Canary Mission: A Blacklist Shapes Immigration, Policing, and Pro-Palestinian Discourse
What is Canary Mission?
The Canary Mission, a pro-Israel website, first appeared in the spring of 2015 with a series of online attacks on undergraduate student activists who had spoken out about the violation of Palestinian human rights. In the past decade, it has evolved from an anonymous website to a state-influencing actor, exemplifying the transformation of online doxxing into a geopolitical tool of transnational surveillance. Its reach extends from student protests to immigration detention cells, and two successive United States governments have used its content to identify, detain, deport, and intimidate pro-Palestinian activists.
Despite operating under the guise of transparency, Canary Mission remains opaque: run from a padlocked building in Israel, funded by U.S. donors seeking anonymity, and used to monitor dissent in both Israel and the U.S. Its collaboration with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been exposed in court. Lawsuits, policy reform, and student advocacy are its ongoing work. Still, the core mission of the site remains the same: to punish and dissuade those who speak out for Palestinian rights.
What are the goals of Canary Mission?
Canary Mission’s website declares that “Canary Mission documents people and groups that promote hatred of the USA, Israel, and Jews on North American college campuses.”
As per the Ethics Policy on their website, Canary Mission contends that the following are tantamount to anti-Semitism and support for terrorism:
any criticism of Israeli policy in the occupied Palestinian territories or of Zionism as a political ideology,
any form of support for Palestinian human rights or the BDS movement,
any criticism of US policy in the Middle East
By producing what is, in effect, a blacklist, Canary Mission seeks to silence free and open discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Like McCarthy-era blacklists that branded individuals as Communist sympathizers to destroy their careers, Canary Mission has created profiles of nearly 5,000 students and academics, labeling them as “anti-Semitic,” “terrorist sympathizers,” or “extremists,” often with no credible basis.
It claims that “every individual and organization [in its database] has been carefully researched and sourced.” It openly proclaims that it seeks to prevent former students from being employed, whom it defines as “radicals.” The civil rights group Palestine Legal has reported that employers and graduate schools have questioned numerous students in the US about their Canary Mission profiles.
What tactics does it use?
Canary Mission’s approach is tripartite:
Doxxing: Publishing personal details of individuals—names, photos, affiliations, graduation years, and social media accounts—framed to suggest extremism.
Defamation: Framing quotes by individuals without context, and using the label of antisemitism on peaceful protesters to portray them as terror supporters.
Amplification: Using social media, especially X (formerly Twitter), to drive harassment, with trolls in the comments swarming targets and calling for their expulsion, and sometimes issuing violent threats.
The group has even created an “Ex-Canary” page for those who recant their political views, a move likened to ideological extortion. Victims report rape threats, death threats, and misogynistic slurs. Columbia student Layla Saliba, for instance, received hundreds of such threats and was later physically assaulted on campus. Layla Saliba, a graduate student at Columbia University, received hundreds of death and rape threats after being profiled.
Offline, Canary Mission’s proxies have engaged in intimidation: giant yellow “canary” mascots appeared at a George Washington University divestment vote. At the same time, digital billboard trucks circled Columbia with faces of student protesters branded as “antisemites.”
Is the information on Canary Mission accurate?
Although Canary Mission states that it is open to correcting factual inaccuracies, there is scant evidence that it has addressed concerns raised by targets featured on the site or removed the numerous false claims it hosts. Those targeted have limited recourse options, largely due to the difficulty, time, and financial and emotional expense of filing defamation lawsuits in the US, the website’s anonymous nature, and the fact that the Canary Mission’s servers appear to be located in Israel.
How does Canary Mission attack its targets?
By analyzing its website, The Polis Project found that it displays profiles of individual students and faculty, as well as organizations, containing personal information, quotes, photos, videos, institutional affiliations, and links to friends and colleagues.
Many individuals and organizations may also be subjected to Twitter trolling campaigns linked back to Canary Mission, as found by The Polis Project in analyzing tweets over the past year. This typically unleashes a wave of denunciations from (mostly anonymous) Twitter and email accounts.
Canary Mission retweets its attacks dozens of times during a single day. This set of tactics is inexpensive and effective: victims are never able to confront their accusers, who hide behind many layers of electronic cloaking.
On February 26, 2018, Twitter suspended Canary Mission’s account, but it was restored just two days later. No reasons were given for either action, but Canary Mission has been accused of violating X’s stated rules of conduct on many occasions; however, no action has been taken against the organization.
What are its origins?
