Funding and Role of Western Countries in Colonial Settlements (7)
Posted on: September 2011
By Mike Coogan
How US “charities” break tax laws to fund Israeli settlements
In spite of US government statements about its displeasure with the expansion of Israeli settlements, US based organizations are abusing the 501(C)3 section of US tax codes to provide billions in subsidies to do exactly that.
There are hundreds of these tax-exempt, so-called charities funneling money to illegal Israeli settlements, often with the names no more creative than “American Friends of name an Israeli settlement.”
One such organization, American Friends of Ariel Inc., paints a picture of how these US based front groups collect tax-deductible donations, and use them to build and expand illegal Israeli settlements, and in some cases, purchase weapons for the settlers within them. In many cases, including that of American Friends of Ariel Inc., the organization does not make substantial efforts to disguise the fact that the US based tax exempt entity is nothing more than a shell organization being used to transfer money abroad.
For example, the president of American Friends of Ariel, Ron Nachman, also happens to be the longtime mayor of Ariel. The sole programmatic function of American Friends of Ariel is to transfer funds to a non-exempt organization based in Ariel called the Ariel Development Fund, also controlled by Nachman, which describes itself simply as the “fundraising arm of the city of Ariel.” Under Ron Nachman’s leadership, American Friends of Ariel transferred more than $5 million to the Ariel Development Fund over the last several years.
It is worth noting that much of the funding for American Friends of Ariel has come from Christian Zionist groups, and in general, these groups have played an increasingly dominant role in the financial and political support for the illegal Israeli settlement enterprise.
Devastating impact
The work of American Friends of Ariel Inc., and the many tax-exempt organizations like it, is having a devastating impact on local Palestinian communities. A recent report by the UN Office of Humanitarian Affairs, covered by the Ma’an News Agency, described the “alarming trends of forced displacement of Palestinians in Area C” as a result of settlement expansion, and found that “more demolitions have taken place so far in 2011 than in all of 2009 and 2010 combined” (“UN: Marked increase in forced displacement of Palestinians,” 21 July 2011).
In addition to the gross human rights violations inherent in illegal Israeli settlement expansion, US taxpayers simply cannot afford to build homes and walls in illegal Israeli settlements while record numbers of Americans are losing their homes, and unmet domestic needs in the US are at an all time high.
American Friends of Ariel, and the vast number of organizations like it, not only violate Palestinian human rights, they violate US laws. American Friends of Ariel Inc. flouts US laws in two ways.
The first has to do with the structure of the organization, and the fact that most of these tax exempt 501(c)3 organizations are simply shells that transfer money to non-exempt organizations abroad, and the second deals with the exempt purposes set forth by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and Treasury Department.
The rule concerning the use of tax exempt entities as conduit organizations is clear, and states that “the code would be nullified if contributions inevitably committed to a foreign organization were held to be deductible solely because, in the course of transmittal to a foreign organization, they came to rest momentarily in a qualifying domestic organization” (Section 170(c)(2)(A)). That is exactly the case with American Friends of Ariel Inc., and hundreds of organizations like it, a fact which is abundantly clear upon review of their publicly available 990 tax forms.
Exacerbating poverty and neighborhood tensions
The second major legal violation occurs because these organizations fundamentally violate the purpose for which charities can be organized, namely to provide “relief of the poor, the distressed, or the underprivileged; lessening neighborhood tensions; eliminating prejudice and discrimination; defending human and civil rights secured by law; and combating community deterioration and juvenile delinquency.”
Illegal Israeli settlements, mostly built on expropriated land and operated with stolen resources, exacerbate poverty and systematically create an underprivileged class of people. Race-based colonies inherently increase neighborhood tensions, and they effectively annex occupied Palestinian land through a system of apartheid infrastructure that has been detrimental to Palestinian communities across the West Bank, including occupied East Jerusalem.
The raison d’etre of illegal Israeli settlements is rooted in institutionalized discrimination, and therefore technically violates IRS regulations on a daily basis in the same way that Bob Jones University violated those same regulations barring discrimination (Bob Jones University v United States).
In 1983, the Supreme Court ruled that the IRS had the authority to revoke the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University because they openly discriminated against interracially married individuals. The court ruled that such behavior was “wholly incompatible with the concepts underlying tax exemption,” and clarified by stating that “whatever may be the rationale for such private schools’ policies, racial discrimination in education is contrary to public policy.” Fundamental human rights like equality are not confined by jurisdiction, and organizations operating abroad are similarly bound to respect and uphold them.
The numerous and flagrant violations of the tax-exempt purposes set forth by the IRS and Treasury department should be reason enough to revoke the tax-exempt status of these organizations. It is hard to imagine the US playing any constructive role as an “honest broker” when in addition to providing $3 billion in annual military aid to Israel, Americans are also being forced to subsidize the construction and expansion of the same illegal settlements that our government is politely telling Israel are very unhelpful.
Because of the US government’s unwillingness to equally enforce the law, or use the proverbial stick instead of just carrots, money that would otherwise be going into our national treasury to pay down the debt or build affordable housing in the US, is instead being used to construct and defend Jewish-only colonies in the occupied West Bank.
