Micah Avni

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Micah Avni LinkedIn Profile

Employment:

In January 2018, Avni was appointed Chairman of Concert a company set up by the Ministry of Strategic Affairs to combat BDS.

• Chairman, Association of Credit Companies in Israel, Aug 2017 - Present
• CEO, Peninsula, Nov 2004 - Present
• General Partner, Jerusalem Global Ventures Jul 2000 - Jan 2005 (Invests in Israeli based projects)
• Attorney, Yigal Arnon & Co. Mar 1996 - Jun 2000

Education

• Kellogg School of Management/Recanati School of Business Administration - Tel Aviv University, MBA 2002 - 2004

• The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, LLB, Law 1992 - 1996

Activities and Views

Father's Death and Facebook Lawsuit

In October 2015, Micah Avni stated his support for a lawsuit that would make Facebook responsible for “allowing gruesome Palestinian pages that incite violence.” The Lawsuit was filed by rights group Shurat Hadin, days after Micah Avni’s father (Richard Lakin) was killed (Micah Avni states that “his father was shot in the head and then stabbed multiple times — in much the same way as described in some of the videos posted online.” The postings on Palestinian pages include: “caricatures and video re-enactments demonizing Israelis, graphics with instructions on "how to stab a Jew," and calls for attacks on Facebook before carrying out stabbings.” One of the Palestinians that killed Micah’s father made his intentions clear on Facebook. Anvi said that social media companies "must recognize their social and ethical responsibility.”

Avni states that the following has been found online and directly relates to his father’s killer (Baha Alyan). The examples were reported by Palestinian Media Watch and reproduced by Anvi:

• President Muhamad Abbas has met publically with Mohamad Alyan – the terrorist’s father, praising my father’s murder – calling Baha Alyan “martyr.”
• Jabril Rajoub (#3 in the Fatah party hierarchy) has spoken on PA television commending Baha Alya’s activities and calling on others to follow suit.
• The Palestinian official daily newspaper Al-Hayat Al-Jadida devoted an article to the life of a terrorist killer, praising his virtues. The headline read “Baha Alyan – Martyr and intellectual”
• Palestinian Authority Television has hosted the terrorist’s father twice on their show Good Morning Jerusalem, where, not surprisingly, the host referred to his son as a “shining martyr.”
• The Palestinian Authority Official Facebook Page posted the “Ten Commandments of a Martyr” written by Baha Alyan – all about killing Jews and destroying Israel.
• The Palestinian Authority provides the family of Baha Alyan with a monthly cash stipend under its Pay to Slay Law. A reward, if you wil, for murdering my father.
• The Palestinian Scout Association (the local chapter of the Boy Scouts) established a leadership training course named after Baha Alyan. They are teaching children that this horrible terrorist is an example for every scout.
• The Palestinian Authority Supreme Council for Sport and Youth Affairs established a summer camp named after Baha Alyan in the village of Beit Anan, northwest of Jerusalem. You can guess what they teach there.
• Schools and universities in the West Bank and Gaza have hosted numerous lectures, reader’s circles, book fairs, school plays, wish boxes, etc. Too many to keep track of.
• There are Baha Alyan Facebook Pages and Baha Alyan memorial videos on YouTube, etc. All glorifying this horrific terrorist for murdering my father. All encouraging Palestinian youth to go out and commit similar acts.

Anvi states that “the focused efforts of the Palestinian Authority to glorify Baha Alyan as a holy martyr send a very clear message to Palestinian youth: Go out and kill Israelis in an attempt to destroy Israel and you will go to heaven. You too will become a martyr. A hero. It is the right thing to do.” The law that Anvi would attempt to get initiated would be known as “Lakin’s Law”.

