Israel Files: The Architecture of Impunity

Freddie Ponton
21st Century Wire

For more than a decade, Israeli officials have warned of an alleged international campaign to “delegitimise” the Jewish state. The accusation has been repeated so often that it has hardened into dogma. A new investigation dubbed “Israel Files” reveals what this rhetoric was designed to obscure: not a besieged democracy acting in good faith, but a state that has deliberately organised the dismantling of international justice to preserve a regime of permanent domination over Palestinians.

The documents uncovered by French investigative media outlet Mediapart and the European Investigative Collaborations (EIC) network, more than two million internal emails, memos, contracts, and legal notes from the Israeli Ministry of Justice, expose a state strategy that treats law not as a constraint on power, but as a weapon to neutralise it. Courts are no longer arenas of accountability. They are battlefields to be captured, delayed, or rendered ineffective.

This is not a legal defence strategy; it is nothing short of a state-engineered impunity.

IMAGE: “Israel Files”: Israeli authorities’ paid lobbying against the boycott in France (Mediapart)

Institutionalising Lawfare to Shield Colonial Power
A Ministry of Justice Reconfigured to Protect a Colonial Regime

In 2010, under the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel quietly created a specialised structure within its Ministry of Justice dedicated to managing what officials internally described as strategic legal threats abroad. Its mission was never debated in parliament. Its existence was barely acknowledged publicly. Yet its mandate was sweeping: to ensure that Israeli officials, soldiers, and state-linked corporations would never face prosecution outside Israel.

According to the leaked documents, this department did not function like a conventional legal office. It operated as a cross-institutional command centre, coordinating legal action with diplomatic services, security agencies, and political networks. It mapped foreign judicial systems, identified “hostile” jurisdictions, monitored human rights organisations, and tracked individual judges and prosecutors involved in cases concerning Israel.

Lawsuits were not answered; they were preempted. The department anticipated legal action months or years in advance and mobilised external law firms before complaints were even filed. Its objective was not to win cases on the merits, but to ensure that cases never reached substance.

This logic, smothering justice at birth, defines the entire strategy.

The unit was staffed and overseen by senior legal figures drawn from Israel’s military-legal ecosystem. These were not neutral jurists. They were architects of the very doctrines used to justify bombardments of Gaza, targeted assassinations, mass civilian harm, and the permanent expansion of illegal settlements.

The same legal culture that rationalised occupation at home was now being exported abroad.

International law, in this framework, was not something to be respected. It was something to be managed, diluted, and ultimately neutralised.

Crushing Accountability and Criminalising Solidarity in Europe
Universal Jurisdiction: A Threat to Impunity That Had to Be Destroyed

Among all legal principles, none alarmed Israeli officials more than universal jurisdiction — the idea that certain crimes are so grave that any court may prosecute them when domestic systems refuse to act. Born from the ashes of World War II, universal jurisdiction exists precisely to prevent powerful states from insulating themselves from accountability.

For Israel, this principle represented an existential legal threat.

Internal communications reveal an almost obsessive focus on dismantling universal jurisdiction across Europe. Spain, Belgium, France, and the United Kingdom appear repeatedly in the documents as sites of concern. Each had, at various moments, allowed cases to be filed against Israeli officials for alleged war crimes linked to military operations in Gaza or policies in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Rather than address the substance of these allegations, Israel chose to attack the legal architecture itself.

Elite law firms were hired to challenge admissibility, procedural standing, and jurisdiction at the earliest possible stage. Prosecutors were pressured through diplomatic channels. Governments were lobbied to amend their laws. Where necessary, political leverage was deployed to restrict or hollow out universal jurisdiction statutes.
This was not advocacy. It was systematic judicial sabotage.

The strategy worked. Over time, universal jurisdiction was weakened across Europe. Cases were dismissed, shelved, or allowed to expire. Victims were denied hearings not because their claims lacked evidence, but because justice was deliberately obstructed.

What the documents make clear is that this was not accidental or reactive. It was planned, coordinated, and resourced at the highest levels of the Israeli state.

Behind the Curtain: The Covert Operations of Israel’s Legal Apparatus

The Israel Files leak does more than reveal strategy: it exposes real operations, concrete interventions, and the human impact of Israel’s legal war. At the heart of the scandal lies a shadowy unit within the Israeli Ministry of Justice, created in 2010 to preemptively manage legal threats abroad. Staffed by former military jurists — architects of doctrines justifying bombings in Gaza, extrajudicial killings, and the expansion of illegal settlements, this department operated like a highly trained legal commando unit, tasked with safeguarding impunity.

