As a reader-funded independent news outlet, we operate free from the influence of governments, advertisers, and corporate backers. This is essential to our mission: to report on what matters most, beholden only to the truth. In that spirit, we made a commitment to ensure that our journalism is free for everyone, not locked behind a paywall. But that means we rely on the voluntary support of our community of readers. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation to support our work today.
Subscribe now
Pro-Palestine protesters demonstrate against the arrest of student activist Mahmoud Khalil and call for an end to U.S. support of Israel, in Los Angeles, California on March 29, 2025. Photo by ALI MATIN/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images.
The pro-Israel doxxing site Canary Mission has been notoriously secretive since its creation in 2015. The anonymous website, which began as an online blacklist targeting academics and activists who expressed pro-Palestine views, over the last year has been used by the Trump administration to select international students for arrest, detention, and deportation. Despite its increasingly high profile, the website’s operators have remained largely unknown.
In January, Drop Site reported on unlisted websites used by Canary Mission to plan and execute its doxxing operation and was able to confirm that the site is operated in Israel. The unlisted website data revealed that an employee paid by the Israeli nonprofit Megamot Shalom as a writer provided content for Canary Mission’s dossiers of targets, confirming earlier reporting by The Forward that Megamot Shalom’s only known activity appears to be providing support to Canary Mission.
Drop Site has now identified five more people whom Megamot Shalom has employed as content writers, editors, and consultants. These individuals—Elihu David Stone, Yehuda HaKohen, Abigail Bornstein, Aharon Dikel, and Alexander Malbin Duncan—were identified through a review of Megamot Shalom’s business filings with the Israeli government from 2016 to 2024, where they were listed as the nonprofit’s highest-paid employees. They are all Americans who moved to Israel and are connected to one another and individuals reported to be involved with Canary Mission.
None of the individuals identified by Drop Site responded to requests for comment. Drop Site is not publishing the names of two other individuals listed in Magamot Shalom’s filings because additional identifying details were not publicly available.
The Canary Mission website was launched in the spring of 2015; Megamot Shalom was incorporated in late 2015 and made its first filing in 2016. A series of reports by The Forward in 2018 uncovered evidence that Megamot Shalom was formed as the entity running Canary Mission’s operations by a UK-born businessman named Jonathan Bash, who now lives in Jerusalem.
Bash and Megamot Shalom did not respond to requests for comment.
Drop Site’s previous investigation confirmed that Megamot Shalom appears to run Canary Mission, with non-public websites revealing staging material for Canary Mission’s website showing that someone uploading content for a dossier of a pro-Palestine activist on the site matched the name of a person listed as a content writer on Megamot Shalom’s business listing, a UK-born writer named Alex Ben Carson, now living in Jerusalem.
Megamot Shalom’s filings reveal that it receives millions from overseas donors, including funds from major American nonprofits that were earmarked for Canary Mission on their tax filings, another indication that Megamot operates the website. American donations are moved to Megamot via a New York-based nonprofit called the Central Fund of Israel. Drop Site previously uncovered ties between Bash and a New York interior design business that shares an address with the Central Fund of Israel.
The American Israelis who appear to be providing content for Canary Mission’s operations via Megamot Shalom come from all over the U.S., and have been involved in American organizations like settler nonprofits, the Wexner Foundation, and Israeli groups with reported ties to the Israeli government such as the legal nonprofit Shurat HaDin.
A number of the Megamot Shalom content writers are also associated with Aish HaTorah, a Jewish Orthodox educational nonprofit based in Jerusalem to which Bash, some his family members, and other Megamot Shalom board members have longstanding ties.
The Wexner Fellow
Elihu David Stone appears in the Megamot Shalom government fillings every year from 2016 through 2024, in a section that lists the organization’s five highest paid employees. His title is given as content writer or content editor, depending on the year, and his top annual compensation was about $80,000 (236,682 shekels), which made him the highest paid employee for five years.
An Elihu David Stone originally from Boston and now living in Israel has previously written pro-Israel content for outlets like The Times of Israel. Stone shared Canary Mission posts on his Facebook account and is connected on social media with two other highly paid Megamot Shalom content writers identified by Drop Site.
Stone did not respond to requests for comment.
A lawyer and life insurance broker who “served in leadership roles for a variety of Jewish communal organizations,” Stone relocated to Efrat, Israel in 2017.
