Under the Radar, a U.S. Group Is Grooming Right-wing Judges Who Will Reshape Israel
Six U.S. Supreme Court justices were cultivated for their role by the same organization. Now its Israeli counterpart, financed by the New York-based Tikvah Fund, is operating along similar lines
A demonstration against Israel’s so-called reform, outside the Manhattan offices of the Tikvah Fund last month. The protest surprised supporters of the organization.Credit: Roi Boshi
Even if the judicial overhaul is canceled, Israel can expect more judges like Justice Alex Stein. Dr. Aviad Bakshi, head of the legal department of the conservative Kohelet Policy Forum think tank – and himself a possible candidate for the Supreme Court – described news of Stein’s appointment to the bench in 2018, during the period of Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, as “genuinely refreshing conservative tidings.”
One should note that despite the right-wing cries about a “lack of diversity” in the judiciary, Shaked injected a potent element of conservatism into the legal system when appointing a record number of 300 judges to lower courts – in addition to appointing four conservative or conservative-leaning justices to the Supreme Court, out of a total of six openings there during her tenure. However, she did have a hard time finding candidates for the top court who would serve her political agenda. Stein, for example, was an import from the United States.
Right-wing attorneys general in the United States encountered a problem of their own in the 1970s, when conservative justices displayed independence and voted, for example, in favor of women’s right to have an abortion. It turned out that some of those who had been considered judicially conservative didn’t always see eye to eye with the goals of the political movement that appointed them. A solution was found in the form of the Federalist Society, an organization that has been working for 40 years now to attract and cultivate right-wing candidates for the bench from their first day at law school, accompanying them all the way to the highest posts in the judicial realm.
This was a project that demanded a great deal of money and a large dose of forbearance, but which bore fruit within a relatively short period. Today, six of nine U.S. Supreme Court justices are past or present members of the Federalist Society. Five owe their position directly to the organization’s efforts – and all are actively advancing the goals of the Republican Party.
The Federalist Society also initiated and encouraged the establishment of a similar organization in Israel. The Israel Law and Liberty Forum, established in 2019 with the aid of then-future MK Simcha Rothman, has branches on four campuses: the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv University, Bar-Ilan University and Reichman University (formerly the Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya). Enjoying substantial funding from the New York-based Tikvah Fund, a conservative U.S. nonprofit foundation, the Law and Liberty Forum provides students with a parallel, in some cases quite different sort of legal education from what is offered in the usual law school curriculum, by means of courses, conferences and other activities. It also helps people it sees as outstanding ideologues to find internships and other posts after their studies and throughout their careers.
With long-term planning that sees years, if not decades, in advance, it is necessary to launch a serious and thorough probe of the activities of the Law and Liberty Forum now – while that organization is still in a nascent stage. Decades of activity on the part of the Federalist Society show the substantive shift an organization of this sort can effect in a supreme court. It’s not a question of whether the justices will be right-wing, but rather of whether they’ll be the shade of right the Forum wants to produce.
The answer lies in the organization that stands behind the Forum and the person who heads it. The Tikvah Fund, financed by the estate of the American investment manager Zalman C. Bernstein, was founded with the express purpose of inculcating conservative and Jewish values in Israel and the United States, by means of educational and other activities. However, after many years of philanthropic work – supporting institutions such as Beit Avi Chai and the Shalem Center (now Shalem College) in Jerusalem – the organization’s activity has taken a different tack in recent years. In addition to underwriting scholarships, conferences and research institutes, the Tikvah Fund now also supports groups, such as the Kohelet Policy Forum, that want to revamp society, by way of implanting American-style conservatism in Israel.
The Tikvah Fund is headed by Elliott Abrams, 75, whose name and face will be familiar to some Israelis. Abrams was a ranking figure in the Reagan and George W. Bush administrations and an adviser to President Donald Trump. He was appointed chairman of Tikvah’s board a year ago, after years of activity in the organization. Abrams had served as one of six members on its board, along with Mem Bernstein, the founder’s widow, and Prof. Moshe Koppel, chairman of the Kohelet Forum in Israel. Abrams – who is highly critical of the power of Israel’s judicial system and supports efforts to weaken it – is a member of the Federalist Society, serving on its Council on Foreign Relations. Plus, as people in Latin America know well, he has plenty of experience in helping to bring about regime change.
Back to Nicaragua
On December 11, 1981, a U.S.-trained unit of the El Salvador army raided a remote village called El Mozote. Survivors related that the troops raped women and girls, some as young as 10 years old, before murdering them. One eyewitness described how a 3-year-old boy was hurled into the air and skewered on a sharp object as he fell. More than 800 civilians were murdered that day.
