Yossi Melman reports on the Knesset meeting in Maariv. Key points translated by Ofer Neiman:
Defamation, harassment and threats - the risk in "special operations" against BDS

Israel
is formulating a policy for fighting the boycott movement via the
Ministry of Strategic Affairs. According to concerned officials in the
Ministry of Justice, in view of past experience, it would be better not
to get dragged into adventurous operations.
Netanyahu's statement
that BDS has been defeated was an embarrassment to Minister Gilad Erdan,
whose Ministry of Strategic Affairs is now based on fighting BDS, with a
new staff and a large budget. If Netanyahu is right, the Ministry is
not needed.
In Israel, whose military language, imagery world and
culture pervade all walks of civil society, Erdan's ministry prepares to
face the boycott challenge as if it were a military threat. Sima Vaknin
Gil, the director of the ministry, wants to establish a "community of
combatants".

Iran - out, BDS - in
Gilad Erdan has decided to
focus on BDS because the agreement with Iran is a done deal, and for now
Mossad can only collect data on possible Iranian violations.
Sima
Vaknin Gil told MK Stav Shafir at the Knesset Transparency Committee:
"We want most of the ministry's work to be classified. There are many
sensitivities, and I can't even explain in an open forum why there are
such sensitivities... A major part of what we do stays under the radar".
A scale of efforts

The ministry is divided into three sections: intelligence, awareness (media) and operations.
25
workers have been hired, whose names are classified. The intelligence
section is run by a former investigator/researcher for the "Security
System". The Ministry is assisted by a special unit in the IDF's
intelligence section, and Shabak assists as well.
The Ministry of
Strategic Affairs, via the Ministry of Tourism and Jewish and non-Jewish
groups abroad, has started to fund visits of "public opinion shapers":
journalists, bloggers, film actors, trade union leaders etc. The costs
are high.
At the same time, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is
attempting to convince governments to ban boycotts of Israel. A senior
Ministry official says the Boycott Law from 2010, which requires the
plaintiff to prove they have incurred financial damage due to a boycott
call is merely a "defiant" law, and should be replaced by an "efficient"
one.
The Ministry also initiates "pressure" actions to convince
international companies not to boycott Israel. This involves the use of
AIPAC and Hillel in the US, or similar groups in other countries.

The
problem may arise when the operations section, as hinted by Erdan at
the YNET conference on BDS this year, will try to carry out, directly or
indirectly, attack "special ops", which may also be called "black ops".
These may have the form of defamation campaigns, harassment and threats
to the lives of activists in "the boycott movement and
de-legitimization" groups, infringing on, and violating, their privacy
etc.
Last March BDS accused Israeli intelligence of responsibility
for cyber attacks against its website. At the same time, an anonymous
speaker named "Abu Nabil" made threatening phone calls in Sweden to the
family of Palestinian Attorney Nada Kiswanson, active in the al-Hak NGO
in the Hague. Three weeks ago, Amira Hass published a report about this
in Haaretz.
Kiswanson and a Palestinian colleague, had filed, two
weeks prior to the call, a report and a demand that alleged war crimes
during the "Black Friday" events in Rafah, be investigated.
Of
course, no one has assumed responsibility for the "incident" against the
Palestinian lawyer, and no one addressed the BDS campaign's claims that
the Israeli intelligence is running a cyber war against it.

An
inter-ministerial team of Ministry of Justice officials is now examining
various ideas and proposals in order to come with a legal definition of
what de-legitimization is, and what are the dos and don'ts in the
fight.