Stone has been involved in nonprofit and advocacy work since the 1990s, when he was selected as one of the 1992 Wexner Heritage Program fellows. Stone stayed involved with Wexner, attending an alumni retreat in 1994 and writing for the group’s website several times, most recently in 2017. The Wexner Heritage fellowship program was funded by the Wexner Foundation at the time, which by then had already appointed late sex offender and financier Jeffrey Epstein as a trustee. The foundation described the Heritage program as designed to “strengthen Jewish community leaders by making educational resources and experienced clergy and faculty available to selected Jewish communities, allowing the intensive study of biblical text, history, philosophy and law.”
(There is no indication that Stone has any connection to Epstein aside from their shared affiliations with the Wexner Foundation.)
Stone penned a dozen blog posts for The Times of Israel from 2013 until 2023. In a 2023 post for a Wexner Foundation blog he discussed his life in Israel and interactions with Palestinians: “I have cordial relations with the Palestinian Arabs building my home. We talk about religion, but not politics. We shop at the Gush Etzion Junction Rami-Levy supermarket, where on any given day many hundreds of Palestinian Arabs and Jews of numerous stripes and descriptions work together and shop together. It’s hardly all sweetness and light, but Israel—including Yehuda and Shomron—is no ‘apartheid state.’ The briefest visit to the Jerusalem malls or hospitals where Jews and Arabs work, shop, and heal together bears testament to that.”
In a March Facebook post, Stone mocked reports that American influencers were being paid $7,000 per pro-Israel post. “I’m not sure what to be more worried about: The mind virus that has gripped so many who were once rational and thoughtful, or the fact that I have yet to be paid a single installment of seven thousand dollars or - anything at All- for anything have posted in support of Israel. The world is SO unfair,” he wrote.
In February he shared a Canary Mission post on Facebook about The Young Turks podcast, writing “antisemitism is a virus […] see what it does to people?”
The “Post-Zionist” Rabbi
Yehuda HaKohen, a well-known Israeli settler and rabbi originally from New York, appears as one of Megamot Shalom’s highest-paid employees in 2016 and 2017 and is friends with Stone on Facebook. HaKohen is listed as a “content consultant,” earning roughly $14,500 (43,494 shekels) for part of 2016 and $57,000 (169,657 shekels) in 2017.
Born Jason Weisbrod in New York, HaKohen joined the Jewish Defense League after graduating from a Manhattan preparatory school, and then moved to Israel in 2001 and enlisted in the IDF, according to a 2020 profile.
HaKohen has been involved with other pro-Israel campus outreach groups, including another group led by Jonathan Bash called Video Activism. A 2016 promotional video for the group-–that includes the tagline, “Want to fight for Israel and build your resume?”—shows HaKohen sitting with Bash on a panel.
HaKohen did not respond to requests for comment.
Writer Josephine Riesman spent several months with HaKohen in 2020, exploring his enigmatic views that mixed some seemingly leftist and progressive ideas with Israeli nationalism. HaKohen called himself a “post-Zionist” but lived in West Bank settlement Beit-El. According to Riesman, HaKohen held classes in Jerusalem that were funded via the Central Fund of Israel, the same American nonprofit that donations to Canary Mission are earmarked through.
The New York Lawyer
In Megamat Shalom’s 2020 filings, a new writer appeared among the top five highest paid employees section. Abigail Bornstein was paid $46,400 (139,000 shekels) for “content writing.”
An Abigail Kazhdan Bornstein living in Jerusalem is connected on Facebook to several people known to have worked with Canary Mission, including two Bash associates whose names and emails were reportedly used for early Canary Mission social media accounts. Several Facebook posts from her husband were liked by Aish HaTorah consultant Todd Rosenblatt, who previously worked for Bash at Video Activism, and whose email was reportedly used as the recovery email for the Canary Mission Facebook account when hackers accessed it in 2015. Another Bash associate who engages with Bornstein’s husband on Facebook is Betzalel Lapidus. When Canary Mission first launched in 2015, links on the website meant to direct to the group’s Twitter profile pointed instead to Lapidus’s personal Twitter page. Lapidus was also involved with Video Activism.