*Mike Coogan is a member of Virginians for Middle East Peace.
Source:
http://electronicintifada.net
Posted on: 04/02/2015
Of all the hurdles to peace negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian leaders, perhaps the largest is the 150 or so Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
These communities, considered illegal by the UN, are fracturing Israel’s relationship even with its allies: The pro-Israeli head of the UK parliament’s foreign affairs committee this year declared that a decision to develop a new settlement “outraged me more than anything else in my political life.”
Despite an unofficial freeze on settlement planning, in late December the Jerusalem Planning and Budget Committee set the stage for approving building permits for some 400 homes on Palestinian land in Jerusalem, and approved a plan for 1,850 more homes in a neighbourhood that sits on the border.
While they are often thought of as the result of a religious quest by Jews to claim new territory, in fact for most settlers the reasons for moving are economic – encouraged through government-planned incentive schemes to move into occupied land. But for some, the process of living in a settlement may have a radicalizing effect.
“Quality of life”
It’s a weekday in the West Bank settlement of Ariel. Students share a cigarette break on the university campus. Two women walking their dogs chatter in Russian-accented Hebrew. Nothing suggests this is anything other than an ordinary Israeli town.
But while it is not known for a strong ideological bent or violent attacks on its Palestinian neighbours, jutting out some 16km east of the Green Line that divides Israel from the Occupied West Bank, this town of 19,000 is very much a settlement.
In Ariel, many residents live the Israeli commuter lifestyle. There is a direct motorway to Tel Aviv, less than 40km away, with buses running frequently to the capital and less often to Jerusalem, 50km away.
“People come here looking for different things,” said Avi Zimmerman, head of Ariel’s Development Fund and the de facto spokesperson for its municipality. As an observant Jew, he came eight years ago looking for a heterogeneous community.
“You’ll find people who came for the quality of life, even for the relief from the humidity of Tel Aviv.”
But the financial benefits are top for many. House prices in Israel have risen rapidly for the last seven years, with the high cost of living and food prices sparking mass protests in the summer of 2011. The average apartment in Ariel costs 1,098,774 NIS (US$280,537), a far cry from the Tel Aviv average of 2,363,268 NIS ($603,386).
Cheap rent made Noa and her boyfriend temporary settlers in 2009 when they started looking for a place near her Jerusalem university. “We were both students and we needed a cheap place to live,” explains Noa, a dance teacher in her late twenties. They couldn’t find anything in their price range in Jerusalem, but in Anatot, a community of 1,000, 7km over the Green Line, the price was right.
Amit, a 34-year-old mother of one, sees her settlement – although she doesn’t call it by that name — 5km over the Green Line as just another suburb of Jerusalem. She and her husband had lived in the city, but when they went looking for a home she wanted “a house, a garden and a parking lot. and the green parks and closeness to Jerusalem were a big thing.” She commutes to Jerusalem for work, and her husband to Tel Aviv: “I don’t see this as contested land,” she emphasizes, but “for me it’s a suburb of a big city and I come back at night.”
Government incentives
According to the Yesha Council, an organization that represents and campaigns for West Bank settlements, at last count in June 2014 there were 382,031 Jewish settlers in the West Bank, not including East Jerusalem, which Israel does not consider occupied. This draw across the Green Line has been encouraged by consecutive Israeli governments.
Much of the state’s help comes through the definition of roughly three-quarters of settlements as “national priority areas”, along with other areas that are deemed to need a boost — communities close to the borders with Lebanon or Gaza, or otherwise peripheral and underdeveloped.
National priority areas receive discounts on land and grants for mortgages, and those areas recognized by the Construction Ministry as national priority areas receive state investment in apartment infrastructure. In areas designated as the highest level of priority, there are discounts on land costs and development expenses.
Investment in settlement infrastructure such as roads is also key, and teachers who live in settlements receive generous assistance, including what the Israeli NGO B’tselem reports as 15-20 percent salary boost and government coverage for 75 percent of travel and 80 percent of home rental expenses. As national priority areas, the settlements also receive extra investment in education, including increased school hours and more funding.
Direct benefits to individuals have mostly been eliminated, with an income tax break lifted in 2003, allowing many in the settlement community to argue that that the settlements should be considered like any other Israeli city.
Avi Zimmerman, head of Ariel’s Development Fund and the de facto spokesperson for its municipality, disputes the idea of unfair economic incentives drawing people onto Palestinian land. “People talk and talk about incentivization because of the past.” Now, “there are no direct incentives — you don’t get a bank loan, (for example.)”
Natan Sachs, a fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Middle East Policy and an expert on Israeli politics, agrees that there are “no direct incentives in the sense that there aren’t grants.”
But “there are lot of ways” to encourage settlement, “in particular the cost of land and permits. There is no overt incentivizing but there is still dramatic incentivizing in real terms.”
Radicalization
The increase in “quality of life” settlers is a major shift from the settler movement’s origins in the late 1960s, when after its victory in the 1967 war with Egypt, Jordan and Syria, Israel began moving its citizens into what it refers to as Judea and Samaria, the biblical names for the occupied West Bank.