The next day, Elliott Abrams took up his post in the administration of President Ronald Reagan as assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs – although he would eventually become identified with violations in those realms. A civil war was underway in El Salvador before Abrams took up his new post, and Washington was assisting the right-wing military junta, which accused its adversaries of being communists. The Reagan administration supplied the Salvadoran army with weapons and training for its armed forces, including those who perpetrated the massacre. According to New York Magazine, when news of the incident was publicized, Abrams came out in defense of the government in San Salvador, asserting that the reports were “unreliable” and part of an anti-American propaganda campaign.
Enjoying substantial funding from the New York-based Tikvah Fund, the Law and Liberty Forum provides students with a parallel, in some cases quite different legal education from what's offered by the law schools.
During his first year on the job, Abrams urged the administration to provide military aid to the Guatemalan dictator, Efrain Rios Montt, who was considered to be anti-communist. The weapons were used to kill opponents of the regime and to carry out what amounted to genocide until 1983. When the Cold War reached its peak during the Reagan years, Abrams advocated the hawkish, conservative view that the Soviet Union posed an acute threat and that any regime was preferable to a socialist one.
But the event with which Elliot Abrams is most closely identified, and which continues to tarnish his reputation, is what became known as the “Iran-Contra affair.” In the 1980s, the Reagan administration trained and armed an underground organization in Nicaragua that was fighting the socialist government there. When Congress barred those activities, administration officials devised a circuitous arrangement to keep the arrangement going. It involved the regime of the ayatollahs in Iran and also Israel’s government, which supplied funds to Nicaraguan rebels, aka the Contras, thereby breaking U.S. law. An investigation of the affair revealed that Abrams had lied to Congress twice; he admitted to this as part of a plea bargain, was sentenced to two years probation and community service, and was pardoned by President George H. Bush.
Abrams served early in the 2000s on President George W. Bush’s National Security Council, where he was one of the leading voices calling for “regime change” in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and in Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela. He also intervened in the Palestinian Authority after Hamas came to power in the Gaza Strip: According to documents published in Vanity Fair magazine in 2008, he, along with President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, arranged to supply weapons to the Fatah organization and thereby exacerbated tensions within the PA.
Under Donald Trump, a decade later, Abrams served as a special State Department representative for Venezuela and Iran. Social media reports about the process of his appointment went viral in the wake of a well-publicized clash with progressive Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar, in February 2019, in the House. After noting a number of incidents in which Abrams had supported regime change, Omar declared that he had never paid a price for any of his actions. “I fail to understand,” she said, “why members of this committee or the American people should find any testimony that you give today to be truthful.” Abrams, who could barely conceal his anger, tried to interrupt, but she retorted: “That wasn’t a question.” The exchange between them, which escalated, generated a storm on the web.
Abrams’ service under Trump was short and unproductive. Since then he has concentrated on writing articles for conservative journals, including on media sites run by the Tikvah Fund. As the latter’s chairman, his influence is strongly felt.
Job placement for lawyers
Last month, the protest in Israel against the government’s judicial “reform” reached the headquarters of the Tikvah Fund, in Manhattan. Some 200 Israelis carried signs bearing photographs of Abrams, Mem Bernstein and Eric Cohen, the organization’s executive director. One sign said: “Elliott Abrams doesn’t live in Israel, didn’t serve in the army, doesn’t know a single Kaveret song and never saw [the iconic film] ‘Halfon Hill’ – he is funding by remote control a regime coup in Israel.”
For many American Jews involved in the Fund, which they believe focuses on educational issues, the protest outside the Fund’s offices was a surprise. Cohen lost no time emailing supporters, writing: “We were greeted at our office by a small band of angry protesters committed to disrupting our work. They screamed ‘SHAME’ in our faces.”
The Tikvah Fund, created as a philanthropic organization that promotes Jewish, conservative educational endeavors, does in fact collaborate with respected U.S. and Israeli institutions of higher learning, as well as with leading members of the politically conservative American Jewish community. According to internal documents, about 3,500 young people have signed up for the organization’s “Online Academy” programs and seminars since 2020, and over 4,600 people have donated to the Fund since 2021. However, it appears that many of its American donors did not understand exactly where their money was going.
