Apri l22, 2026
Abdaljawad Omar
It was the latest entry in what Israeli security commentators now describe as a “magefa” — an epidemic. Since October 2023, over 50 indictments have been filed against Israeli citizens for spying on behalf of Iran. In 2025, Israel’s internal security agency, the Shin Bet, reported a 400% increase in Iranian recruitment attempts compared to the previous year, which itself had seen an unprecedented surge.
In 2026, several prominent cases dominated the headlines. In March, an Iron Dome reservist was arrested on suspicion of passing along details on how the missile interceptor system worked in exchange for $1000. During the past month alone, a rash of spy rings was uncovered: two suspected moles in the Israeli Air Force, a thwarted plot to assassinate former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennet, four active-duty soldiers accused of spying for Iran, and now, the two citizens with the forged documents.
The suspects have ranged in age from 13 to 73. They include ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students, Azerbaijani immigrants, a Bnei Brak resident who stalked a nuclear scientist, reservists who filmed Iron Dome batteries, and soldiers arrested during an ongoing “existential” war with Iran.
What is notable about this development isn’t the intelligence failure, or even the relative success in uncovering the espionage operations. The more interesting part is the underlying sociological realities that made it possible. Emblematic of this reality is the emergence of a new figure in Israeli political life: the ordinary citizen-traitor who sells out his country not for ideology, but for a Telegram payment made in cryptocurrency.
The fact that such attempts were made isn’t necessarily due to Iranian cunning — though that, too, deserves attention — but to internal conditions within Israeli society that created an opening for such infiltrations.
Banner advertisement for Mondoweiss's Fall 2025 fundraising campaign. It read, "Fight propaganda with truth."
The Iranian method is strikingly simple. Intelligence experts describe it as a “spray-and-pray” operation: thousands of messages sent via Telegram and social media offer payment for “easy tasks” — no careful vetting, no assets cultivated over years, no dead drops, no safe houses. Just a message: interested in making money?
The first task might be spraying graffiti. The second is photographing a street. By the fifth or sixth mission, the recruit is filming the entrance to an air defense base. By the tenth, he is being asked to assassinate his reserve commander for NIS 100,000 (about $33,000).
What makes this method work is not its sophistication but its environment: Iran is planting in soil that has already been made fertile. The Hebrew-language commentary keeps coming back to a single phrase, again and again: “ha-kesef menatze’akh.” Money wins.
But the thing is, money wins when nothing else does. And this is where the analysis must turn inward, toward the conditions that made the Israeli social contract so brittle that a few thousand dollars could fracture it.
What made Israelis susceptible to Iranian recruitment?
The self-described espionage epidemic didn’t occur in a vacuum. It accelerated alongside a series of political and moral crises that have systematically degraded Israeli social and institutional trust over the last several years. The 2023 judicial overhaul split the country into warring camps. October 7 shattered the myth of the security state. And then there are the corruption scandals that have enveloped the political leadership, demonstrating a clear pattern of self-dealing. They have had a subtler and more corrosive effect than the more dramatic developments of recent years.
When the head of state is under indictment, and his inner circle is credibly accused of coordinating with foreign interests, the lesson that filters down is not complex: loyalty is transactional, the state serves those who run it, and the language of collective sacrifice is a rhetoric of convenience deployed by people who don’t believe it.
The teenager on Telegram is not reading indictments or following parliamentary debates, but he is absorbing the ambient signal that tells him the social contract is a fiction maintained for the benefit of those at the top.
Those at the top are accused of accepting money from Qatar in exchange for policy shifts, and those at the bottom are accused of accepting money from Iran in exchange for intelligence. The structural parallel between the two has not escaped Israeli commentators. Intelligence journalist Yossi Melman described it as “the deterioration of society.”
Ordinary citizens reason that if officials can serve foreign interests, why can’t the layperson? The rationalization isn’t particularly sophisticated, but it does, on its own cynical terms, remain internally consistent.
The Israeli discourse has developed a rich vocabulary to describe what is happening: hitpor’rut khevratit, or “social disintegration”; and mashehu ba-khevra ha-yisraelit nisdak, or “something has cracked in Israeli society.” Each phrase circles the same recognition that the threat comes from within.
Yet these phrases, for all their urgency, also perform a kind of containment. Naming the crisis in Hebrew and assigning it a place within the taxonomy of national emergencies means that the problem is already being domesticated. It becomes subsumed under a discourse that Israel often uses to process existential threats without fundamentally altering the structures that produce them.