Many early settlers hoped to reclaim what they saw as biblical Israel, as Elie Pierpz, director of external affairs for the Yesha Council, explains.
“Religious consideration was a major driver of growth in the 70s and 80s. There is an ideological capacity – this is the last Zionist frontier; 100 years ago it was Tel Aviv, 60 years ago it was the Negev and the (northern part of the country), and for the last 47 years it has been Judea and Samaria.”
The phenomenon of the economic settler is a mixed bag. Ariel, for example, is a blend of immigrants from the former Soviet Union — secular and religiously observant but non ultra-Orthodox Jews.
Dror Etkes, an expert on settlements, argues that the difference in terminology between economic or quality of life settlers and their more ideological counterparts can’t really be justified — all are part of the larger occupation project, whether they like it or not.
“When ideology meets economy its always nicer, and the ideology eventually comes to align with self interest. People tell themselves stories . it’s very easy to be a settler. Whatever you don’t want to see, you don’t have to see.”
Yet settlements, even those dominated by economic migrants, can shift beliefs towards the right.
Etkes notes that several recent violent attacks on Palestinians have come from these so-called “non ideological” settlements. Last month, a bilingual Hebrew-Arabic school in Jerusalem was set ablaze. Two of the three suspects, who have confessed to the crime, hail from Beitar Illit, not previously known for its far right wing beliefs.
And even as economic settlers may see themselves as nonpolitical or even left wing — Noa says she’s “centre left, sometimes left” — by moving to the settlements, settlers’ voting patterns may change out of self-interest.
Ultraorthodox settlers are the paradigm of this change — largely poor, in the past 15 years many have moved to areas like Beitar Illit or Modi’in Ilit for cheap housing and a homogenous atmosphere, with plenty of space for their high birth rate. Historically, they were not interested in settlement or Zionist activism.
Neve Gordon, professor of politics and government at Ben-Gurion University and the author of Israel’s Occupation, points out that the parties who represent this sector have shifted its policies. “In the early 1990s the Orthodox parties were in favour of a land compromise — today, much less so, because a large percent of their constituency lives in the occupied territories: space changes consciousness.”
Obstacle to peace
The “quality of life” settler came into public consciousness after the 1993 Oslo agreement between Israeli and Palestinian leaders, when there was serious talk of territory swaps. It has long been assumed that large settlement blocs, either those close to Jerusalem such as Ma’ale Adumim, Beitar Ilit, Modi’in Ilit, or those too big to move, and strategic places like Ariel, would be included in any future two-state solution.
But continuous surveys have suggested that a large percentage of non-ideological settlers would be prepared to leave their homes and move inside the Green Line, for a price.
At the moment though, said Sachs, “there’s a perverse disincentive to leave.” The Israeli public largely sees its government as having bungled the 2005 disengagement from Gaza, with some former settlers who were dragged from their homes on TV complaining about poor compensation and the government’s inability to properly relocate them.
This makes those who might be willing to move from the West Bank, Sachs says, understandably wary. One group founded by a former Shin Bet director, Blue Light Future, advocates a unilateral and voluntary evacuation of settlers by payment.
Amit purchased her house right around the time of the Gaza pullout, and said the possibility of an eventual evacuation “was something that we did think about.” Her area was often mentioned as one that was close enough to Jerusalem to eventually be included in Israel-proper, and that was a selling point.
“If there was some compensation (as part of a peace deal) I don’t see us saying ‘we’re staying under a Palestinian government.'”
But large settlement blocs like Ariel are also unlikely to go anywhere, even in the event of an eventual peace settlement with the Palestinians. In some ways, they are simply too big to move.
To Zimmerman, who has been in Ariel for eight years, the concept of a payoff is irrelevant, as he doesn’t see the Israeli government even attempting an evacuation of Ariel. “That’s going to be handled by the elected government. They’re going to make the policy on that and the consensus in Israeli politics is that Ariel is part of Israel, period.”
It’s perhaps this certainty that has led to house prices in Ariel shooting up: In the six years up to 2013, prices of new and secondhand homes increased by 104 percent. Other settlements saw increases, including Beitar Ilit (80 percent) largely secular Efrat (77 percent), and Oranit (65 percent). While house prices in Israel proper have still outpaced those in the settlements, rising prices increase the pressure to find new settlements.
Pierpz is enthusiastic about the future of the settler project. “The extremely tight-knit communities (where hitchhiking is a way of life, doors often remain unlocked, young kids are safe on streets unsupervised late at night), are some of the reasons why people want to stay and raise multiple generations here.”
Palestinian officials have said they will take into account the motivations of settlers in negotiating the boundaries of a future Palestinian state. In the end, they see all settlements as encroaching on Palestinian land, whether the settlers have come for the fresh air and cheap accommodation or because of religious fervour.
Source:
http://www.maannews.net
Posted on: January 29, 2015
By Eric Goldstein
With Israel’s campaign season in full swing, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will add a new stop to his campaign trail. 
