Investigation
Fatema Al Harbi: The Arab Working Overtime to Defend Israel's Genocide
While its actions in Gaza and beyond have united the world against it, Israel can still rely on a small cadre of hardcore Arab Zionist supporters. Given these individuals' race and religion, they are enthusiastically presented with platforms to passionately defend the state and its actions. One notable example of this is Fatema Al Harbi, author, activist, and former longtime civil servant with the Bahraini Ministry of Education.
Al Harbi spread lurid and demonstrably false stories about the October 7 attack by Hamas, claiming that she saw with her own eyes videos of Israeli children being beheaded and women being raped in front of their families.
"Shame on you," for not believing Israel, she told her fellow Arabs, explaining their mentality:
I think those people don't want to accept anything, either it is rape, or beheaded babies or beheaded soldiers, or any other crime. They just don't want to accept it. But, you know it is a reality, and it is happening. That's just sad."
And while Al Harbi was quick to condemn Hamas or any Arab who did not line up to support what she described as Israel "defending itself" from "terrorism," she was less hasty to assign any blame to Israel for their post-October 7 actions. "Unfortunately, the situation is very complicated for both sides," she said. "I don't think it is a genocide," she said, adding that it was merely "the price" Palestinians have to "pay."
Bahraini author and Director of Gulf Affairs at the UAE-based organisation Sharaka, Fatema Al Harbi, denies the Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip, describing the "complicated situation" on "both sides", while saying "it's war, unfortunately".Al Harbi became involved with the... pic.twitter.com/w0TATQoekD
- PalPulse (@PulseofPal) April 8, 2025
"Partnership" With Israeli Military Intelligence
Fatema Al Harbi is a director of Sharaka, an Israeli non-governmental organization established in 2020 to promote the Abraham Accords, a series of international normalization agreements between Israel and four Muslim-majority states: Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Sudan, and Morocco. The accords - an attempt to legitimize the State of Israel in the region - have proven extremely unpopular, and have generated widespread protests against their implementation.
Although Sharaka (which means "partnership" in Arabic) is officially a non-governmental organization, anyone analyzing its key staff could be forgiven for mistaking it for an outgrowth of Israeli military intelligence.
The firm's co-chairman, Dan Feferman, is a former IDF intelligence officer. Spending more than four years in the military, Feferman rose to the rank of major and was, according to his LinkedIn resume, responsible for handling the IDF's public relations. As of at least
, he was still an IDF reservist. Given the background of other key staff at Sharaka, the military intelligence unit in question is likely Unit 8200, Israel's most elite and controversial spying organization.
Lior Dabush, Sharaka's Israel director, is a former analyst with Unit 8200. Between 2013 and 2016, she notes, she "wrote intelligence reports and experimented with collecting, processing, deciphering and researching information." Dabush later went on to become an employee of the Bahraini Embassy in Tel Aviv, highlighting how close the relationship between those two countries has become.
Alongside Dabush at Unit 8200 was Michal Amar, who went on to work for the Israeli Police Force before joining Sharaka as a project manager in 2022.
Infamous around the world, Unit 8200 is the centerpiece of Israel's hi-tech surveillance and targeting systems. Using big data gleaned from facial recognition cameras, spy drones, fingerprint sensors at checkpoints, and mass surveillance of Palestinians' electronic devices, Unit 8200 created A.I.-generated kill lists of Gazans, and used drones to carry out tens of thousands of strikes on the densely-populated strip. With help from Western tech corporations such as Microsoft, it also keeps enormous files on every Palestinian, containing medical records, phone calls, and text messages which are used as kompromat for extortion, or can be referred to after an individual is killed to find some post hoc justification for their targeting.
Unit 8200 agents have also been behind some of the most controversial hi-tech spying incidents, including the 2024 Lebanese pager attack, which injured thousands of civilians, and the Pegasus spyware software, used to surveil tens of thousands of prominent politicians, activists, and journalists worldwide.
Other key figures with close ties to the Israeli national security state include Sharaka co-founder Lorena Khateeb, an Israeli Druze employed by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs' Department of Digital Diplomacy to target Arab Muslims with pro-Israel P.R. In 2021, she was named as among the top 30 most influential pro-Israel influencers in the world.
The company's managing director, Noam Meirov, is a career soldier, serving more than seven years as an active duty officer in the IDF before being appointed to his current position. He remains a reserve officer.
