of Palestinian rights have described Canary Mission and Betar as conduits for harassment and threats of violence, including rape.

The groups’ direct ties to the government, however, are murky. My requests for comment to spokespeople at the Department of Homeland Security and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement went unanswered. A State Department spokesperson told me only that the administration “remains committed to fighting antisemitism as a foreign policy priority” and considers multiple factors when revoking visas. When I asked if they had received and used information from Canary Mission, the spokesperson said, “Given our commitment to and responsibility for national security, the Department uses all available tools to receive and review concerning information when considering visa revocations about possible ineligibilities.”

From anti-immigrant policy shops with ties to white nationalists to the gold-and-black-wearing street fighters of the Proud Boys, Trump has elevated an ever-changing cadre of reactionaries and extremists to drive his authoritarian agenda. Canary Mission and Betar are just two of the groups that the government is now using to terrorize pro-Palestine students under the guise of fighting antisemitism—but they’ve proven especially difficult to combat.

While multiple courts have stalled or reversed the government’s attempts to deport noncitizen students, including high-profile activists like Mahmoud Khalil, efforts to limit or counteract Canary Mission and Betar’s campaigns of doxing and harassment through the legislatures and courts have to this point proven fruitless. The same constitutionally protected rights that these and other groups seek to undermine for pro-Palestine activists insulate them, to some extent, from legal retaliation from their victims. Where, then, might we go from here?

Ever since it launched in 2015, Canary Mission has posed a mystery to reporters and activists. Its website includes extensive dossiers on pro-Palestinian student activists that anonymous authors compiled, growing to over two thousand in 2025. These short blogs include videos and photographs of activists, links to their personal social media pages, and descriptions of the groups that they were allegedly involved with. It indiscriminately mixes dossiers of pro-Palestine activists with violent neo-Nazis and white supremacists. The site lists no public-facing staff members.

Yet, as reporters from The Forward and other outlets have found, Canary Mission’s staff never fully succeeded in keeping their identities off the internet. An early version of the group’s website and Facebook included links to a personal Twitter account and email associated with two separate men involved with the Jewish organizations Aish HaTorah, a prominent Orthodox Jewish educational institution, and a company called VideoActivism. Three years later, the outlet discovered that a major Jewish foundation had sent $100,000 to Canary Mission through an Israeli nonprofit called Megamot Shalom, Hebrew for “Peace Trends.”

Among the staff members that The Forward identified was Jonathan Bash, a British-born man in Israel with a career in right-wing Jewish organizations. As with other Canary Mission affiliates, Bash’s digital footprint is limited. There are few photos of him online. Documents that I obtained from Israel’s Corporations Authority, which oversees the registration and operations of companies, lists him as the director for Megamot Shalom since its founding in 2015. He appears to reside in Old Jerusalem. Bash, whom I contacted through an email on Megamot Shalom’s corporate records, didn’t respond to approximately twenty questions I sent about his activities. But a trail of corporate records helped to elaborate Bash’s career since 2000. Beginning in that year, UK corporate records listed Bash as a director for two health care goods companies, Body Clock Health Care and Baby and You. He listed his occupation as computer programming.

Then, in 2008, Bash joined the board of the video company OpenDor Media, otherwise known as Imagination Productions. In tax records, the group listed its activities as creating videos to promote Israel’s image abroad. It shared an address and received funding from the Clarion Project, a far-right nonprofit with a history of Islamophobic rhetoric. In 2010, while Bash was still a board member, OpenDor distributed a film produced by its leader and a Clarion Project cofounder, Raphael Shore, titled Crossing the Line: The Intifada Comes to Campus, which portrays pro-Palestine student protesters as anti-American malcontents at the whims of foreign donors. Bash’s activities between 2012, when he left OpenDor, and when he founded Canary Mission in 2015 are somewhat unclear.

Canary Mission focuses on—and receives over 99 percent of its funding from—the United States. Yet corporate records reveal a company with vanishingly few American ties. Its content writers, directors, and accountant all appear to live in Israel. A job ad from 2022 that I found through an email tied to Megamot Shalom’s accountant sought a bookkeeper for an “International Non-profit Organization” that bears similarities to Canary Mission and includes requirements such as fluency in Hebrew and English, as well as a willingness to “work 1-2 evenings a week during US office work-hours.” 