On LinkedIn, Bornstein lists her job since 2014 as social media manager for Shurat HaDin, or the Israel Law Center, a Tel Aviv-based organization known for aggressive litigation accusing individuals and companies—including John Kerry, Hilary Clinton, President Jimmy Carter, and Facebook—of supporting terrorism. Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, the group’s founder, described in a 2017 book how she worked directly with Mossad to choose the group’s legal targets. A 2007 U.S. embassy cable published by Wikileaks also detailed the group’s activities.
Bornstein’s husband was involved with Aish HaTorah in Jerusalem and founded an Israeli peer-to-peer fundraising platform called CauseMatch that is used for a range of pro-Israel fundraising efforts, and that has been cited in a UK complaint about donations to Israeli soldiers fighting in Gaza.
Bornstein and Shurat HaDin did not respond to requests for comment.
The DC Emigrés
Aharon Dikel is listed as Megamot’s social media manager in 2016 and 2017, though the group, unlike Canary Mission, has no public social media presence or publicly known work output. Dikel earned about $59,500 (177,966 shekels) in 2017, making him the highest listed earner that year. In 2016, Megamot reported partial year earnings for Dikel of $9,400 (28,142 shekels).
An Aharon or Aaron Dikel working as a social media manager and living in Israel interacts with Elihu Stone and Yehuda HaKohen on Facebook. Dikel attended the University of Maryland, where he was involved with campus group Hillel. He grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, before moving to Israel in 2002 and joining the Israeli military.
Dikel says on his LinkedIn profile that he was voted top soldier in his military unit: “The year I made Aliyah I went into the IDF as an infantry soldier in the Shimshon brigade. In spite of the new language and culture I became friends with everyone. My Hebrew was still very basic, but I put all of my heart into helping the team achieve.”
In March 2024, he wrote “I see two differences between the anti-Semitism of today versus the anti-Semitism during the time of the Holocaust. 1) Today Jews have a State and and a military and more ability to defend themselves 2) Anti-Semitism is way more pervasive today than during the time of the Holocaust
But the writing’s on the wall and it’s time for all of the Jewish people left in the diaspora to try to get home now. Let me know if you need help.”
In 2023, he noted that he finished his reserve military service five years earlier, which coincides with the time period he was employed by Megamot Shalom.
Dikel did not respond to requests for comment.
Alexander Malbin Duncan, another highly paid Megamot employee, also appears to be from Bethesda, Maryland. The filings list Duncan as a content writer from 2019 through 2024. Duncan earned $95,500 (285,981 shekels) in 2024.
An Alexander Malbin Duncan—living in Jerusalem, originally from Bethesda, Maryland—and his wife interact with Jonathan Bash’s wife and relatives of Elihu Stone on social media.
Duncan attended Johns Hopkins University, then briefly worked as a reporter for a trade publication covering nuclear weapons, and registered a domain for writing work, according to a review of public records and his known emails.
Duncan did not respond to requests for comment.
Canary Mission’s dossiers were used by the Department of Homeland Security in 2025 to build lists of foreign students who expressed pro-Palestine views, with over 75 people identified based on Canary Mission’s anonymous blacklists, according to deposition testimony by DHS officials in a federal lawsuit filed by the American Association of University Professors and the Middle East Studies Association. In January, a federal judge ruled in favor of the plaintiffs and said the case revealed an “unconstitutional conspiracy” to violate the First Amendment.
The State Department, Homeland Security, and the Department of Justice did not respond to requests for comment.
In February,a coalition of 70 American religious and civil rights organizations demanded that the Department of Justice open a Foreign Agents Registration Act investigation into Canary Mission, based on Drop Site’s previous reporting indicating the group’s operations are based in Israel.
“If this Justice Department will not act to protect Americans from the Israeli government and its agents,” said the Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR), “it must at least stop using Canary’s blacklists to target college kids and state attorney generals should open their own investigation.”
“It’s not surprising but ironic that this group would use opaque and evasive tactics to hide who they are,” Christina Abraham, who directs CAIR-Chicago’s Litigation Clinic, told Drop Site.
“The fact that there’s a foreign interest behind Canary Mission,” added Abraham, who tracks the consequences of Canary Mission’s doxxing operation, “means a lot of Americans would be concerned now more than ever. It absolutely does not make sense that our government would listen to sources like this, people with an extremist agenda, saying they openly want to use intimidation tactics to suppress our free speech.”
Leave a comment
Share
From Drop Site News via This RSS Feed.