The commentary around these cases oscillates between two frames that strain against each other. First, there’s the language of the “epidemic,” denoting a major crisis in which espionage is just a symptom of the fact that the social contract has thinned. And second, there’s the persistent effort to minimize the phenomenon by casting the accused as marginal figures, people who never fully recognized the state’s authority and whose actions therefore reveal little about the broader polity.
These narratives obviously can’t comfortably coexist, because if you’re describing espionage as symptomatic of a wider epidemic, you’ve already implicated the whole. That cannot be squared with the contention that the perpetrators are outliers.
This incompatibility is itself revealing, because it points to how Israeli public discourse handles crisis: they perform alarm so thoroughly that the frenzy itself becomes reassuring, suggesting a state that has learned to metabolize panic as a form of governance. The more agitated the commentary, the more it signals vigilance and that the state is still in control.
The frenzy, in other words, substitutes for the sensation of order. The treatment of the espionage cases follows the same pattern: their existence indicates that something is wrong with Israeli society, but somehow they’re still marginal. Everything is going wrong, and nothing needs to change.
What is emerging is something Israeli security culture had no ready language for: a new kind of traitor. Not the ideological defector who crosses over out of conviction, nor the compromised official, but the financially motivated operative who moves from spray-painting graffiti to plotting assassinations in a matter of weeks. Israel is intimately familiar with this type of figure because it has spent decades cultivating such traitors as assets and informants within enemy societies. But until now, it had not appeared from within.
And this is where the irony becomes almost comical. The Shin Bet has spent decades studying exactly what conditions produce willing collaborators: economic precarity, political disillusionment, the erosion of communal bonds, a governing class that visibly exempts itself from the obligations it imposes on others. These are the vulnerabilities any competent intelligence service looks for when trying to recruit spies from within a hostile society. They are also, as of 2026, a reasonable description of large parts of Israel.
It is part of the same playbook the Shin Bet has used time and again to turn ordinary citizens into assets. But now it has to confront those same mechanics operating on its own terrain.
Abdaljawad Omar
Israel has long used the same
playbook to recruit informants from enemy societies. Iran is now using it to
recruit spies in Israel by exploiting new cracks in Israeli society.
On Sunday, Israeli prosecutors
charged two Israeli citizens with espionage for Iran — 19-year-old Sagi Haik,
who had been in contact with an Iranian handler for months through Telegram,
and 21-year-old Asaf Shitrit, who was allegedly recruited by Haik to carry out
tasks under Iranian direction. The months-long contact included plans for the
two men to travel to an Arab country for “training,” while the younger suspect
allegedly told Israeli authorities that he had given “fake intelligence” to his
Iranian handler in the form of a forged document detailing plans for a
U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran. Prosecutors warned that if the allegedly fake
document had reached Tehran, it could have triggered a preemptive Iranian
attack.
It was the latest entry in what Israeli security commentators now describe as a “magefa” — an epidemic. Since October 2023, over 50 indictments have been filed against Israeli citizens for spying on behalf of Iran. In 2025, Israel’s internal security agency, the Shin Bet, reported a 400% increase in Iranian recruitment attempts compared to the previous year, which itself had seen an unprecedented surge.
In 2026, several prominent cases dominated the headlines. In March, an Iron Dome reservist was arrested on suspicion of passing along details on how the missile interceptor system worked in exchange for $1000. During the past month alone, a rash of spy rings was uncovered: two suspected moles in the Israeli Air Force, a thwarted plot to assassinate former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennet, four active-duty soldiers accused of spying for Iran, and now, the two citizens with the forged documents.
The suspects have ranged in age from 13 to 73. They include ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students, Azerbaijani immigrants, a Bnei Brak resident who stalked a nuclear scientist, reservists who filmed Iron Dome batteries, and soldiers arrested during an ongoing “existential” war with Iran.
What is notable about this development isn’t the intelligence failure, or even the relative success in uncovering the espionage operations. The more interesting part is the underlying sociological realities that made it possible. Emblematic of this reality is the emergence of a new figure in Israeli political life: the ordinary citizen-traitor who sells out his country not for ideology, but for a Telegram payment made in cryptocurrency.
The fact that such attempts were made isn’t necessarily due to Iranian cunning — though that, too, deserves attention — but to internal conditions within Israeli society that created an opening for such infiltrations.
Banner advertisement for Mondoweiss's Fall 2025 fundraising campaign. It read, "Fight propaganda with truth."
The Iranian method is strikingly simple. Intelligence experts describe it as a “spray-and-pray” operation: thousands of messages sent via Telegram and social media offer payment for “easy tasks” — no careful vetting, no assets cultivated over years, no dead drops, no safe houses. Just a message: interested in making money?
