Over the last century, the U.S. military has shown a consistent disregard for civilian lives. It has repeatedly cast or misidentified ordinary people as enemies; failed to investigate civilian harm allegations; excused casualties as regrettable but unavoidable; and failed to prevent their recurrence or to hold troops accountable. These long-standing practices stand in stark contrast to the U.S. government’s public campaigns to sell its wars as benign, its air campaigns as precise, its concern for civilians as overriding, and the deaths of innocent people as “tragic” anomalies. Such campaigns have mainly served to obscure the true toll of the American way of war, from the “banana wars” of the 1920s to the “forever wars” a century later.

Netanyahu’s greatest fear was that as a result of the growing strength of the BDS movement, the American public would finally begin seeing Israel in the same light that many people in the rest of the world, and even in Israel, saw it: as a brutal apartheid state. The more Israel’s atrocities came to light, the more the BDS movement gained strength around the country. On the same weekend that Adelson’s secret task force was forming in Las Vegas, an Associated Press news article noted, “In boardrooms and campuses, on social media and in celebrity circles, momentum seems to be growing for a global pressure campaign on Israel. The atmosphere recalls the boycotts that helped demolish apartheid South Africa a quarter century ago…. Increasingly prominent is the so‑called ‘BDS’ (boycott-disinvestment-sanctions) movement, run by Palestinians and leftist activists from around the world.”

Hence Netanyahu’s move to counter the protesters with lots of money to buy political power in Washington to create laws making it a crime to boycott Israel. The group at the Venetian would make up what would become Adelson’s Army, a task force of Gulfstream warriors (since so many of them owned private jets). The objective was the launch of a political and psychological war targeting Americans on behalf of Israel.

Before the night was over, the group had raised upwards of $50 million for Netanyahu’s war inside the United States; tens of millions more would covertly come from the Israeli government through a variety of hidden fronts and shell organizations. At the same time the Las Vegas gathering was taking place, Netanyahu was meeting with his top national security and intelligence officials. He told them they would receive at least $30 million from the government for the campaign, and with the help of Adelson’s group and others possibly as much as $900 million.

There was a reason the Adelson task force formally demanded pledges of secrecy before, during, and after the meeting. Once they closed the door at the Venetian, they opened the door to potential criminal prosecution as agents of a foreign power, a very serious offense punishable by up to a decade in prison. According to 18 USC § 951: “Whoever, other than a diplomatic or consular officer or attaché, acts in the United States as an agent of a foreign government without prior notification to the Attorney General…shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both…. For purposes of this section, the term ‘agent of a foreign government’ means an individual who agrees to operate within the United States subject to the direction or control of a foreign government or official.”

Yet that, in fact, was precisely what Netanyahu was proposing.

Within a few months, Netanyahu’s war began. Key Jewish donors in the United States were secretly approached with a proposal by Psy-Group, an Israeli psychological warfare firm with close connections to Mossad. Code-named “Project Butterfly,” the proposal outlined a clandestine operation within the “theater of action,” as the company referred to the United States. Its purpose was to damage specific Americans and US organizations associated with the boycott movement. It would develop ways to disrupt their activities, lead them to be falsely investigated by the authorities, and run a hidden media influence campaign against them.