Cohen, the executive director, insisted in his email last month that “Tikvah is an educational institution, committed to the belief that serious ideas improve democratic discourse and that educated citizens are indispensable for democratic life – in America, in Israel and around the world.” He added that, at a time when education is tending to go “so strongly in one ideological direction, it is healthy to offer courses, essays, books, and podcasts that offer a different perspective.”
The Tikvah Fund’s activity has extended far beyond the philanthropic world in recent years. While operating for more than two decades from Manhattan, it was only two years ago that it registered in Israel as a company for the public’s benefit, headed by local representatives, among them its director general, Amiad Cohen, and Prof. Koppel, who also chairs the Kohelet Policy Forum. They and other people involved in the Tikvah Fund are now seeking to foment deep structural upheavals in the Israeli judiciary. An organization that donated about 3.7 million shekels (about $1 million) over the years to the Kohelet Forum is not just an “educational institution.”
Funding the Kohelet Forum is apparently not part of the mandate the Tikvah Fund has received from the American Jews who work with and/or donate to it. Moreover, such activity poses questions about the communication gaps among members of the organization’s top ranks. For one thing, the goal to “promote conservative education” in Israel, but ostensibly in the liberal spirit of the United States, is not in keeping with Amiad Cohen’s recent trip to Hungary. After meeting with the prime minister, Viktor Orban, the latter tweeted, “Building a conservative community is a tough job… I had the chance today to compare notes with Amiad Cohen on this noble mission.” Cohen shared the tweet, berated the Israeli left for its fears of “going the way of Hungary” and related that he “met with heads of research institutes and universities in order to understand in depth the reforms that have been introduced there. Complex, interesting article to follow soon.” That was in January; since then his Twitter account has been silent.
It is Amiad Cohen, and not Eric Cohen, who is actually orchestrating the work of the Tikvah Fund in Israel. His deputy, Aylana Meisel-Diamant, an activist in conservative circles in the U.S., who started out working abroad for the Fund, is now chair of the Israel Law and Liberty Forum – the local version of the Federalist Society. The Forum, the jewel in the crown of the Tikvah Fund, seeks out young people who are about to begin their legal studies in order to provide them with an “alternative” education, by various means, beginning as early as possible and in some cases throughout their years of work.
The work of the Law and Liberty Forum is hard to detect for two reasons. First, it is intended to reap dividends only years or even decades down the line, and thus it is impossible to point to any achievements it has chalked up so far. And second, anyone who attends the events it organizes on Israeli campuses these days will discover a cordial group that organizes talks for students by such figures as Justice Alex Stein and provides books about American law.
However, none of this is indicative of the organization’s declared goals, derived from the Federalist Society model. Like Facebook, the Law and Liberty Forum does in fact contribute to its members by creating and funding “a community.” That’s useful for networking and forging connections among conservative jurists, but development of said community is not the real purpose or essence of the Forum (or, for that matter, of the Federalist Society it cooperates with) – nor is it an incentive for the Tikvah Fund to invest in it.
For its part, the Federalist Society became known within a few short years, in practical terms, as a job-placement firm for the best and brightest. Today it acts as an exclusive agent for hooking up lawyers with Republican officials and politicians, even presidents. A right-wing legal eagle seeking a high position in the American judiciary knows the Federalists are the gatekeepers. Indeed, the organization tries to find young adults who are interested in studying law, on U.S. campuses, cultivates the most ideologically conservative ones, and assists them with money, connections and clout thereafter. One example exemplifies this vividly: When the results of the 2000 election in the United States were contested, the Bush campaign asked the Federalists to send over their best lawyers for consultation. Three had clerked in the Supreme Court and today are among its members: Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Back in 2000 they were available to the Federalist Society.
Kavanaugh and Barrett are prime examples of lawyers whose entire careers have been boosted by the Federalist Society, and have also behaved with extreme caution. The organization knows that the political-judicial appointment process is a complicated one: Accordingly, Kavanaugh and Barrett, both law school lecturers, were careful not to supply ammunition to progressive lawmakers in the form of provocative statements or publications. In addition, Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization – which overturned the right to an abortion – was especially meticulous in pursuing the same strategy. An investigation by The New Yorker revealed that at the time of Alito’s appointment to the Supreme Court, at the age of 56, even colleagues who had worked with him for decades were surprised to find how radical his ideas were.
Decades of activity on the part of the Federalist Society show the substantive shift an organization like the Law and Liberty Forum can effect in a supreme court.
Internal documents of the Tikvah Fund show that the Law and Liberty Forum is pursuing the same goals as the Federalist Society: “creating a community of students, lawyers, policy makers and judges who believe in the basic principles of a free society. We wanted to create a network – even a movement – of people interested in these ideas, and a pipeline of talent into key positions in Israeli government and for key appointments to the Israeli courts.”