The leaked documents reveal how this apparatus intervened in European courts with surgical precision. One example concerns France in 2018. The French Ministry of Economy had ordered that products originating from Israeli settlements be explicitly labelled, a seemingly technical measure with enormous implications. For Israel, the ruling threatened to establish a binding European precedent challenging the legality of settlements. On November 12, 2019, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) upheld European legislation imposing specific labelling on products from Israeli settlements located in the territories….The Ministry’s special affairs department moved swiftly, lobbying plaintiffs such as the Psagot winery to withdraw their complaints and framing potential judgments as a “national security risk” for Israel. Eventually, the French government backs down on the labelling of Israeli settlement products.

In Spain, the department’s influence extended to shielding military officials accused of war crimes. In 2009, a criminal case targeted Defence Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer and six senior officers for their alleged role in the killing of 14 civilians, including children, in Gaza. Through behind-the-scenes pressure and legal manoeuvring, the investigation was quietly shelved, leaving victims without recourse.

The Netherlands also witnessed similar interventions. A company implicated in constructing the West Bank separation wall, Riwal, had a case against it dismissed by the Dutch Public Prosecutor, following coordinated lobbying from Israeli state actors, highlighting how corporate actors in the occupation were shielded from accountability.

Beyond corporate and military protection, the department tracked and defended dual-national soldiers in multiple jurisdictions, covering legal expenses while crafting pre-emptive arguments to justify army actions under international law. The scale of their ambition becomes clear when the leaks suggest that the unit effectively delayed a full ICC investigation for nearly a decade, manipulating international judicial mechanisms to Israel’s advantage.

The Israel Files also reveal the crucial role of private actors in this global legal offensive. At the heart of Europe’s lawfare network stood Van Bael & Bellis, a Brussels-based law firm that served as Israel’s “interlocutor privilégié” for BDS-related cases. Over several years, the firm provided strategic memorandums, legal analyses, and lobbying guidance across multiple jurisdictions, from the United Kingdom to the Netherlands, Ireland, the United States, Japan, Spain, and France. It monitored activist campaigns, anticipated legislative threats, and coordinated with local law firms and embassies to neutralise challenges before they could gain traction. The leaked documents even recount incidents as minute as a Brussels Airlines halva snack, which triggered immediate legal advisories from the firm to the Israeli embassy, illustrating the department’s obsession with controlling Israel’s image at every possible level. Between 2016 and 2020, Israel paid at least €650,000 to Van Bael & Bellis, including long-form memorandums of up to 67 pages, while contracts and coordination extended at least until 2026, demonstrating that this was not a series of ad hoc interventions, but a decades-long, meticulously orchestrated campaign to shield occupation, apartheid, and settler-colonial policies from accountability.

The Israel Files reveal that the Israeli Department of Special Affairs did not limit its operations to Europe; it also targeted the International Criminal Court (ICC), claiming credit for delaying a Palestinian-requested investigation into war crimes in Gaza by ten years. The department maintained a “constant presence” in The Hague, lobbied key figures, and engaged in discreet negotiations with the ICC, buying Israel crucial time before the investigation was formally opened in 2021. Its interference extended to Europe, where it secretly controlled legal representation in cases involving Israeli-linked companies, such as the Dutch firm Four Winds, whose dogs were used by the Israeli army to maim Palestinian children. Lawyers representing victims later discovered that those they were negotiating with were, in fact, agents of the Israeli state, highlighting the department’s opaque and manipulative reach into international and domestic legal proceedings.

The most recent Israel Files emails, dating to spring 2023, reveal that the Department of Special Affairs remains a central pillar of Israel’s state machinery, even amid domestic unrest and global condemnation. Staff and affiliated foreign lawyers express distress over massive protests against Netanyahu’s government and the rise of far-right forces, yet there is no acknowledgement of their role in empowering the political currents now challenging them. Following the October 7, 2023 attacks and Israel’s subsequent assault on Gaza, the department’s influence only intensified, coordinating responses to a surge of legal scrutiny abroad. Meanwhile, the Israeli military flagrantly disregards international law, leaving courts inactive, while the department continues to vigorously defend the legality of state actions, maintaining its long-standing mission of shielding occupation and violence from accountability.

These few examples transform the abstract notion of “lawfare” into tangible human and judicial consequences. Courts were not just influenced; they were subverted, processes stalled, and cases neutralised before justice could ever reach the accused. The operation was precise, persistent, and unapologetically ambitious:

It is the story of a foreign state engineering the erosion of legal accountability across Europe.

In exposing these operations, the Israel Files grant a rare, unflinching glimpse into a systematic effort to weaponise law itself as a tool of oppression, a machinery designed to defend not democracy, but an apartheid and settler-colonial order.

