Glen Stellmacher Prism
This is Part 4 of Prism’s series “The ASTI Files.”
On the shore of the mighty Columbia River across from Portland, Oregon, sits the small city of Vancouver, Washington. It was there in 2007 that Gil Kleiman, a Brooklyn native and former Israeli National Police spokesperson, stood in front of a crowd of conference participants at the Vancouver Hilton Hotel ballroom and called Gaza “a pit.”
“If anybody’s been to Gaza, it’s a real pit,” Kleiman said. “In 500 years, the Palestinians will be a little footnote in history.”
The purpose of the conference was to “establish effective, direct relationships between Israeli and local community leaders,” among other goals. Specifically, conference organizers recruited evangelical Christians, calling over 2,000 churches to attract attendees, according to an archived June 5, 2007, report in The Oregonian. The event was organized in part by Yisroel Stefansky, an Israeli American dual national, who helped connect Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu via video link to the event, according to another conference organizer.
“Don’t give me any of this nonsense, occupation, not occupation,” Kleiman said during an hourlong speech. “Right behind that door is a big, furry, bad monster who is gonna come in here and eat my children alive no matter how much food I give him, no matter how nice I’m gonna be, no matter how much land I’m gonna give ’em, no matter how much I talk to him,” Kleiman said of Palestinians.
Kleiman attended the conference in his personal capacity, speaking as a veteran of the Israeli National Police. He would later join Stefansky in speaking at a 2008 law enforcement seminar in Tacoma, Washington, as well as several business and nonprofit entities. He served as director of public information and preparedness programs at Intelligence3, a for-profit business started by one of the 2007 conference organizers, and with Proactive Global Security (PGS), a for-profit entity founded by Stefansky in Washington state.
Kleiman has also given lectures with the Advanced Security Training Institute (ASTI), a nonprofit that trains American police and other emergency personnel in Israel and in the U.S. Prism spent two years investigating ASTI and what it teaches American police. This is part four of “The ASTI Files.”
Documents obtained by Prism through public records requests show how Kleiman and Stefansky, both of whom have backgrounds in Israeli public relations, played roles organizing and instructing ASTI workshops.
As an ASTI lecturer, Kleiman told a group of American police that they are part of a “propaganda war,” according to training notes. It’s unclear if Kleiman was employed by ASTI, if he served as a private contractor, or if he did work for ASTI free of charge.
Prism also found that Stefansky previously served as an international spokesperson for the Israeli civil guard volunteer force known as ZAKA; he has said publicly that the war on terror directly involves propaganda. According to dozens of news articles and public records reviewed by Prism, it doesn’t appear that Stefansky’s role with ZAKA, which appears to have tapered off around 2005, ever overlapped with his roles training American police, which started around the same time.
As recently as 2024, Stefansky proposed ASTI training programs featuring Kleiman in Seattle and San Francisco, according to public records. The police departments of both cities told Prism that they have not engaged in any training with ASTI. While ASTI still remains active on X and maintains a website, the current scope of its involvement with American police departments is unclear.
Over two years, Prism submitted dozens of public records requests to agencies across the U.S., with the aim to uncover the scope of ASTI training, and received thousands of pages of documents. Prism traced law enforcement training programs as far back as 2005 across Washington state to Colorado, Texas, and Washington, D.C.
According to ASTI notes summarizing one 2018 training lecture taught by Kleiman in Israel, a contingent of police officers, firefighters, and emergency managers from the Washington, D.C., region learned that fighting terrorism is about communicating the right message. Notes from ASTI trainings in 2018 and 2017 were distributed to participants and shared with others by Stefansky. The author is not identified.
“It is a war for the hearts and minds of the people. It is a propaganda war with the spokesman as the key. It’s all about perception,” the notes state. Stefansky echoed these comments during a 2012 “We The People Radio” interview.
Stefansky did not respond to multiple requests for an interview and an email detailing this report’s findings.
Prism did not receive a response to multiple emails and messages to Kleiman’s Israeli consulting and lecture company iResilience. He also did not respond to Prism’s messages on social media.
“People know when you are being honest. When you do that, you are less likely to get blowback. Do not be tempted to lie to gain a few minutes of fame. You will never be able to recover from it,” the ASTI notes say, “but do not be honest to the point where you are stupid honest (don’t tell them everything).”
In another 2017 ASTI lecture titled, “Crisis Media Management: Counter Terror Approach,” the training notes state that the “session focused on the ability to use the media as a multiplier as part of response operations.” According to the notes, Kleiman “stressed the importance of understanding the sensitive issues in your community to gather intelligence, as well as the need to feed the media with information during a response.”
University of Chicago sociology professor Julian Go has studied how American foreign military campaigns abroad have influenced policing and militarization back home. He wrote the book “Policing Empires: Militarization, Race, and the Imperial Boomerang in Britain and the US.”
“The sharing of intelligence, military tactics and techniques—I do see that as a kind of boomerang effect,” Go told Prism, referencing the idea that what America’s imperial project unleashes abroad eventually returns home. “The boomerang effect also entails the importation of mentalities and mindsets.”
Go said ASTI’s guidance on the use of propaganda aligned with a long-standing counterinsurgency strategy.
“What I’m seeing here is the counterinsurgency militaristic approach to propaganda brought to American police through this organization,” Go said.