A scrub of the website by The Polis Project found that Canary Mission first appeared in May 2015 as an anonymously-run website that profiles student and academic activists advocating for Palestinian rights and criticizing Israel, by presenting them as “anti-semitic.” Its launch was accompanied by a provocative YouTube video declaring: “It is your duty to ensure that today’s radicals are not tomorrow’s employees.” The website often publishes information on individuals after tracking them through protest activities and social media activism.
Since the beginning, Canary Mission has been deliberately opaque. As per a May 2015 article by The Forward, no names of staff, founders, or donors are listed on the website; its domain is privacy-protected; and it lacks nonprofit status in the US. Early investigative attempts traced the operation to Israel. A now-deleted Twitter link led to an Israeli man named Warren Betzalel Lapidus. Narrators of Canary Mission videos were found to have ties to Israeli advocacy groups. When confronted, the site went offline temporarily.
How did it establish a legal front?
In 2016, the Israeli nonprofit Megamot Shalom was incorporated with the stated aim of preserving Israel’s public image through media work. It would soon emerge as the legal front for Canary Mission. Documents accessed by The Forward revealed the organization’s incorporation was signed by Rabbi Jonathan “Jack” Bash, a dual Israeli-American citizen with a background in pro-Israel media. Bash previously co-founded HonestReporting and ran a media training outfit called VideoActivism. Though Bash denied managing Canary Mission, his signature on official filings, combined with testimony from associates, firmly tied him to the project.
Megamot Shalom’s registered address — a rundown, padlocked building in Beit Shemesh — was emblematic of the secrecy around its operations. Even as Canary Mission continued expanding its profile database through 2016, its backers and operators remained anonymous to the public.
How has it collaborated with the government and facilitated border detentions?
In both Israel and the US, Canary Mission’s influence extended beyond private smear campaigns. By 2018, Haaretz reported that Israeli border authorities were using Canary Mission profiles to interrogate or deny entry to foreign nationals.
Notable examples included:
Lara Alqasem, a U.S. student, was detained in Israel for over two weeks in 2018 because of her Canary profile. She was eventually allowed into Israel after appealing to the country’s Supreme Court.
Katherine Franke, a professor at Columbia Law School, turned away at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport after being flagged by Israeli authorities.
These incidents pointed to coordination between Canary Mission and Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs (MSA) and internal security agency, Shin Bet. Further, Megamot Shalom’s links to the MSA suggest state-level integration in Canary Mission’s efforts to identify and obstruct BDS supporters abroad.
In the US, the Trump administration’s second term deepened the entanglement following the Gaza genocide in October 2023. Peter Hatch, the assistant director for the Office of Investigations within the Department of Homeland Security, testified in federal court that in March 2025, senior officials of the Homeland Security Investigations agency within DHS created a “tiger team” of analysts to investigate over 5,000 student protesters listed on Canary Mission. Hatch said that between 100 and 200 reports of analysis on student protestors were produced.
Two prominent cases emerged in this period:
Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish PhD student at Tufts, was detained for six weeks after being listed on Canary Mission for co-authoring a divestment op-ed.
Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian-American dental student, was arrested and detained for over 100 days under a national security clause. His only known “offense” was campus activism, and his Canary Mission profile was central to the government’s case.
Both Ozturk and Khalil have been released on bail.
Peter Hatch, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency official, confirmed that ICE used Canary Mission in Tufts graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk’s arrest. These cases highlighted how a private blacklist had become instrumental in US immigration enforcement — a chilling development for student activists, especially foreign students, nationwide.
In 2017, 24 students and alumni of the University of Texas at Arlington, who were members of the group Students for Justice in Palestine, were named in a Canary Mission dossier, video, and press release, claiming the group fosters an anti-Semitic culture on campus.
How has its influence escalated since 2023?
Following Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza, campus protests erupted across the US. Canary Mission seized the moment. By May 2024, it had posted over 250 new profiles accusing students and professors of “supporting terrorism” or “hating Israel” — often based on protest chants, club memberships, or solidarity statements.
At Harvard, even students whose clubs merely co-signed a pro-Gaza letter were listed.
At UPenn, photos from protests were dissected to identify and tag individuals like sophomore Layla Sayed, who was labeled a “Hamas War Crimes Apologist.”
Meanwhile, a counter-blacklist called “Raven Mission” emerged to highlight Islamophobia on campuses, mimicking Canary Mission’s format. Civil rights groups denounced the escalation as stifling of free expression disguised as anti-hate vigilance.
The Trump administration further fuelled this climate. Its executive orders in early 2025 mandated surveillance of foreign students engaged in political activity. In court, the administration admitted its agents relied heavily on the Canary Mission’s database.