At U.S. House Speaker John Boehner’s invitation, Netanyahu is slated to address Congress on March 3 to advocate for a tougher line against Iran, in particular regarding the ongoing negotiations over its nuclear program. If Congress gives Netanyahu a platform to address these issues, it should also begin a conversation with President Barack Obama’s administration about how the United States can strike a blow against Israel’s continued settlement construction.
Since Netanyahu took office in March 2009, the population of Israeli settlements has grown dramatically. According to recently released Israeli government data, from the beginning of 2009 until the beginning of 2014, the settlement population grew 23 percent — more than double the rate of the overall Israeli population, which expanded 9.6 percent. In late December, another 380 new housing units in East Jerusalem settlements were approved.
This growth is partly being funded by millions of dollars from tax-exempt American charities, which help expand and support settlements. Even though this revenue stream arguably violates Internal Revenue Service rules, neither Congress nor the Obama administration has done anything to stop it.
In late September, settlers moved into 25 housing units in Silwan, an East Jerusalem neighborhood that abuts the Old City to the south and is home to 50,000 Palestinians. The move prompted the Obama administration to condemn the organization that engineered the purchase — a reference, apparently, to an Israeli association known as Elad — as one “whose agenda, by definition, stokes tensions between Israelis and Palestinians.”
Elad’s name is an acronym for “To the City of David,” the name Israelis use for Silwan. The name reflects the organization’s mission to, in its own words, “strengthen the Jewish connection” in the neighborhood, in particular, and East Jerusalem more broadly “through settlement and environmental and touristic development.” Elad’s agenda coincides with Israel’s state policy of moving its citizens into occupied territory — a position that violates international law. The Rome Statute, the treaty establishing the International Criminal Court, provides that the court may prosecute government officials responsible for the “transfer, directly or indirectly, by the Occupying Power of parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”
American taxpayers indirectly subsidize Elad’s work. In 2011 and 2012, the two most recent years for which tax filings are publicly available, Elad received around two-thirds of its donations through a New York-based charity, Friends of Ir David. The charity transferred $5.6 million in grants in 2012 and $6.9 million in grants in 2011 to Elad — almost its entire revenue stream. The founder of Elad, David Be’eri, is also a board member of the American charity.
In late October 2014, nine more Israeli families moved into Silwan. They were assisted by Ateret Cohanim, another Israeli settlement association largely funded through its U.S.-based charity, which raises between $1 million and $2 million in tax-deductible contributions annually for Ateret Cohanim’s benefit.
Israeli officials claim disingenuously that Jewish citizens are merely buying property in Arab neighborhoods. In reality, the Israeli government has collaborated closely with organizations like Elad to boost the presence of Israelis in occupied Palestinian territory, a policy that could complicate the path to any eventual solution to the conflict based on a partition of the land.
The Klugman Report, commissioned by the Israeli government in 1992 and produced by a committee headed by Haim Klugman, then director general of the Justice Ministry, revealed that Elad gained its foothold in Silwan by persuading the government to evict Palestinian families from their homes and transfer their property to Elad. This government decision was based in part onallegedly fraudulent evidence purporting to show that the land belonged to the state. Israel Nature and Parks Authority also gave Elad a contract to assist in the administration of an archeological site in Silwan, further expanding Elad’s control over the neighborhood.
In occupied East Jerusalem, Israel has built more than 50,000 housing units for Jewish Israelis in areas it declared state land. Israel still severely restricts the 39 percent of Jerusalem’s population who is Palestinian from building there, partly to implement the Jerusalem municipality’s policy of achieving a “demographic balance” of 70 percent Israeli Jews to 30 percent Palestinians in the contested city.
The role of American charities in supporting settlement construction has long been known — even if, in the words of Daniel Kurtzer, former U.S. ambassador to Israel, “it was a thing you didn’t talk about in polite company.” Breaking this taboo, Marc Ginsberg, a former U.S. ambassador to Morocco, and others have recently called on the Obama administration to stop the spigot of tax-free dollars coming from, as Ginsberg writes, “international and American ‘philanthropies’ that fund these settlements.” Internal Revenue Service rules prohibit tax-exempt organizations from engaging in, planning, or sponsoring illegal acts or acts contrary to established U.S. public policy, such as discrimination. Funding settlement expansion likely falls within that category: The United States has long called settlements “illegitimate,” and there is no question that they violate the Fourth Geneva Convention’s prohibition on transfer of civilians to occupied territory.
The Obama administration should direct the Internal Revenue Service to ensure that U.S. charities do not contribute to settlement expansion by clarifying its policy on settlements and conducting an audit of organizations that help support settlements. Members of Congress should also request that the Government Accountability Office conduct an audit of such organizations. While some tax-exempt organizations, such as the Hebron Fund and Christian Friends of Israeli Communities, make settlement expansion an explicit part of their mission, other more established charities aren’t clear about what percentage of the dollars they raise go to settlements. Nefesh B’Nefesh, an organization that encourages immigration to Israel from North America, is one non-profit that includes settlements as potential communities for immigrants in promotional material on its website.*
For decades, even as every U.S. administration condemned settlement construction, they all allowed it to continue with impunity by avoiding policies that could extract a price for the settlements’ continued expansion. The United States has consistently vetoed U.N. Security Council resolutions critical of settlements, pressured the Palestinians not to go to the International Criminal Court to examine settlements as a possible war crime, and allowed charities to freely send donations to build and expand settlements. It’s up to Congress and the Obama administration to put an end to this double standard and stop enabling Israel’s violations of international law.