While Canary Mission has covered its targets from afar, affiliates of Betar have harassed activists at demonstrations in New York, Massachusetts, and elsewhere. The Shoestring, an independent news outlet in western Massachusetts, reported in June that activists at UMass Amherst, one of the schools that Ercelik attended, repeatedly raised concerns about Betar targeting and threatening other activists to school administrators. Organizers, the writers noted, expressed concern that Betar and other groups used material from “fellow students or others . . . covertly photographing and recording them at protests.” In another case, Betar encouraged their fans to write to Tulane University in order to support a Jewish student who faced online harassment after someone filmed him defacing a pro-Palestine mural in New Orleans. And earlier this year, referring to Israel’s use of explosive beepers in Lebanon, the group offered an $1,800 bounty to anyone who sent one to the founder of the pro-Palestine organization Within Our Lifetimes.

Betar’s proclivity for harassment extends to journalists as well. When I reached out for comment, someone tweeted a screenshot of my email and called me a “jihadi.” Over the course of the next few hours, Betar and its followers dug through The Baffler’s tax records and identified a grant that Open Society Foundations, a group that George Soros founded, gave the magazine in 2023. A spokesperson from Betar, who declined to sign their name on any emails to me, asked me if I wanted to comment. While I worked for The Baffler full time from 2015 to 2017, I declined to respond to their bizarre implication of a possibly antisemitic conspiracy. In response, they sent me a follow up email asking about my father—a recently retired political scientist and researcher—and one of his prior employers. When I asked my dad about how he wanted to respond, he found the whole situation perplexing. The group continued its line of inquiry the next week. Betar seemed unaware that he, and I, are partially Jewish. And they declined to respond to any of my questions.

Following Trump’s reelection, Betar boasted about providing “information” to ICE about activists prior to their detention. In early spring, the group published a list of nearly eighty people it identified as students or employees of universities whom it believed were eligible for deportation under Trump’s executive orders. The list included several students that ICE later illegally detained, including Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk and Columbia University activist Mohsen Mahdawi. It also contained, as the Boston Globe reported, numerous errors, ranging from errors in students’ professional affiliations or even their locations.

That the government now references Betar’s “research” comes as no surprise; the current iteration of the group has long cultivated ties to the pro-Trump right. Ronn Torossian, head of the New York-based PR firm 5W, with the help of an accountant in Katonah, New York, registered Betar as a nonprofit in New York state under the name Betar Zionist Organization Inc. in June 2024. 5W’s clients have included multiple Trump affiliates, as well as Israeli politicians. In the early 2000s, for instance, Torossian and his firm received funding from Israel’s Ministry of Tourism to encourage “Christian Market tourism,” according to Foreign Agents Registration Act records. In responses to me on X, a person with access to Betar’s account described themselves as “in Israel.” When I asked why Betar registered as a nonprofit in New York if its base is in Israel, the user asked, “Are Zionist Americans not allowed multiple charities in different places?”

Torossian, as a spokesperson for Betar, has elsewhere justified its existence through fearmongering. “Many of us believe we are living in the days before a potential Holocaust,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in February. Natasha Roth-Rowland, the director of research and analysis at Diaspora Alliance who has conducted extensive research on Betar, told me that Torossian’s organization is a revival of a movement with its roots in pre-World War II Europe. Founded in Latvia in 1923, the group expanded to the United States six years later. In founding documents, it described its purpose as “to create that type of Jew which the nstion [sic] needs in order to better and more quickly build a Jewish state.” Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the godfather of the movement, embraced militarism, saying that those who were unwilling to train in warfare were “useless and unsuitable” to Israel.

To that end, its members embraced “fascist streetgang aesthetics,” Roth-Rowland said. Among other ties to pre-war fascism, she pointed to the group’s early uniform—a brown shirt and tie, similar to the Nazi’s Sturmabteilung, known as “Storm Troopers.” The group’s game of footsie with fascist aesthetics had some limits, and in May 1933, roughly two-and-a-half months after Adolf Hitler came to power, Betar abandoned the outfit. In a letter, the group’s leadership decreed that wearing brown shirts was “strictly forbidden.” The author didn’t explain why.

With Israel’s founding in 1948, Roth-Rowland explained, Betar’s influence diminished but didn’t disappear entirely. According to a profile in Lifestyles Magazine, Torossian recalled becoming involved in Betar in the late 1980s at the age of thirteen. By 1994, a Jewish news organization quoted him as the “national coordinator” for “Betar’s college wing.” But it was the October 7 attacks that gave the group new life.

The new group, Roth-Rowland said, is “clearly intended to be the same organization.” Its site includes statements and images from Jabotinsky. Its staff and affiliates celebrate Kahanism, a violent, far-right nationalist movement that supports Jewish theocracy and the ethnic cleansing of Arab populations in Israel. In tweets and videos, Betar has crafted a combative and militant form of Judaism for the modern era. It recruits “Bear Jews”—a reference to a character in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds whose white shirt is often splattered with the blood and brains of World War II-era Nazi soldiers.