Who funds Canary Mission?
Canary Mission is financed by a shadowy network of wealthy American donors, philanthropic foundations, and pass-through entities designed to obscure the flow of money from the United States to Israel. These donors include individuals with deep ties to right-wing pro-Israel advocacy and organizations that have been implicated in funding extremist settler groups, Islamophobic campaigns, and pro-Trump political efforts. According to multiple reports, including those by The Nation, Jewish Currents, The Intercept, and The Forward, the group’s financial structure is engineered to enable tax-deductible U.S. donations to support a covert, Israel-directed blacklisting operation.
In October 2018, Jewish-American publication The Forward uncovered that the Helen Diller Family Foundation, a prominent Jewish charity in San Francisco, had routed $100,000 to “Canary Mission for Megamot Shalom.” The grant was processed through the Central Fund of Israel (CFI), a New York-based charity known for channeling U.S. tax-exempt donations to right-wing Israeli organizations. This mechanism allowed American donors to finance the Israeli-run operation while receiving U.S. tax deductions.
From 2019 to 2022, Megamot Shalom reportedly received ₪13.2 million (approximately $3.5 million) from the Central Fund of Israel. Other donors included the Jewish Community Foundation of Los Angeles, which moved $250,000 into Megamot Shalom via an anonymous donor-advised fund. CFI president Jay Marcus, himself a West Bank settler, declined to confirm specific grantees but acknowledged the fund’s role as a conduit for Megamot Shalom.
A 2023 report by The Nation also implicated individuals such as multimillionaire Adam Milstein, a convicted tax felon and high-profile pro-Israel donor, and the Natan and Lidia Peisach Family Foundation, which in 2023 contributed $100,000 to Canary Mission. These contributions, often hidden behind layers of legal entities, turned an obscure website that tracked activists in the US into a well-funded, foreign-operated influence campaign.
In 2023, the organization reported on its Israeli disclosure forms that it received about $1 million in foreign donations, far more than what has been reported on its U.S. tax filings.
There is concern that Americans funding Canary Mission may be violating federal law, specifically the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), which requires disclosure by anyone acting on behalf of a foreign government or intelligence service. Since Canary Mission has reported links to Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Shin Bet, donors could be classified as unregistered foreign agents: a federal crime.
Moreover, these donors exploited loopholes in US tax law:
Donations were made to US-registered charities (like CFI) to finance political activity abroad.
In doing so, American taxpayers subsidized the harassment, surveillance, and deportation of college students on American soil.
Who are its primary donors?
Megamot Shalom
Canary Mission’s legal identity is anchored in Megamot Shalom, an obscure Israeli nonprofit registered as a public benefit corporation in 2016.
While Megamot Shalom claims to promote Israel’s “national image and strength through technological means,” leaked documents and investigative findings show it is the legal front for Canary Mission.
Its listed address is a padlocked, derelict building in Beit Shemesh, devoid of signage or activity.
Jonathan “Jack” Ian Bash, a British-born Orthodox rabbi living in Jerusalem, is widely reported to run Megamot Shalom and Canary Mission. He signed Megamot Shalom’s official filings and has longstanding ties to pro-Israel media training ventures.
Megamot Shalom allows Canary Mission to operate in Israel while avoiding U.S. disclosure requirements, shielding its funders and operators from legal and reputational risk.
The Helen Diller Family Foundation
One of the first major funders publicly linked to Canary Mission, the Helen Diller Family Foundation, funnelled $100,000 in 2016 to Megamot Shalom.
This grant was routed through the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco and the Central Fund of Israel (CFI), allowing the foundation to receive a U.S. tax deduction for what was, in effect, a foreign political expenditure.
Sanford Diller, the foundation’s founder, was a major Trump donor and supporter of Islamophobic organisations such as the American Freedom Law Centre and Stop Islamization of America, both flagged by the ADL for bigotry.
The Diller Foundation later distanced itself from Canary Mission following media backlash, pledging not to renew its support and condemning “ideologies associated with sinat chinam (baseless hatred).”
The Central Fund of Israel (CFI)
CFI is a New York-based nonprofit operated by Jay Marcus, a settler from the illegal West Bank settlement of Efrat.
The organisation acts as a financial clearinghouse, enabling tax-exempt U.S. donations to be rerouted to Israeli groups, including:
Megamot Shalom (i.e., Canary Mission)
Settler organisations like Lehava, which has led chants of “Death to Arabs”
In 2022, 19 rabbis signed a letter to one of the Central Fund’s key supporters, the New York-based Jewish Communal Fund, protesting the donations. But they were rebuffed.