*Correction: This article originally included a reference to the Jewish Agency as an organization involved in settlement expansion. This reference has been removed, as the Jewish Agency does not direct Israelis to settlements. The organization assists new immigrants in the immigration process to Israel, but does nothing to predispose them to live in any particular area of the country.
*Eric Goldstein is deputy Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch.
Source:
http://foreignpolicy.com
Posted on: 2008
By Diana Rowe
Overview: The international community agrees that the continual expansion of Israeli settlements within the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights serves as the key roadblock to peace.
Not only are the settlements deemed illegal by all readings of international law, but the majority of Israeli citizens recognize that the evacuation of settlements will be necessary if Israelis and Palestinians are ever to reach a lasting peace. Eleven months prior to the Annapolis Peace Conference in November 2007, fewer than 100 homes were scheduled to be commissioned in the settlements according to Israeli government figures. Now over 1,700 homes are scheduled for construction, and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has approved every proposal of settlement expansion since Annapolis.
While there is sufficient analysis regarding the detrimental impact of Israeli settlements on a potential peace negotiation and their alarming expansion rates, settlements are rarely spoken of in terms of their monetary price and their sources of funding. This missing piece of the discussion results from the fact that concrete figures for Israel’s investment into illegal settlements do not exist. Calculating an exact figure is essentially impossible because the majority of funding is allocated through winks and nods in a state budget that does not distinguish between which funds are channeling to Israel proper and which are being used in the Occupied Territories of Palestine.
The Illegal Status of Settlements
Israeli settlements in the occupied Arab lands are illegal under every reading of international law and are not recognized by any country outside Israel, including the United States. Their violations include the following:
Article 49, paragraph six of the Fourth Geneva Convention explicitly stipulates that “the occupying power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”
-Article 46 and 55 of the Hague Convention prohibit the confiscation of private property in occupied territory and stipulates that “the occupying state shall be regarded only as administrator and usufructuary of public buildings, real estate, forests, and agricultural estates belonging to the hostile State, and situated in the occupied country. It must safeguard the capital of these properties, and administer them in accordance with the rules of usufruct,” respectively.
-United Nations (UN) Security Council Resolution 465 states that “Israel’s policy and practices of settling parts of its population and new immigrants” in the Occupied Territories constitutes “a serious obstruction to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East.” The Security Council called upon Israel to “dismantle the existing settlements and in particular to cease, on an urgent basis, the establishment, construction or planning of settlements in the Arab territories occupied since 1967, including Jerusalem.”
-The 2004 ruling of the International Court of Justice in The Hague declared that “Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, are illegal and an obstacle to peace and to economic and social development.”
The building of settlements began after the 1967 war when Israel took control of Arab lands in the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula, but expansion did not take a strong-hold until the Likud party gained power in 1977 which has since spearheaded the majority of support within the government. Despite the international condemnation of the settlements, the Israeli government, regardless of which party holds the majority in Parliament, continues to support settlements in an effort to appease right-wing religious camp within Israel that possess power to diminish political leverage.
Many Israeli government officials attempt to justify settlement expansion by insisting that the majority of expansion is taking place in what has come to be known as “settlement blocs.” According to Americans for Peace Now, “a’ settlement bloc’ is an informal term, referring to areas in the West Bank where clusters of settlements have been established in relatively close proximity to one another.” Such a term has become a code name for areas which are supposedly within the Israeli national “consensus” as being settlements which should, and likely will remain a part of Israel proper under any potential peace agreement. Yet, these “settlement blocs” have no legal definition or standing under either Israeli or international law.
The Israeli governments of the past and present have invested heavily into the “settlement blocs” to make it appear as though they are a part of Israel proper, despite the fact that they have never been officially annexed. Settlements such as Ma’ale Adumim, Modi’in Illit and Beitar Illit are each home to more than 30,000 people, not including their surrounding “suburb” communities, and have been named official cities by the state of Israel.
To keep reading the full report click here
Source:
http://www.thejerusalemfund.org
Posted on: Mar 4 2015
By Nathan Guttman
It’s an unwritten arrangement 
Jewish leaders and Israel have kept for decades — though few Jews know about it: The government of Israel uses one of world Jewry’s main Zionist funding instruments to hide money that it channels secretly to exclusively Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank.
The funding body is the World Zionist Organization, set up to represent all Jews who support the concept of a Jewish state. For more than a century, the WZO, founded by Theodor Herzl at the first Zionist Congress, has served to gather the Zionist movement’s members under one nonpartisan umbrella.
But for decades, the Israeli government, with the tacit consent of Diaspora Jewish leaders, has taken one branch of this group, the Settlement Division, and turned it into a covert cash box for bankrolling settlement activity off the government’s own books.
Now, a sudden spike in public attention and an unexpected vote at the WZO’s governing body meeting could bring an end to this arrangement and dry up one of the key funding vehicles of West Bank settlements.