“Israel is good, the Arabs are bad”
Kleiman’s own writing and public statements provide a window into how he viewed the role of propaganda while working for the Israeli police.
According to a Jerusalem News Syndicate (JNS) report, Kleiman served as the Israeli National Police foreign press spokesperson during the Second Intifada, a Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation in the early 2000s, in what he described as a “battleground of hearts and minds.”
“As a spokesman in a terror war, the goal is to counter the terror agenda and motives,” Kleiman told JNS. “This battleground can’t be avoided. It isn’t public relations; these are actual operational capabilities to fight terror.”
In his personal capacity, Kleiman also co-authored a 2012 book titled “Terrorist Suicide Bombings: Attack Interdiction, Mitigation, and Response,” which describes the role of the Israeli foreign press spokesperson.
“We focus on the way the Israelis have used public relations to try and roll back worldwide media support for the Palestinian cause generally,” wrote Kleiman and his co-authors, Robert Slater, a prolific biographer, and the late New York Police Department Tel Aviv liaison detective Mordecai Dzikansky. “Continuing international criticism of Israel led the [Israeli] police to consider hiring its own spokesman for the foreign press.”
Kleiman wrote in the book that he met Dzikansky in Israel in 2002 after Kleiman gave a lecture to intelligence officers from various Israeli-based embassies—“essentially a ‘spy’ convention,” according to the book.
The book laid out the task assigned to Kleiman. “The new police spokesman would face the immense challenge of getting American ‘soccer moms’ and ‘workaholic dads’ to focus on the Israeli-Palestinian issue … convincing the single mother in Des Moines, Iowa, that the Israelis were the good guys,” the book states.
While an Israeli police spokesperson, “Kleiman refused to slant the story overtly in favor of his country. He would slant the story, but subtly,” the book states. “While Kleiman was emphatic about giving the facts of the suicide bombing, he always sought to slip in one message that he felt Israel should try to get across: Israel is good, the Arabs are bad.”
Prism previously reported that ASTI’s training included materials that leaned into anti-Muslim stereotypes.
“The power of Israeli propaganda in demonizing Arabs and falsely conflating Islam with terrorism is immense,” former FBI agent Terry Albury told Prism.
During the course of Albury’s career with the FBI, he investigated numerous alleged terrorist threats and was even deployed as a counterterrorism investigator in Iraq. However, after becoming increasingly disgusted by the FBI’s tactics, he began disclosing FBI documents that were later published by The Intercept. As a result, Albury served two years in federal prison.
“It’s clear that the educational, religious, legal, and political system is designed to keep the public distracted, uninformed, and ignorant of the issues we’re attempting to illuminate,” Albury told Prism. “I think Israel, through its propaganda, plays on that. It’s all about narrative control and framing. If you are able to effectively convey propaganda on a level that taps into the public’s irrational fear, you can effectively control them.”
“Narrative control”
Stefansky, the founder of ASTI, has also been directly involved in international public relations as a former spokesperson for ZAKA, a controversial organization that has worked with the Israeli Foreign Ministry and the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office to provide “a public relations service for the State” of Israel, according to archived ZAKA webpages.
ZAKA did not respond to multiple emailed requests for comment.
ZAKA is an acronym for the Hebrew abbreviation of Zihuy Korbanot Ason, or Disaster Victim Identification. ZAKA volunteers are legally classified as volunteers of the Israeli Police Civil Guard, which is overseen by the Israeli Ministry of National Security, formerly known as the Ministry of Public Security.
ZAKA volunteers were instrumental in spreading false, graphic stories of atrocities following Hamas’ Operation Al-Aqsa Flood attack on Oct. 7, 2023, including about beheaded children. ZAKA’s current leader Yossi Landau later admitted that some of ZAKA’s statements about Oct. 7 were not true.
Decades earlier, Stefansky was traveling across North America as an emissary of ZAKA, aiming to raise money. At one event he headlined in Toronto, he referenced “babies missing heads,” according to an archived July 17, 2002, news story.
Stefansky appears to have promoted his work with ZAKA on the website of one of his other American 501(c)(3) entities called the Israel Support Fund (ISF). An archived ISF webpage references Stefansky’s travel to the U.S. to participate in recovery efforts following the disintegration of the space shuttle Columbia in 2023. On the ground, Stefansky was identified as a “member of the Israeli National Police” and “director of ZAKA” according to archived San Antonio Express–News reports.
In November 2023, Netanyahu met with a group of ZAKA volunteers, telling the group, “You have an important role in influencing public opinion, which also influences leaders. We are in a war; it will continue,” according to an Israeli government press release. No one from ASTI attended this meeting.
After Oct. 7, Stefansky cold-pitched a Seattle official over email, offering a new ASTI course named “Combating Terrorism Homeland Security Conference – Lessons From Israel, October 7th, 2023.” The proposed syllabus included a course taught by Kleiman aimed at understanding “how to use the media as a force multiplier before, during, and after a crisis or terror event.”
After reviewing ASTI’s trip notes and training materials, Albury said that he believes ASTI’s programs appear to be narrative control, influence operations, and propaganda.
“It’s a multiple-pronged approach to reach the hearts and minds of people in a way that is effective and will resonate with a wider swath of people,” Albury said.
However, “the dam is breaking,” Albury said. “The stranglehold that the Israelis have had on the narrative has been lost. … In terms of the message, the narrative, they’re done.”
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