Sharaka co-founder and chairman, Amit Deri, however, is an active participant in the ongoing violence in Gaza, described by international organizations the world over as a "genocide." Deri is an officer in the Israeli military, and has shared pictures of himself inside the war zone, alongside statements celebrating the destruction of civilian buildings.
Sharaka serves as a key prong in Israel's public relations strategy, and has been directly promoted by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself, who published a video of Sharaka agents praising and thanking him and the State of Israel.
A World of Opportunities (For Warmongers)
Al Harbi was the first non-government Bahraini to visit Israel, and came back singing its praises. In an interview with PragerU, a far-right American media organization responsible for much of the worst Islamophobic content on the internet, she insisted that there was nothing close to Apartheid in Israel. On the contrary, she claimed that the country was a paragon of racial and religious harmony, where people of all creeds live together in peace.
Fatema from Bahrain @Fatemaal7rbi pic.twitter.com/aSpR4uTvoD- Fat Cat (@FATCAed) January 21, 2024
Al Harbi told PragerU that she met with many Arab Israelis, and that the overriding sentiment among them is that they feel "so proud" and "privileged" to live in Israel, a land that ensures that they "have rights they had never dreamed of" before.
She has since turned this experience into a children's book, "Fatema's journey to the Land of Abraham," which tells the story of how she realized she had been taught to hate Jews, and how Israeli kindness melted away her prejudices. Today, her social media profiles are filled with pictures of her visiting the Israeli Foreign Ministry and Knesset (parliament).
Her pro-Israel advocacy has opened up a world of opportunities. In 2022, she was appointed a scholar-in-residence at Oxford University, thanks to a program sponsored by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP).
Like Sharaka, ISGAP is closely tied to the Israeli government. Its chairman is Natan Sharansky, the country's former deputy prime minister and minister of internal affairs. Other key people at the organization include notorious pro-Israel lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, and Christine Maxwell, sister of international child sex offender, Ghislaine Maxwell. Moreover, as a recent MintPress News investigation documented, ISGAP is secretly funded by the Israeli government. In 2018, for instance, the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs surreptitiously provided around 80% of ISGAP's budget.
The Al Harbi accolades do not stop there. Later in 2022, she was selected as a European Commission Peace Ambassador and the following year, represented Bahrain at the United Nations Global Youth Summit for Change in Geneva, Switzerland.
By this point, her pro-Israel activism had caught the attention of the U.S. government. In 2024, the State Department nominated her for its prestigious International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP), a project that provides political instruction to young leaders from around the world and develops long-term relationships between the U.S. government and a cadre of tens of thousands of prominent individuals. Hundreds of IVLP laureates have gone on to become heads of state in their respective countries. IVLP nominees are flown to the United States, are shown the inner workings of the U.S. government, and develop relationships with American officials.
Al Harbi certainly took advantage of this opportunity. Her social media is filled with posts highlighting her frequent trips across the U.S., whether that is meeting the mayor of Beverly Hills, or visits to Harvard University, the Texas State Capitol, or the Pentagon.
Conservative Media Darling
Unsurprisingly, a hijab-wearing Arab Muslim woman willing to defend Israel has proven attractive for corporate media in the U.S., particularly the conservative press. In a separate video recorded for PragerU, Al Harbi states that virtually every Arab child is brought up to hate Jews, but that Arabs in Israel "feel safe," and "have full rights" in "the country they call home." The video was then seized upon by Israeli media to whitewash their crimes.
Yet PragerU itself also has ties to Israeli intelligence; its CEO, Marissa Streit, having also served in Unit 8200. PragerU has recently become a partner of the U.S. government, providing "educational" videos for Washington to be used nationwide, a decision that has sparked an outcry from groups citing the organization's less than stellar reputation for accuracy.
Meanwhile, in an interview with The Daily Wire, Al Harbi revealed that she was invited to the Israeli consulate in Boston to watch a 47-minute compilation of October 7 footage. "I was shocked. I couldn't breathe," she said, of the footage, "I cried [through] most of it." "I thought I saw enough on social media... There were more horrific acts and barbaric acts towards civilians, people sleeping in their beds," she added.
The Daily Wire was founded in 2015 by Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boreing. Shapiro, a pro-Israel crusader, has long attracted controversy and criticism because of his hardline views. In a 2003 article titled "transfer is not a dirty word," he called for the genocide of the Palestinian population. And in 2019, he wrote that "Israelis like to build. Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage."