Concert Together for Israel Involvement

Micah Avni is one of the shareholders/board members, alongside Sagi Balasha, Dore Gold, Yossi Kuperwasser, the former director general of the Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Ehud Danoch, the former Israeli consul general in Los Angeles, of Kela Shlomo, now Concert–Together for Israel, a corporation “created” by the Israeli Government, and which received ‘$37 million from the Netanyahu government, and reportedly expects to raise the same amount through international donors, from “philanthropic sources” and “pro-Israel organizations”’The funding is aimed to “implement part of the ministry’s activities related to the struggle against the phenomena of delegitimization and boycotts against the State of Israel.” According to RT, in December 2017 the Israeli Government “approved plans to dedicate $75 million to fight the international Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.” Kella Shlomo will primarily target social media and online: engagement in the online space “the opponent directs most of his conscious and moving efforts to this space,” and will conduct ‘“mass awareness activities” and organize delegations of public opinion leaders “especially those who influence non-Jews.’

On the launch of Concert, Avni stated his stance on BDS in a blog post for the Times of Israel. It included the following:

• “Hundreds of organizations and millions of people around the world – in politics, media, academia, diplomatic corridors, in so-called ‘human rights’ organizations, in the arts and on campuses – spend millions of dollars and millions of person-hours to systematically undermine, marginalize and delegitimize the State of Israel.”
• “Delegitimization is not a mere tactic of our enemies, it is their intended outcome: to erode the willingness of nations to acknowledge the State of Israel’s right to sovereignty over its population and territory. Democratic values encourage criticism of governments and policies, but our enemies are not just protesting the policies of the Israeli government, they are waging political warfare aimed at destroying the Jewish State.”
• “…while Israel thrives — and on many levels has never been stronger — we have done a poor job of fighting the long-term battle against delegitimization. We have often failed to understand the hearts and minds of the public outside of Israel. We have often failed to understand how to influence world opinion in our favor. And we have often neglected to heed the advice and utilize the skills of our brothers, sisters and friends outside of Israel in this regard.”

Avni has attended meetings held by ‘Concert Together for Israel’, a private company used by the state of Israel to front its campaign against the BDS movement.

Including the 3rd steering meeting of Concert Together for Israel in December 2018 where the following was discussed:

- started working in Europe - begin working in coordination with 10+ online pro-Israel groups - building a high-tech platform, providing info to pro-Israel groups - building a strategy - building global tool for media campaigns - setting up media centers in Europe

Avni has long campaigned against terrorism, however this has deviated to pinpointing accusations of state-sponsored terrorism on the Palestinian Authority. Most prominently at the UNHRC in 2018, Avni stated: “The Palestinian Authority actually has a pay-to-slay law. Palestinians systematically pay terrorists to murder Jews,”

This is the same authority that receives hundreds of millions of dollars a year from the UN, the European Union and countries like Germany, France, Britain, Belgium, Norway, Sweden and Ireland, Avni explained. “Your failure to report or condemn these crimes makes you an accessory to the murder of my father, and to the murder of many other Jewish fathers, mothers and children who the Palestinians pay to slay,” he said.

“I call upon this council, and upon all UN members, to stop funding the Palestinian Authority until the Palestinians stop the murderous practice of rewarding terrorists for killing Jews.”

In January 2018, Avni was positioned as the CEO of Concert-Together for Israel, an organisation in “direct partnership with the Israel Government.” In an interview with the Times of Israel Avni suggests that “if a global consensus ever develops that Israel has no right to exist, the country will indeed cease to exist.” Anvi points to Airbnb’s West Bank boycott as an example of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic activity.

Concert is seen as a “public benefit company” that “first, to build a strategic picture of who the demonizers are, what they’re doing right, and how best to counter them. And then, second, to help organize, direct and fund the counter-strategy.”

Anvi states that the Israel government’s involvement is vital to combat BDS successfully: “You can’t talk about Israel’s image, or combating the delegitimization of Israel, without the government actually having some kind of involvement in that,” he argues, because otherwise “everything would be left completely to everybody’s interpretation. “…there are lots of challenges working with the government — and every day I learn about new ones,” but “to my mind you can’t address this in a major way without them having a seat at the table.”

He adds: “If you have an organization whose mission is to protect the state and to build up the state’s image, and it’s not working in full cooperation with the state, then it can’t really be doing its job. And if you don’t want to be cooperative with the state because you don’t like the government, well, I feel like that’s something you need to deal with within yourself, because we’re a democratic state. We have a government. Once it was a different government. Maybe two weeks from now it will be another government. That’s what we have, what we have to live with… That’s the playing field.”