The WZO’s executive committee’s February 19 vote adopting two resolutions put forth by progressive Zionist groups would essentially close the loophole that allowed money to flow to settlements without public scrutiny. The resolutions require more control over the funding branch and full transparency for its activities.
“There’s never been transparency, so no one knows what money comes in and goes out,” said Judy Gelman, a representative of the progressive Hatikvah slate at the WZO that submitted the resolution. “So to see this happen is a major, major achievement. Diaspora Jewry wants to see where the money is going.”
The complex funding mechanism used by the WZO evolved through years of cooperation with the Israeli government. After the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, the WZO, as well as its sister organization, the Jewish Agency for Israel, adjusted its role and became an umbrella organization in which representatives from Israel and from Jewish communities abroad provide funding for settlements, education, immigration to Israel, and combating anti-Semitism.
In the Zionist Congress, the WZO’s top governing body, 38% of the members represent Israeli political parties; 29% are from American Zionist movements; and 33% are from other Jewish communities. For years, the head of the WZO also headed the Jewish Agency for Israel, but in 2009 the positions were separated; the WZO is currently headed by Avraham Duvdevani, a member of Yisrael Beiteinu, the right-wing party led by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman.
As Israel’s settlement activity in the West Bank grew, starting in the 1970s, the WZO’s Settlement Division emerged as a key force in supporting Jewish building in the Palestinian territories. This function had been previously entrusted to its partner group the Jewish Agency, which received most of its Diaspora funding from Jewish federations in North America. The reason for shift, explained Gershom Gorenberg, author of “The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977,” was to protect American donors from running into trouble with the Internal Revenue Service for sending tax exempt dollars to settlements in territories America viewed as occupied.
“It kept Jewish American philanthropists out of the settlements,” Gorenberg said. He described the creation of the WZO Settlement Division a “quasi-fiction bureaucracy.”
In the 1980s and ’90s, the Settlement Division evolved into the Israeli government’s key funding vehicle for its settlement activity in the West Bank.
While all other operations of the WZO are funded by both Diaspora funds and funds from the Israeli government, the Settlement Division is solely funded, and effectively controlled, by the government. An agreement signed in 2000 between WZO and the Israeli government defines the Settlement Division’s mandate as developing Jewish settlements in the Golan Heights, Samaria, Judea, the Jordan Valley, and, until Israel’s disengagement, the Gaza Strip. Later on, areas of the Galilee and the Negev, which are part of Israel proper, were added to the division’s jurisdiction.
What made WZO’s Settlement Division such an attractive conduit for government funds was the fact that it is not a government body. As such, it is not subject to transparency rules, nor does it have to abide by disclosure rules that regulate governmental institutions. “It’s a great hideout,” said a former Israeli government official.
Information about the Settlement Division’s financial activity is anecdotal. In a 1999 report, Israel’s state comptroller confirmed that “the entire budget of the division comes from the government budget.” The comptroller’s report found that the division’s budget that year reached nearly $50 million, all directed to settlements across the Green Line.
In 2013, the Knesset’s research center compared the Settlement Division’s approved budget to its actual budget and found that it grew massively thanks to the government’s huge undisclosed infusion of funds. The Division’s central region, which includes most of its West Bank settlement activity, was allocated $1.7 million in 2013, but ended up with an increase of 2,333%, which brought its budget up to $41.8 million.
A report published last year by the liberal-leaning Molad think tank in Israel found that three-quarters of the Division’s funds go to settlements across the Green Line. The report was titled: “The secret trove of the right wing settlers.”
Recently, the WZO’s function as a non-transparent funding arm for settlements has drawn increased public attention in Israel. Much of this attention was a result of the efforts of Stav Shaffir,a leader of Israel’s social justice protest movement who was elected to the parliament in 2012. As a lawmaker, Shaffir has devoted much of her time to fighting against secret money transfers from the government’s budget.
In meetings of the Knesset’s finance committee, Shaffir was ejected from the meeting several times for trying to force lawmakers to expose the funds delivered to West Bank settlements via the WZO’s Settlement Division. Shaffir referred to the body as the “corruption division” and said it had become “a secret cash fund for the heads of Judea and Samaria settlements.”
But Shaffir’s efforts failed to open the WZO’s Settlement Division to public scrutiny. Another attempt, led by then Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, to make the division accountable to freedom of information requests, failed as well.
Then came a police investigation. On December 31, investigators from the Israeli national police’s Lahav-443 unit raided the Settlement Division’s offices and confiscated documents related to a corruption scandal involving top members of Yisrael Beiteinu party. At the core of the investigation stood claims that members of Knesset from the party used the Settlement Division to illegally transfer funds to political allies.
Yet despite these growing attempts to end the use of the Settlement Division as the government’s unofficial funding arm, it was ultimately the work of Jewish Diaspora activists, partnering with Israeli representatives to the executive committee, that succeeded in bringing the WZO’s settlement branch closer than ever to this goal.