The first task might be spraying graffiti. The second is photographing a street. By the fifth or sixth mission, the recruit is filming the entrance to an air defense base. By the tenth, he is being asked to assassinate his reserve commander for NIS 100,000 (about $33,000).
What makes this method work is not its sophistication but its environment: Iran is planting in soil that has already been made fertile. The Hebrew-language commentary keeps coming back to a single phrase, again and again: “ha-kesef menatze’akh.” Money wins.
But the thing is, money wins when nothing else does. And this is where the analysis must turn inward, toward the conditions that made the Israeli social contract so brittle that a few thousand dollars could fracture it.
What made Israelis susceptible to Iranian recruitment?
The self-described espionage epidemic didn’t occur in a vacuum. It accelerated alongside a series of political and moral crises that have systematically degraded Israeli social and institutional trust over the last several years. The 2023 judicial overhaul split the country into warring camps. October 7 shattered the myth of the security state. And then there are the corruption scandals that have enveloped the political leadership, demonstrating a clear pattern of self-dealing. They have had a subtler and more corrosive effect than the more dramatic developments of recent years.
When the head of state is under indictment, and his inner circle is credibly accused of coordinating with foreign interests, the lesson that filters down is not complex: loyalty is transactional, the state serves those who run it, and the language of collective sacrifice is a rhetoric of convenience deployed by people who don’t believe it.
The teenager on Telegram is not reading indictments or following parliamentary debates, but he is absorbing the ambient signal that tells him the social contract is a fiction maintained for the benefit of those at the top.
Those at the top are accused of accepting money from Qatar in exchange for policy shifts, and those at the bottom are accused of accepting money from Iran in exchange for intelligence. The structural parallel between the two has not escaped Israeli commentators. Intelligence journalist Yossi Melman described it as “the deterioration of society.”
Ordinary citizens reason that if officials can serve foreign interests, why can’t the layperson? The rationalization isn’t particularly sophisticated, but it does, on its own cynical terms, remain internally consistent.
The Israeli discourse has developed a rich vocabulary to describe what is happening: hitpor’rut khevratit, or “social disintegration”; and mashehu ba-khevra ha-yisraelit nisdak, or “something has cracked in Israeli society.” Each phrase circles the same recognition that the threat comes from within.
Yet these phrases, for all their urgency, also perform a kind of containment. Naming the crisis in Hebrew and assigning it a place within the taxonomy of national emergencies means that the problem is already being domesticated. It becomes subsumed under a discourse that Israel often uses to process existential threats without fundamentally altering the structures that produce them.
The commentary around these cases oscillates between two frames that strain against each other. First, there’s the language of the “epidemic,” denoting a major crisis in which espionage is just a symptom of the fact that the social contract has thinned. And second, there’s the persistent effort to minimize the phenomenon by casting the accused as marginal figures, people who never fully recognized the state’s authority and whose actions therefore reveal little about the broader polity.
These narratives obviously can’t comfortably coexist, because if you’re describing espionage as symptomatic of a wider epidemic, you’ve already implicated the whole. That cannot be squared with the contention that the perpetrators are outliers.
This incompatibility is itself revealing, because it points to how Israeli public discourse handles crisis: they perform alarm so thoroughly that the frenzy itself becomes reassuring, suggesting a state that has learned to metabolize panic as a form of governance. The more agitated the commentary, the more it signals vigilance and that the state is still in control.
The frenzy, in other words, substitutes for the sensation of order. The treatment of the espionage cases follows the same pattern: their existence indicates that something is wrong with Israeli society, but somehow they’re still marginal. Everything is going wrong, and nothing needs to change.
What is emerging is something Israeli security culture had no ready language for: a new kind of traitor. Not the ideological defector who crosses over out of conviction, nor the compromised official, but the financially motivated operative who moves from spray-painting graffiti to plotting assassinations in a matter of weeks. Israel is intimately familiar with this type of figure because it has spent decades cultivating such traitors as assets and informants within enemy societies. But until now, it had not appeared from within.
And this is where the irony becomes almost comical. The Shin Bet has spent decades studying exactly what conditions produce willing collaborators: economic precarity, political disillusionment, the erosion of communal bonds, a governing class that visibly exempts itself from the obligations it imposes on others. These are the vulnerabilities any competent intelligence service looks for when trying to recruit spies from within a hostile society. They are also, as of 2026, a reasonable description of large parts of Israel.
It is part of the same playbook the Shin Bet has used time and again to turn ordinary citizens into assets. But now it has to confront those same mechanics operating on its own terrain.
No comments:
Post a Comment