Concert’s mission is to “combat delegitimization of Israel and help strengthen Israel’s image in the world.” Avni says that Concert is managed “by a board of directors of which I am the chairman and has shareholders like any public benefit company.” Its CEO is Ayelet Shiloh Tamir, the former CEO of Masa (Israel experience programs). “And there is a steering committee where the government has representation and oversight on budget, so they know what’s going on and where things are going.”

Concert is seen as a long-term project, “Working to strengthen Israel’s image is not a problem that started yesterday, and it’s not a problem that we’re going to fix tomorrow morning’, Avni states.

After the death of his father, Anvi states he became more activistic for the Pro-Israel cause, however what he saw was a disconnected industry: “a bunch of silos — lots of different organizations, some doing great stuff, some doing less effective stuff — but hardly working together, hardly communicating. And a government doing its stuff each time, changing with different governments and different ministers.” Concert aimed to fix this: “Not people sitting around the table, agreeing on a unified strategy, and then combing organizations and doing everything together,” but as the facilitator, so that “when different organizations can collaborate on certain projects, and their skill sets can help strengthen one another, we can help pull that together.”

One part of the strategy is gathering publicly available information: “It became very clear to us over time that we need to distance ourselves as much as possible from any kind of concept of intelligence gathering or stuff like that. We’re working completely and entirely with public information.”

“If a person puts up a post, a public post on Facebook, and says I’m a big supporter of this or that anti-Israel organization, not only that but I’m organizing a demonstration on my campus tomorrow — if they put that public post out for the whole world to know, that’s public information, so there’s nothing wrong with being aware of that post and making sure that the Jewish students on their campus are aware of it,” he says. “Which would be very different from breaking into somebody’s email and seeing what’s going on there or following them on the street.” “Our line is very clear: only completely public information in terms of what we’re gathering, following every law in every state in terms of databases, in terms of privacy. We’ve got the best legal advice. We did a big block of work in terms of building up ethical standards.”

Avni says that Concert will not have anything “to do with Black Cube or psyop (psychological operations) types.” Adding that he’s “sure that military intelligence and Mossad do all sorts of things protecting our country and protecting Israel. If anything like that needs to be done, that’s the place for it to be done.” Avni adds that “without information it’s very difficult to build an effective strategy on the other fronts.”

At the beginning of 2018, when the Israeli Government stepped in the information gathering work was split into a Concert-funded subsidiary headed by Yossi Kuperwasser — a former head of research in the IDF Military Intelligence division and an ex-director general of the Ministry of Strategic Affairs — called Keshet David (formally knowns as Innovative Collaboration Strategies.

Avni also says that Concert wants to empower “the pro-Israel community. It’s basically setting up roundtables and bringing people together, organizations, so that they can work more effectively, benefit from information, benefit from matching funding. We have a pool of money where we can match funding on activities which are meeting our goals.”

In the future, Concert will help with pro-Israel campaigns “through existing organizations — marketing and public relations, getting messaging across.” He adds that with “those who are attacking us, we need to understand what they’re doing, and understand what’s working and what’s not, and think of ways that we as a pro-Israel community can tone down what’s actually damaging us out there. But most of the Western world is in the middle,” he says, “There’s places there where we really need to be influencing.”

Avni wants Concert to serve as a “pro-Israel accelerator — for different startups, for people who have great ideas and initial concepts that they want to test out to either combat BDS or build up the country’s image.”

On the Government involvement, Anvi states that “The government gets a copy of every invoice for everything that their matching funds have been used for; They have complete transparency into the books. They get monthly reporting. That is all viewed by the comptroller of the Ministry of Strategic Affairs and the legal adviser of the ministry. It doesn’t mean that they have decision-making power on every invoice or expense, but they’ll know exactly where the money is going, so presumably if somebody would ever be doing something not kosher, it would be seen and be very clear.” Anvi adds that Concert “are considering working together with Act.il in terms of help getting information and making it publicly available. They’ve built up a wonderful system of getting pro-Israel activists around the world together to work online influencing things. We’re looking at that, and perhaps we’ll be helping that expand into other areas of the world.”