The aggressor country, Russia, organized anti-Semitic attacks in the West and established a hidden network of influence in Israel. This is stated in an investigation by OCCRP with the participation of the Israeli publication Shomrim.
Documents show that the organizer of the operations was high-ranking Kremlin official Sofya Zakharova, who defined their goal as creating “cognitive vulnerabilities” in Western countries in order to weaken and destabilize them.
The key documented action was Operation Green Synagogues, where the Kremlin staged an attack on a synagogue and Holocaust memorial in Paris in 2024. Serbian citizens were hired to carry out operations in Western Europe, who doused the Holocaust Museum and several synagogues in France with green paint, and placed plastic pigs' heads at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin near the Holocaust memorial as a deliberate anti-Semitic provocation.
The perpetrators were detained, and later a court in Paris stated that the purpose of the actions was to “incite religious and national intolerance” between Jews and Muslims, as well as to “destabilize” Germany and France.
At the same time, the Russian Federation was building an agent network of influence inside Israel, the investigation says. According to the leak, Zakharova’s circle, together with the Russian PR company SDA, was developing a plan to create a fictitious “research institute” in Israel that would hire local scientists and intellectuals to shape the narratives the Kremlin needs in society. The budget for the first six months of the structure’s operation included $125 thousand, the selection of three Israeli co-founders and the rental of offices in Haifa. There is no evidence in the documents that the institute was actually created.