To the extent this militaristic outlook has supported Betar economically is still a mystery. Betar’s board includes Torossian, as well as two women who appear to be related to him. (Torossian did not respond to request for comment.) All three list a sprawling, $16 million condominium on Park Avenue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side as their address. Still, a GoFundMe with a goal of raising $500,000 had only reached a bit over a tenth of its goal as of this writing. Yet the organization appears to be expanding. Currently, they’re advertising the position of social media manager. The first requirement? “A strong Zionist and a 100% supporter of Israel.”

The tools and tactics that made Canary Mission and, to a lesser extent, Betar’s work an asset to the current administration date back to the mid-2010s. Amid the continued popularity of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement—a Palestinian-led campaign founded in 2005 to pressure Israel to adhere to international human rights law—the Israeli government conscripted a secretive agency, the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, to combat it.

Haaretz reported that the ministry’s purpose was to “guide, coordinate and integrate the activities of all the ministers and the government and of civil entities in Israel and abroad on the subject of the struggle against attempts to delegitimize Israel and the boycott movement.” It began doing so in October 2015, amid escalating tension between Israel and Palestine, as well as following a sweeping victory for Benjamin Netanyahu’s party in the country’s legislative elections. Instead of focusing on dialogue or public education—the traditional means that Israeli-backed groups used to promote Zionism—the ministry would use harsher tactics, including digital surveillance and confronting BDS activists on campuses and elsewhere.

The MSA became a nexus for what Yousef Munayyer, the head of the Palestine/Israel program at the Arab Center Washington, D.C., and codirector of the Transnational Repression Project, called a “transnational repression network” in the 2024 edited volume Suppressing Dissent. The NGOs that MSA cooperated with or supported were a closely guarded secret, but journalists, activists, and academics uncovered some of its activities. They found it funded groups in Israel and abroad, including Aish HaTorah, the right-leaning Jewish educational group that several Canary Mission affiliates once worked for. These groups used a variety of tactics including lawfare, targeting funding for Palestinian or pro-Palestine groups and activists, lobbying for anti-BDS laws, and promoting definitions of antisemitism that equated criticisms of Israeli government policy with hatred of the Jewish people. “They’re going to agitate for legislation. They’re still going to conduct lawfare,” Munayyer continued. “But being able to actually count on the machinery of the U.S. government to execute repression is something that really started with Trump.”

A perfect storm of rising anti-immigrant sentiment and the October 7 attacks emboldened groups within the network. Civil society groups tracked a surge of anti-Muslim bias, as well as antisemitism, in the aftermath of the attack. Harassment and doxing weren’t new issues for pro-Palestine activists, but the stakes and frequency have only increased since late 2023. Palestine Legal, an advocacy organization that provides legal support to activists and advocates for Palestinian rights, documented 523 reports from activists of doxing between October 7 and the end of 2024. Following intense, and often violent, crackdowns on pro-Palestine protests on college and university campuses, schools became a focal point for right-wing Zionist culture warriors and their Trumpian allies.

Since October 7, right-wing think tanks, lawmakers, and media outlets have doubled down on presenting foreign students as responsible for antisemitism on campus, using Canary Mission’s work as spurious supporting evidence in the process. Ryan Mauro, an investigative researcher at the Capital Research Center and director of intelligence at the Clarion Project, suggested in an October report that the government “deport terrorism-supporting foreign protesters” and bring domestic terrorism charges against demonstrators. Canary Mission is cited or referenced by name in the report sixteen times. The government has since cited Mauro’s work in multiple legal filings against Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University student and organizer who was detained earlier this year, according to his lawyers. (Mauro did not respond to request for comment.)

Earlier, in testimony submitted to the Committee on Ways and Means in June 2024, Jonathan Pidluzny of the America First Policy Institute described campus protests as a “foreign influence problem.” In a section on “foreign students,” Pidulzny accused visa holders of leading “pro-Hamas campus organizations that have been at the center of antisemitic disruptions.” To support his argument, he included a link to Canary Mission’s archive in a footnote. Pidluzny, now a Trump administration appointee to the Department of Education, has called for “a complete reorientation of civil rights enforcement” that included holding campuses accountable for supposed antisemitism.