CFI’s setup provides legal and financial cover: donors claim deductions in the U.S., while funds ultimately finance surveillance, doxxing, and blacklisting operations abroad.
Jewish Community Foundation of Los Angeles
Facilitated a $250,000 anonymous donation to Megamot Shalom.
Operates over $1.3 billion in assets, heavily tilted toward right-wing pro-Israel organisations.
Notably rejected a $5,000 donation from philanthropist Lisa Greer to the anti-occupation group IfNotNow, suggesting an institutional bias against progressive Jewish activism.
Adam Milstein
A convicted tax felon and high-profile pro-Israel donor, Milstein was named in an Al Jazeera undercover documentary as the principal financier of Canary Mission.
In a hidden-camera conversation, Eric Gallagher, a former fundraising director for The Israel Project, stated that “Adam Milstein’s the guy who funds it.”
Milstein denied the allegation, claiming the video was selectively edited. However, his longstanding ties to Canary-aligned organisations and close association with the late multibillionaire Israel supporter Sheldon Adelson lend credibility to the claim.
Michael Leven
Former COO of Las Vegas Sands (owned by Sheldon Adelson), Leven contributed $50,000 to Canary Mission in 2021.
Though he initially withdrew support, stating the site was ineffective in reducing antisemitism, he resumed funding in 2023, as revealed in a New York Times interview.
Natan and Lidia Peisach Family Foundation
Donated $100,000 to Canary Mission in 2023.
The foundation’s treasurer, Jaime Peisach, is married to Cheryl Peisach, a trustee of the University of Pennsylvania, a university that Canary Mission has aggressively targeted.
The family has also donated over $1 million to UPenn, raising questions about internal conflicts of interest and donor complicity in undermining campus freedoms.
The Peisachs also signed public letters opposing Palestinian cultural events at UPenn and have close ties to groups like Friends of the IDF, which they funded with $180,000 in the same year.
Ann and Robert Fromer Charitable Foundation
Donated $20,000 in 2023 to Canary Mission via CFI.
Robert Fromer is a board member of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a think tank with deep influence over US foreign policy in the Middle East.
A pipeline between think tank influence and campus suppression strategies.
What impact does it leave on targets?
The consequences for those listed are profound:
Employment and Education: As per an investigation by The Polis Project, profiles often appear as top Google search results, sabotaging job prospects or academic admissions. Students have removed affiliations from CVs or avoided campus activism altogether to dodge profiling.
Legal and Immigration Trouble: As seen in the cases of Öztürk and Khalil, Canary Mission listings have been used to revoke visas or justify detentions, despite no criminal conduct.
Mental Health and Safety: Students report anxiety, PTSD, and fear of physical harm. Some have required counseling or gone into social media hibernation. For many, the listing becomes a lifelong scarlet letter.
Is Canary Mission novel?
Since the 1980s, pro-Israel advocacy groups have sought to influence how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is taught and discussed on campuses, and to stifle student activism in support of Palestinian rights. Over the years, they have launched a series of high-profile, defamatory attacks on educators and researchers in the field on sites such as:
Masada 2000 (“The Self-Hating, Israel-Threatening List”)
Free Middle East
In 2011, the Centre for American Progress published a comprehensive report on the links between such organizations and the rise of Islamophobia in the United States. In 2016, the David Horowitz Freedom Center (which, in choosing its targets, seems to rely on Canary Mission) put up posters at several university campuses depicting faculty and students as terrorists or supporters of terrorism.
Has Canary Mission faced pushback and condemnation?
The backlash against Canary Mission has been widespread:
Academic Leaders: Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of UC Berkeley Law, denounced the site in 2023, warning it was chilling campus speech. NYU, Michigan, and others have provided legal support to doxxed students.
Civil Rights Groups: Palestine Legal, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the ACLU have offered legal aid, challenged Canary Mission’s funders, and filed lawsuits like AAUP v. DHS to stop the U.S. government’s use of the site.
Jewish Organizations: Groups like J Street, Jewish Voice for Peace, and IfNotNow condemned the site. J Street called the Israeli government’s cooperation with Canary Mission “outrageous,” while progressive Jewish students formed coalitions with Students for Justice in Palestine chapters to resist its influence.
Legal Concerns: Experts argue that U.S. citizens funding Canary Mission may be violating laws against unregistered foreign lobbying. Calls have grown for oversight of U.S.-based charities like the Central Fund of Israel that act as pipelines for such activities.
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