Two resolutions approved by the body in its last meeting could potentially overturn the practice and restore world Jewry’s control over the division. The first, presented by the liberal Meretz party and approved with two-thirds of the votes, calls on the WZO to “restore the authority and complete control over the Settlement Division to the WZO.” If implemented, this would mean putting an end to the Israeli government’s sole authority over the division.
The second resolution, sponsored by the Hatikvah slate, won the votes of 74 members with only 24 opposing the measure. It demands that the Settlement Division “operate under the generally-accepted rules of transparency.” The decision will be implemented within three months. “It’s not non-transparent by accident,” Gelman told the Forward, explaining that the resolution is meant to make sure the division is no longer used as a means for hiding government funding of settlements.
Morton Klein, head of the Zionist Organization of America, which is active in the WZO, said there is no reason to believe that introducing transparency to the organization should “prevent Israel from continuing its commitment to help its citizens wherever they live.” Klein called authors of the resolution who oppose Jewish settlements in the West Bank “naive, childish, silly Jews” who believe that settlements are the key obstacle to peace.
“Recent corruption investigations of Yisrael Beiteinu and the alleged involvement of senior officials from the Settlement Division in this affair highlight the need to impose transparency on this organization,” said Dror Morag, who represents Meretz at the executive committee.
How did a body controlled by members close to Israel’s right and center-right wings approve such resolutions?
Much of it had to do with luck. Participants speculated that some American and European representatives, even from the right, felt uneasy voting against a call for transparency. Others point to a more trivial reason: Many executive members were absent, in part because of the looming snowstorm that threatened to shut down Jerusalem that night.
But even though the resolutions are now on the books and are, at least officially, binding, many suspect they’ll make no difference on the ground.
Initial reactions from officials close to the WZO indicate this suspicion could be well founded.
An Israeli political official involved with the WZO’s governing bodies said it is not clear whether the organization can enforce transparency on money coming not from WZO donors but from the government. According to the official, once a new government is formed in Israel after the March 17 elections, it will move to bypass these resolutions.
In an official response provided to The Marker, an Israeli business newspaper, Yaron Ben Ezra, director general of the Settlement Division, said that transferring responsibility for the division from the Israeli government to the WZO would only be possible “as soon as the WZO starts funding the division, which is now funded by the government.”
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Posted on: 02/11/2015
By Charlotte Silver
A group of Palestinians has decided to continue a lawsuit against several US-based “charitable organizations” accused of supporting violent Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank.
Although the case had been rejected by a judge, the group has now decided to appeal against the dismissal.
The complaint was originally filed almost two years ago on behalf of thirteen Palestinian residents of the West Bank (two of whom are US citizens), a mosque and a Greek Orthodox monastery. All of the plaintiffs have suffered attacks by settlers.
In May last year, US District Judge Jesse Furman dismissed the complaint, claiming that the plaintiffs had failed to prove the US organizations had intended to facilitate violence.
The Second Circuit Court of Appeals is scheduled to hear arguments for appeal on 15 April. If the case is allowed to go forward it will be the first time for a Palestinian to sue a US-based charity under the Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA).
The ATA allows civil action in US courts against those who allegedly support acts of terror. It has been primarily used to prosecute Muslim and Palestinian-Americans.
The plaintiffs have alleged that five US-based, tax-exempt organizations that have given large donations to settlements in the West Bank provided material support for terrorism due to the fact that settlers were known to have undertaken “price tag” attacks on Palestinians and their property. “Price tag” attacks have occurred when buildings or structures erected by settlers without permission from the Israeli authorities have been demolished.
In 2011, the US State Department referred to “price tag” attacks as “terrorist incidents.”
The plaintiffs have suffered attacks by settlers, including by gunfire, firebombs, vandalism of a church or mosque and the burning of farmland.
Tax-exempt
Melito and Adolfsen, the commercial law firm representing the plaintiffs, told The Electronic Intifada that their scope is more narrow than the judge characterized in his dismissal. Their suit is not looking at all settlements in the West Bank or alleging that all settlement activity amounts to terrorism; rather they are focusing on specific fringe settlements — Yitzhar and Bat Ayin — the residents of which espouse the most radical ideologies and carry out some of the worst violence.
These settlements, the suit alleges, have received ample funding from the five organizations that conduct their fundraising campaigns in the US with the benefit of a tax-exempt status.
For example, the Central Fund of Israel, one of the defendants named in the case, has given thousands of dollars to the Yitzhar settlement, which has advocated for such extreme violence that the Israeli army intervened last year. The Israeli government has, however, also funded the Yitzhar settlement.
In 2009, the Yitzhar settlement’s yeshiva — a religious school — published a book that provided a “justification” for killing non-Jews who allegedly pose a threat to Israel. Just last week, Israeli police seized arms from Yitzhar, which they believed were intended to be used against Palestinians.
The five organizations accused of aiding Israeli settlers are The Hebron Fund, Central Fund of Israel, One Israel Fund, Christian Friends of Israel and American Friends of Ateret Cohanim. All are based in New York.
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http://electronicintifada.net
Posted on: Mar. 11, 2015
By Josh Harkinson
A few weeks before Benjamin Netanyahu delivered his controversial address to Congress, theJerusalem Post reported that the Israeli Prime Minister was considering a campaign trip to Hebron, a right-wing settler community in the Israel-occupied West Bank.
