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.”

Source:

http://www.councilforthenationalinterest.org

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.

Source:

http://electronicintifada.net