France: Turning the Law Against Solidarity

France occupies a central place in the Israel Files because it became a testing ground for legal repression, particularly against the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

BDS posed a unique problem for Israeli authorities. It was non-violent. It was grounded in international law. And it explicitly framed Israeli policies as apartheid, a characterisation later echoed by major human rights organisations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

Israel did not attempt to defeat BDS politically. It attempted to criminalise it.

According to Mediapart, the Israeli government channelled substantial public funds into French law firms selected for their expertise in criminal law, extradition, and strategic litigation. These firms did not merely defend Israeli interests in court; they became operational partners in a state campaign to suppress political expression.

IMAGE: “Israel Files”: the windfall from the legal war waged in France by Israel (Mediapart)

French courts were encouraged to reinterpret calls for boycott, a classic form of political speech, as criminal discrimination. Activists were prosecuted, fined, and subjected to years of legal harassment. Solidarity with Palestinians was transformed into a legal liability. This repression was not an aberration of French law. It was the result of sustained foreign pressure intersecting with domestic political choices. ( Baldassi and Others v. France (application no. 15271/16))

When the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled in 2020 that such convictions violated freedom of expression, the decision threatened to unravel this entire strategy. Internal Israeli communications, cited in the investigation, describe the ruling as a major setback.

The objective remained unchanged, keep BDS legally vulnerable.

The response was revealing. Rather than respect the judgment, Israeli officials sought ways to circumvent it without openly defying it. Alternative legal avenues were explored: civil lawsuits, administrative sanctions, and reputational warfare.

Lobbying, Proxies, and the Mask of Denial

One of the most disturbing aspects of the Israel Files is the way Israeli state action was deliberately obscured behind networks of proxies.

Organisations claiming to represent Jewish communities were repeatedly mobilised to relay Israeli legal and political positions, pressure lawmakers, and attack activists. This allowed Israeli authorities to maintain plausible deniability while exercising significant influence over European legal and political debates.

The documents make clear that this was not a spontaneous mobilisation. It was a coordinated strategy.

In effect, a foreign state intervened directly in European judicial and political processes to silence a non-violent human rights movement. The implications for democratic sovereignty are profound, yet largely unacknowledged by European institutions.

Europe’s Complicity and the Lawfare Defence of Apartheid
Why Accountability Terrifies the Israeli State

The scale and intensity of Israel’s legal war raise an unavoidable question: why go to such lengths?

The answer lies in what accountability would expose.

Independent courts, if allowed to function, could scrutinise Israel’s settlement enterprise, its blockade of Gaza, its repeated large-scale assaults on civilian populations (genocide), and its system of institutionalised discrimination. These are no longer marginal accusations. They are documented by UN bodies, international courts, and Israeli human rights organisations themselves.

Recent developments at the International Court of Justice, including advisory findings that Israel’s occupation is illegal and characterised by systemic discrimination, have only heightened this threat. At the International Criminal Court, prosecutors have sought arrest warrants against senior Israeli leaders, a move that crystallises the very fear driving the lawfare strategy.

For Israel, lawfare is not about defending democracy. It is about preventing a legal reckoning with apartheid and settler colonialism.

Europe’s Silence and Complicity

European institutions have responded cautiously, if at all, to the revelations contained in Israel Files. While EU officials routinely affirm their commitment to human rights and the rule of law, their actions tell a different story.

Despite repeated findings by international bodies, the EU has largely avoided confronting Israel in concrete legal terms. Reviews of human rights compliance under the EU-Israel Association Agreement have been delayed, diluted, or rendered toothless. The repression of BDS activists has continued largely unchecked.

This silence is not neutral. It is enabling.

By allowing their courts to be used as instruments of repression — and by failing to protect freedom of expression — European states have become unwitting participants in Israel’s legal war.

Conclusion: Lawfare as the Last Bastion of Apartheid

The Israel Files investigation exposes a truth that official discourse has worked tirelessly to conceal: Israel’s legal war is not an aberration. It is a structural necessity for a state that maintains domination through force, segregation, and denial of rights.

By dismantling universal jurisdiction, Israel protects war crimes from scrutiny. By criminalising BDS, it attacks the most effective non-violent challenge to apartheid. By manipulating European legal systems, it exports repression beyond its borders.

This is not the defence of law. It is the corruption of law in the service of power.

The question now confronting Europe is stark. Will its courts continue to function as auxiliary defences for colonial violence, or will they reclaim their role as instruments of accountability?

Because when law is weaponised to protect impunity, justice is not merely delayed. It is deliberately destroyed.

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