“Groups like Canary Mission muddy the waters,” Ben Lorber, coauthor of Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism, told me. Lorber, who has researched and reported on many of the same radical right groups that I have, sees the administration and its allies’ supposed efforts to fight antisemitism as unconvincing, even harmful. “The political demands that are motivating the push for freedom for Palestine—these aren’t antisemitic,” he said. When it comes to Trump, he added, “this is someone who sees no problem with dining with Nick Fuentes and who regularly employs antisemitic rhetoric.”

There are distressingly few paths to challenging groups like Canary Mission and Betar—whether through the courts or the legislature. In July 2024, for instance, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in Chicago filed a lawsuit against Canary Mission and a Chicago-area man. The complaint cited an incident in November 2023, when the man is alleged to have followed, harassed, and threatened the plaintiff, a woman, as she removed posters with the caption “Kidnapped by Hamas” on the North Side of Chicago. The complaint alleges that Canary Mission reposted a video from the woman’s harasser and used it to create a profile of her on its site, resulting in a deluge of violent threats. The case cites an Illinois statute, which Democratic Governor JB Pritzker signed into law in August 2023, that permits people to bring civil suits against those who engage in doxing with the intent to harm or harass.

Yet suing Canary Mission is not an easy task. The complaint originally identified Canary Mission as having “its principal place of business in the State of New York.” The Central Fund of Israel, which directs funding to Canary Mission, is registered in New York, but no equivalent registration appears to exist for Canary Mission or Megamot Shalom. Roughly a month after the case was filed, a judge dismissed it, stating the plaintiffs failed to demonstrate what kind of entity Canary Mission is and to show the court had subject matter jurisdiction to handle the case. Still, CAIR Chicago appears to be continuing to go after Canary Mission on the basis of the anti-doxing law, dedicating a portion of its website to resources for victims and a form for reporting incidents.

Others have resorted to different mechanisms. One website, Against Canary Mission, lets individuals that the organization may have targeted explain their goals and careers in pro-Palestine activism through their own words. Another, Reverse Canary Mission, features profiles of journalists, politicians, settlers, artists, and others for the purpose of “holding Zionists accountable for their support of Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine.” The quality of its evidence is mixed, with some biographies featuring details ranging from providing material support to settlers to purchasing Starbucks during a boycott.

Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., and Georgia, former staff members at Georgetown and Emory Universities named Canary Mission—as well as several organizations that have funded it in the past—in anti-discrimination lawsuits. The complaints allege that both institutions terminated them in response to racist harassment campaigns that Canary Mission fueled through profiling the plaintiffs, both of whom are Muslim, on its website and social media accounts. Both cases, which were filed earlier this year, have yet to reach trial.

But jurisdictional quagmires around international entities, as well as First Amendment protections and the thorny nature of anti-doxing laws, produce their own deluge of challenges to using the courts to find recourse. International companies aren’t immune to civil suits per se, but they might not have assets in the United States that victims can collect in the event of a successful case. And while the First Amendment doesn’t protect against defamatory speech, Adam Steinbaugh, an attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, told me, he described what speech would fall under that category as “narrow.” For more well-known activists and public figures, arguing that speech is defamatory includes an extra layer. “People who have a good deal of public notoriety will have to show actual malice—that is, the publisher either knew the information was false or thought it might be false and published it anyway,” Steinbaugh said. Plus, he added, “much of what we might colloquially refer to as ‘doxing’ is protected by the First Amendment.”

These efforts notwithstanding, it’s hard to see the fusion of hardline Zionism and anti-immigration politics going away anytime soon. “This repression has been ongoing, and I think it’s only going to continue to get worse. Not only for Palestine but for other social justice movements as well,” Rifqa Falaneh, a fellow at Palestine Legal, told me. The Trump administration has used antisemitism as a cudgel for its draconian anti-immigrant agenda beyond university campuses. In addition, groups using the Canary Mission model—such as StopAntisemitism, a self-described “grassroots watchdog organization” that puts profiles of pro-Palestine, anti-racist activist groups like Students for Justice in Palestine side-by-side with ones of terroristic neo-Nazi cells like Atomwaffen Division and The Base—have received funding from major Jewish donors to continue their activities.

Hannah Arendt, writing in the mid-1960s of the intellectual roots of authoritarianism, noted that its “most conspicuous hallmark” was “its utter shallowness.” “That something can be born in the gutter, and despite its lack of depth, can at the same time gain power over almost everyone—that is what makes the phenomenon so frightening,” she added. I kept thinking of Arendt’s complicated relationship with Zionism while researching and reporting this essay, as nearly everyone I talked to seemed to share the discomfort of where groups claiming to act on behalf of Jews forging alliances with fascists could lead.

Still, some found kernels of hope. “It’s frightening,” Falaneh told me, “but with repression breeds a lot of resistance.”