In a Haaretz interview in 2020, the executive director of the Law and Liberty Forum, Yonatan (Johnny) Green, maintained that the appointment of certain judges is “not the goal” of his organization, and compared its work to that of the Federalist Society. “[The Forum] has acquired the reputation of being a manipulator of judgeship appointments. That is certainly not what we want to do,” Green said, “and I am also very sure that it’s not what the Federalists are doing. But when you become, de facto, the house organization of conservative jurists, one outcome is that, during the search for conservatives in the judicial system – let’s say a senior appointment – they will turn to you first. That’s all it means.”
The Manhattan project
The Law and Liberty Forum is indeed adopting the methods of its big sister in the United States. For its part, the Federalist Society has made it clear that it can also supply judges with different types of Republican-oriented, conservative outlooks. For example, when Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump contacted the co-chair of the Federalist Society, Leonard Leo, for help, he provided them with names of legal figures whom he had cultivated based on his worldview as a pious Catholic who opposes abortions, taxes and regulation. The Law and Liberty Forum, however, is not an independent body. Meisel-Diamant is the chair, but she is also the deputy of Amiad Cohen, and both are subordinate to Elliott Abrams. The Tikvah Fund has thus taken on the task of helping to screen and groom judges in Israel. The big question today is what type of judges they hope to get appointed.
Prof. Daniel Friedmann, a former Israeli justice minister and a member of the Law and Liberty Forum’s advisory board, explained to students at Tel Aviv in one of the Forum’s early gatherings: “I don’t know how diverse the material you get from your teachers is; to what extent it expresses different approaches; to what degree you see only material written by your own lecturers or by people who share the same views they have; or whether you are given materials of other kinds. I would be very happy if this Forum enables you to see materials of a sort that I’m not sure are given _expression_ as part of the regular law school curriculum.”
An examination of the activity of the Law and Liberty Forum shows is revealing: Budding law students are invited to attend a preparatory course given by Prof. Gideon Sapir – one of the founders of the Kohelet Policy Forum, who has been mooted as its candidate for the Supreme Court – which apparently encourages suspiciousness of liberal lecturers. Students accepted to the course receive a scholarship of 3,000 shekels ($830). In addition, there is also a separate academic program for a chosen few, held in the summer. In general these frameworks allow the aspiring lawyers to hobnob with judges and lawmakers who may help them in their future careers.
Besides Sapir, other lecturers provided by the Law and Liberty Forum, whose names appear on its official website, include Ran Baratz, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s former head of public diplomacy and media in the Prime Minister’s Office; MK Rothman, chairman of the Knesset’s Justice Committee and a former lawyer for the Tikvah Fund before being elected to the Knesset; Gil Bringer, who advised Justice Minister Shaked in her search for judges; and a member of the Forum’s advisory board, Prof. Talia Einhorn, who last month drew considerable attention after asserting that “a democratic state does not need gatekeepers. For that, we have elections.” The dean of the summer seminar run by the Forum is Prof. Avi Bell, who, when recently asked by a TV interviewer, “Who sent you?” angrily replied: “The Holy One, blessed be He.”
For his part, Elliot Abrams, the hard-line conservative and proud Federalist, makes no secret of his criticism of the Israeli judicial system. He has written about and given interviews on the subject extensively, at times reiterating his longtime support for the Americanization of foreign countries. He initially plunged into the current Israeli political morass in a Tikvah Fund podcast in January, accusing the opponents of Rothman and Justice Minister Yariv Levin of being “hysterical” and the protest leaders of being “irresponsible.” He castigated the masses of opponents of the so-called judicial reform in Israel – including ordinary citizens, prominent economists, Israeli army reservists and leaders of countries that are Israel’s allies, such as the United States. Abrams also leveled criticism at liberals, among them apparently American Jews, asserting that they don’t know how to lose. Netanyahu’s coalition, he added, “is a smack in the face for Americans on the left, who don’t want to see the right come to power in Israel.”
Following the demonstration by Israelis outside the Tikvah Fund’s headquarters last month, Abrams and Eric Cohen fired off another email to the organization’s supporters. This time they revised their message, noting that they support “judicial reform” but also the effort now underway that is “seeking a prudent compromise that restores unity and civility within Israeli society.” But later, when the dust settles, the Tikvah Fund will still be there to provide the Israeli right with a production line for appointing “our kind” of judges.
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