Overview
There is a documented record of Israeli intelligence operating inside states Israel was not at war with, and there is a much older and much broader claim that Israel or Jews control the governments of other countries. They are not the same subject, they do not rest on the same kind of evidence, and the second is not what the first adds up to.
This article is about the first. Each case below has a court record, an official inquiry, a state acknowledgement, or forensic evidence published by named researchers. Taken together they describe something real and bounded: an intelligence service that has run operations against friendly states, and an export industry whose products have been found on the phones of people who govern.
They do not describe control of anyone's government, and the last section is about why the distance between those two things is the point rather than a detail.
Operation Susannah, Egypt, 1954
In the summer of 1954 Israeli military intelligence recruited a group of Egyptian Jews to plant firebombs in Egyptian, British and American civilian targets in Cairo and Alexandria — cinemas, a post office, American libraries and information centres. The attacks were meant to be attributed to the Muslim Brotherhood, Egyptian communists or unspecified local malcontents, and the purpose was to persuade Britain that Egypt was too unstable to leave, and so to keep British troops in the Suez Canal Zone.
The cell was caught. What followed in Israel was a decade of political wreckage known as the Lavon Affair, after the defence minister who was blamed and who insisted he had not authorised it. The Olshan-Dori inquiry could not establish who gave the order; a later inquiry pointed to the director of military intelligence.
The operation is unusual among such claims in that it stopped being deniable. Israel denied involvement for half a century, and in 2005 the surviving agents were received by President Moshe Katsav and given certificates of appreciation by the state. Israel's own Ministry of Defense archive now carries an exhibition on the affair.
What makes it worth setting out precisely is the target list. Two of the three countries whose property was bombed were Israel's closest allies, and the intended effect was to change British policy by making Egypt look ungovernable.
Jonathan Pollard, United States, 1985
Jonathan Pollard was a civilian intelligence analyst for the US Navy. Between 1984 and his arrest in November 1985 he passed a very large volume of classified American material to Israeli handlers, and was paid for it. He pleaded guilty in 1986 to one count of conspiracy to deliver national defence information to a foreign government and was sentenced in March 1987 to life imprisonment — the first American to receive a life sentence for spying on behalf of an ally.
Israel's position moved over time, from describing the operation as unauthorised to granting Pollard citizenship in 1995 and formally acknowledging in 1998 that he had been an Israeli agent. He was paroled in 2015 and the remaining restrictions lapsed in 2020.
The case is the clearest documented instance of Israeli espionage against the United States, and it is documented in the ordinary way: a plea, a sentence, a damage assessment and an eventual admission.
The Franklin case, United States, 2004-2009
Lawrence Franklin was a Pentagon analyst working on Iran. In 2005 he pleaded guilty to passing classified information to two employees of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the largest pro-Israel lobbying organisation in Washington, and to an Israeli diplomat. He was sentenced to over twelve years, later reduced to ten months of house arrest after he cooperated.
The two AIPAC employees, Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman, were charged under the Espionage Act of 1917 — an unusual use of that statute against people who were not government employees and who described their conduct as the ordinary business of gathering information in Washington. The prosecution never reached a verdict. In May 2009 the government asked the court to dismiss the indictment, saying that pre-trial rulings had raised the standard of intent it would have to prove and that a trial would inevitably disclose classified information.
The case is often cited in both directions, and the record supports being careful about it. A Pentagon official was convicted of disclosing classified material. The lobbyists were not convicted of anything, and the government abandoned the case rather than losing it, which leaves the central question about their conduct legally unresolved.
Pegasus and the spyware trade, 2016 onwards
The most consequential recent strand is commercial rather than clandestine. NSO Group is a private Israeli company whose Pegasus product takes control of a target's phone. Its exports are licensed by Israel's Ministry of Defense, which is the thread connecting a private firm to state policy.
Researchers at the Citizen Lab, at the University of Toronto, traced Pegasus operations to dozens of countries and then documented specific infections. Among them were devices connected to the office of the British prime minister and the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office in 2020 and 2021. Officials and politicians in a number of countries have been found among the targets, alongside journalists and human rights lawyers.
In November 2021 the United States Commerce Department added NSO Group to its Entity List, restricting American technology exports to the company on the grounds that its tools had enabled foreign governments to conduct transnational repression.
The distinction that matters here is one that gets collapsed constantly. In most documented Pegasus cases the operator was not Israel. It was whichever government had bought the licence, using it against its own citizens or its neighbours. What is attributable to Israel is the manufacture, and the export approval.
What the cases have in common, and what they do not
They are operations: an intelligence service running a sabotage cell, recruiting an analyst, receiving documents; a state approving the export of a weapon that other states then aim at whoever they choose. They are the sort of thing intelligence services do, and several of Israel's allies have their own entries in the same genre.
What none of them shows is a government being run from outside it. The Egyptian operation was intended to manipulate British policy and it failed, spectacularly and at the cost of the Israeli defence establishment's own stability. Pollard's material was taken, not his government. The Franklin prosecution ended without establishing that the lobbyists had done anything unlawful. Pegasus was sold to governments that used it on their own populations.
The wider claim
The broader narrative — that Israel, or Jews, covertly direct the governments of other countries — is much older than any of these cases and older than the state of Israel. It descends from the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion and from the nineteenth-century conspiracy literature the forgery was assembled out of, and the documented cases above are frequently offered as its proof.
They do not function as that proof, for a reason worth stating plainly rather than leaving implied. Evidence of an intelligence operation is evidence of an intelligence operation. To get from a sabotage cell in Cairo, an analyst in Maryland and a spyware licence to a claim about who governs a country requires an inference the documents do not carry, and that inference is supplied by the older narrative rather than by the record.
The slide is also usually visible in the vocabulary. The documented cases concern a state, its intelligence services and a licensed exporter. The wider claim characteristically moves between "Israel", "Zionists" and "Jews" as though they named one thing, and treats Jewish officials as presumptively foreign agents. Where that substitution happens, what is being argued has stopped being about the evidence in this article.
What would change the picture
The documented record is not closed, and the way it has grown is instructive: through court proceedings, declassification, official inquiries and forensic analysis of specific devices by researchers who publish their methods. Every case above became known that way, and several became known over the objections of the governments involved.
A new case would arrive the same way — an indictment, a released file, a named researcher's report on a particular phone. Claims that cannot be tested by any of those routes, and that are supported instead by the assertion that the absence of evidence demonstrates the reach of the thing being alleged, are not additions to this record, whatever they are.