Boreing, meanwhile, has gone out of his way to shield Israel from criticism of its aggression in Gaza. Lauding it for "endeavor[ing] to mitigate civilian losses," he insisted that "Israel did not bomb a refugee camp because there is no refugee camp because there are no refugees."
Surely the most influential piece of media Al Harbi has been involved with, however, is a collaboration with Israeli author Aija Mayrock and pro-Israel organization, Facts For Peace. The video describes Al Harbi has having "risked everything to bring Muslims and Jews together," and features A.I.-generated images of Israelis welcoming her into their households.
Facts for Peace was created in October 2023 by U.S. billionaire, Barry Sternlicht, and spends millions of dollars every month on pro-Israel ads on Google, YouTube, and Facebook. Sternlicht recruited several well-known billionaires to his cause, including former Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, and Dell founder, Michael Dell.
"Public opinion will surely shift as scenes, real or fabricated by Hamas, of civilian Palestinian suffering will surely erode [Israel's] current empathy in the world community," Sternlicht wrote in an email to his fellow plutocrats. "We must get ahead of the narrative," he concluded. Perhaps this explains the virality of the video.
Last year, MintPress published a full investigation into Facts For Peace, its creation, and its shadowy funding.
Is Al Harbi truly as heroic as the Facts For Peace video makes out? Did she really "risk everything" for peace? Some might consider those Bahrainis protesting against their authoritarian government's policy of collaboration with a state carrying out a genocide against Arabs as a far riskier and more noble endeavor. And while she may have lost friends and family members, who describe her as a "traitor" to her religion and her people, it is clear to see that publicly supporting Israel, its expansion, and Arab normalization efforts with it, has landed her a wide range of opportunities and prestigious appointments. Therefore, although many in her country might view her as a real life Clayton Bigsby, her willingness to vocally support Israel has quickly opened doors all the way to the highest halls of power.
A Controversial Alliance
Bahrain has been one of the region's governments most willing to openly collaborate with the State of Israel. In 2020, it was among the first to sign the Abraham Accords, despite widespread internal opposition and condemnation from Palestinian leadership, who called it a "betrayal of Jerusalem, Al-Aqsa, and the Palestinian cause." The government of Bahrain, however-a Sunni administration ruling over a Shiite-majority population- considers Iran its primary threat.
Israel is facing a crisis of legitimization. Its public image has crashed since October 7, 2023, falling in 42 of 43 countries studied by polling organization, Morning Consult. To that end, in 2025, it drastically increased its spending on P.R. by over 2,000%, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs being allocated a budget of $150 million for public diplomacy. Much of that has gone into advertisements targeting Western audiences.
This crisis in Israeli legitimacy is also the key driver in the forced sale of TikTok to pro-Israel billionaire, Larry Ellison. "We really have a TikTok problem, a Gen Z problem," Jonathan Greenblatt, director of the Anti-Defamation League, explained, noting that young people who get their news from social media are far more likely to hold sympathetic views towards Palestinians than older Americans that continue to rely on legacy media.
Likewise, the Ellison family's purchase of CBS News, and its attempts to buy CNN, are also efforts to turn the tide and shore up crumbling support for Israel in the United States. Ellison's decision to appoint Bari Weiss as CBS News' editor-in-chief was reportedly down to the self-described "Zionist fanatic's" positions on Israel.
Arabs have long been accustomed to seeing their governments make unpopular moves. Continued normalization efforts with Israel, however, may be a bridge too far. A poll conducted by the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy, for instance, found that 96% of Saudi respondents believed that Arab nations should cut ties with Israel, not fraternize with it.
Thus, both Israel and its Arab allies are facing an uphill battle selling normalization efforts, while Israel continues to ethnically cleanse Gaza and the West Bank, and has bombed six of its neighbors this year alone. To that end, Fatema Al Harbi is a key asset for Tel Aviv. As a hijabi Bahraini Muslim willing to defend the indefensible, she has transformed herself into one of Israel's most potent weapons in its public relations battle. Whether her efforts will bear fruit is another matter.
Feature photo |Illustration by MintPress News
Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. He completed his PhD in 2017 and has since authored two acclaimed books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles. He has also contributed to FAIR.org, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, and Common Dreams. Follow Alan on Twitter for more of his work and commentary: @AlanRMacLeod.