The proposed March 10 trip to Hebron, which would have been the first by an Israeli PM in more than a decade, raised eyebrows among Israel’s political class and inflamed tensions with Palestinian groups. Last week, Netanyahu called it off, citing security threats.
Here in the United States, meanwhile, few politicians have questioned why American taxpayers continue to subsidize the Hebron settlers, accused by international observers of human rights violations that includethefts, battery, and murder. In 2003, the most recent year for which figures are available, an estimated 45 percent of the settler community’s funding came from the Brooklyn-based Hebron Fund, whose status as a tax-exempt nonprofit allows Americans to write off donations to the group.
“The Hebron Fund has supported, either directly or indirectly, a wide array of acts that are definitely not charitable,” says John Tye, the legal director for the global activist group Avaaz, which last week petitioned the IRS to revoke the Hebron Fund’s nonprofit status. “They are basically using a small group of Jewish settlers in the West Bank to push Palestinians out of their homes. These settlers are arming themselves, they are engaged in military and paramilitary acts, some of them have connections to terrorism, and they are committing a wide range of crimes against Palestinians.”
The Hebron Fund declined to make anyone available for comment for this story, or to respond to my written questions.
Hebron, a community of some 200,000 Palestinians located about 30 miles south of Jerusalem, is home to several ancient Jewish holy sites. The modern Jewish occupation began in 1967, after the Six Day War. The Hebron Fund was founded in 1979 to support the settlers, who now number around 850.
After years of conflicts between Palestinians and settlers, the historic center of Hebron has come to be known as “The Ghost Town.” It is largely abandoned, with the doors of Arab shops welded shut by Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) during the second intifada. Palestinians are forbidden from entering much of the area. In other parts of downtown Hebron, Jewish settlers live in buildings above Palestinian shops. The shopkeepers have stretched nets and metal grates over the streets to catch the garbage that settlers routinely throw from their windows:
The behavior of Jewish settlers in Hebron has been repeatedly denounced by human rights groups. In 2001, Human Rights Watch called Hebron “the site of serious and sustained human rights abuses,” including “a consistent failure [by IDF] to protect Palestinians from attacks by Israeli settlers.” In 2011, the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem wrote that settlers “have been involved in gunfire, attempts to run people over, poisoning of a water well, breaking into homes, spilling of hot liquid on the face of a Palestinian, and the killing of a young Palestinian girl.”
In 2013, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights expressed “deep concern” at the abusive treatment and harassment directed at a Palestinian activist in Hebron by settler groups and the IDF. Breaking the Silence, another Israeli human rights group comprised of IDF veterans, offers guided tours of Hebron—but only rarely, the group writes on its website, due to “the Hebron settlers’ violence towards our tours and the limited ability of the Hebron police to protect our tours from this violence.”
Just in the past two months, according to B’Tselem, vandals in the Hebron area have destroyed Palestinian olive groves in four locations.
At least one former member of a terrorist organization has joined the Hebron settlement. Baruch Marzel, a one-time spokesman for the extremist Kach Party, which is listed by the United States and Israel as a terrorist group, lives in Hebron’s Tel Rumeida outpost. In 2011, he helped organize a manhunt for a Palestinian man, Hani Jaber, who’d just been released from jail after serving 18 years for killing a Jewish settler. Posters appeared on Hebron walls with Jaber’s face and the words, “Rise up and kill him.”
At times, the Hebron Fund has specifically sought to raise money for controversial settler activities. In 2007, according to Salon, it held a fundraiser on a cruise ship in New York’s Hudson River to support a settler who’d taken property from a Palestinian family. A year and a half later, the Israeli government ruled that the house had been illegally seized from the family and ordered the settlers out. Once evicted, the settlers set fire to Palestinian houses, olive trees, and cars—25 people were wounded, including a man shot at close range.
The United States tax code does not provide detailed information about what can disqualify groups from nonprofit status, though precedent suggests that it includes illegal and discriminatory behavior. In 1974, for example, the Supreme Court ruled that the IRS was justified in revoking the nonprofit status of Bob Jones University over its refusal to admit black students.
The Hebron Fund has not released detailed financial information, making it impossible to determine whether it directly bankrolls prohibited activities. Yet Tye of Avaaz argues that the settlements’ finances are sufficiently fluid and dependent upon the Hebron Fund to make it inherently complicit in any abuses. “I can’t tell you precisely where every dollar has gone,” he says. “But when there is a doubt, the legal burden is on the Hebron Fund to produce documents that show how its money is spent.”
This isn’t the first time a group has asked the IRS to revoke the Hebron Fund’s nonprofit status. In 2009, a similar complaint was submitted by the Washington-based American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. The IRS never responded.
Though Tye believes there’s already sufficient public evidence to revoke the fund’s nonprofit status, he at least wants the IRS to conduct a thorough investigation. A spokesman for the IRS declined to comment on the case, citing a federal law that bars the agency from discussing specific taxpayers.
*** Mother Jones is a nonprofit news organization that specializes in investigative, political, and social justice reporting.
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