Hundreds of Meta Employees Confirmed as Israeli Spies

Anderson served as a non-commissioned officer in the IDF for over two years where she worked in the Military Strategic Information Section, writing dossiers and public relations propaganda for the IDF. She was also the liaison between the IDF and foreign military attaches stationed in Israel, and liaison to the Red Cross.

With AI a critical emerging technology for tech giants and militaries, Anderson’s role at Meta is an important one. She develops the legal guidance, policies and public relations talking points concerning AI issues and regulation for all of Meta’s key areas, including its product, public policy and government affairs teams.

At Meta, Anderson, who is based in Meta’s Washington DC office, is in familiar company. More than one hundred former Israeli spies and IDF soldiers are employed by the company, my new investigation shows, many of whom worked for Israel’s spy agency Unit 8200.

These ex-IDF members are based evenly across Meta’s US offices and in its Tel Aviv office, and a significant number of them, like Anderson, have a specialization in AI. Given that Israel has made extensive use of AI not just to conduct its genocide, but to establish its prior system of apartheid, surveillance and occupation, Meta’s recruiting of IDF AI specialists is particularly insidious. Did these former Israeli spies use their Unit 8200 connections to help the tech giant collaborate with the IDF to build kill lists? According to a report last year, Unit 8200 infiltrated WhatsApp groups and marked every name in a group for assassination if just one alleged Hamas member was also in the group, no matter the size or content of the group chat.

How did Israel’s spy unit gain access to WhatsApp user data held by Meta?

Meta has serious, war crime-related questions to answer.

Questions that Anderson has no doubt drafted PR responses for.

Anderson has a long-standing allegiance to Israel. She joined the IDF after studying for a history degree at the University of California, Berkley, then completed a law degree at Duke University before returning to Israel where she worked for an Israeli thinktank run by the former head of the IDF. After this she became a legal assistant to the head of Israel’s Supreme Court. It was Israel’s Supreme Court that two weeks ago rejected a petition to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza, effectively greenlighting the use of starvation as a weapon. This is a war crime under the Geneva Convention.

Anderson herself is a strident denier of the genocide. During a podcast appearance last year she said, “I absolutely do not think genocide is happening” and denied Israel was deliberately targeted civilians. During the interview she called Hamas “a death cult” and said “Gaza is a failed state,” despite it not being a state, the central fact that underlies Palestinian resistance. This is something you’d hope an international rights layer would know. She made numerous genocidal statements during the interview, including that “the challenge in the West Bank” is that “international law doesn’t permit Israel to do what it does in Gaza” because the West Bank is occupied. As a result, she lamented, “different rules apply.” She invoked the trolley problem to argue why killing large numbers of civilians is justifiable and appears from her time as IDF Red Cross liaison to have a particular grudge against the aid organization, saying it “acts like a country” in Israel. You can hear it all here.

Anderson’s path to serve in the IDF, via the Garin Tzabar program, is also highly controversial. This initiative has enabled non-Israelis (known as ‘Lone Soldiers’) to join the IDF, murder Palestinians, commit war crimes, and then re-integrate into their home societies. Legal cases against Garin Tzabar volunteers who have returned to their homes after serving in the IDF are moving forward in a number of countries. In the UK evidence of war crimes committed in Gaza by ten Britons living in London has recently been submitted to London’s Metropolitan police.

How many possible war criminals are employed by Meta?

You can find the Tel Aviv-based Meta employee names here and here. You can find the names of the US-based employees and their locations here, here and here.