Central Fund of Israel - tax-subsidized funding from America for terrorism

[yankeedoodle]

Rebuffed privately, influential rabbis go public with plea to cut off American Jewish funding of Israeli extremists
https://www.jta.org/2022/04/07/israel/rebuffed-privately-influential-rabbis-go-public-with-plea-to-cut-off-american-jewish-funding-of-israeli-extremists

In the wake of last year's round of deadly fighting in Gaza, a group of prominent rabbis in the New York area came to believe that a major American Jewish charity had indirectly fueled the violence.

In a letter to the charity, the 19 rabbis, including ones with national renown such as Angela Buchdahl, Sharon Kleinbaum and Amichai Lau-Lavie, pointed out that it was allowing tax-exempt funds to flow to Israeli right-wing extremists.  https://www.jta.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Truah-rabbis-letter-to-JCF-Central-Fund.pdf

As a donor-advised fund, the $2.4 billion Jewish Communal Fund accepts donations from thousands of individuals and distributes the money according to their recommendations.

Some money, the rabbis said, is going to Lehava, a group known for their incendiary marches through Palestinian neighborhoods of Jerusalem involving participants chanting "death to the Arabs." Lehava carried out such a march before fighting between Israel and Hamas broke out last year.

"We value robust debate within the Jewish community and appreciate JCF's commitment to fund groups that represent a wide range of political positions," the rabbis wrote in their letter, which they followed up with a request for a meeting. "However, incitement and violence are not legitimate political positions."

The charity rebuffed the rabbis, declining the meeting request and ignoring their call to amend its funding practices and end payments to "organizations that support violence."

Now, as new deaths are being tolled and far-right groups agitate once again — Lehava-affiliated lawmaker Itamar Ben-Gvir ascended the Temple Mount last week just ahead of Ramadan — the rabbis are going public with their plea.

The organizer of the letter, Rabbi Jill Jacobs, who serves as the CEO of the human rights group T'ruah, said recent events prompted all but one of the 19 signatories to come forward.

"Itamar Ben-Gvir has been escalating his provocations, and we are concerned that money going to Lehava [and others] will help to incite major violence," Jacobs told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. "We believe that donors who entrust their charitable donations to the Jewish Communal Fund should know that they are helping to subsidize violent extremists."

Many of the signatories are known for their activism around social justice, and the group leans heavily progressive in terms of denomination. Only one rabbi who signed, Avraham Bronstein of the Hampton Synagogue on Long Island, leads an Orthodox congregation.

Perhaps the most prominent of the signatories is Buchdahl, the senior rabbi of New York's Central Synagogue, among the largest Jewish congregations in the country. She made headlines at the outset of her career when she became the first Asian American to be ordained as a rabbi in 2001. Last year she was a "Jeopardy!" clue, and this year her name was in the news because she spoke on the phone with the gunman who held Jews hostage in their Texas synagogue. He had asked to speak to her because he was under the impression that Buchdahl was "the chief rabbi of America," a title that does not exist.

Kleinbaum, meanwhile, leads Congregation Beit Simchat Torah in New York and is known for her LGBTQ advocacy. She was one of President Joe Biden's picks for the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. Then there's Lau-Lavie, the spiritual leader of the hip downtown New York Lab/Shul NYC community, who is also a performance artist, an advocate for more lax practices around intermarriage and a scion to an illustrious rabbinic family.

In their June 2021 letter, the rabbis focused on charitable donations from the Jewish Communal Fund to another U.S. nonprofit, the Central Fund of Israel.

The latter organization has been attracting criticism for over a decade because it is used as a financial conduit by extremist groups in Israel when they solicit donations in the United States. https://www.jta.org/2015/08/24/united-states/is-u-s-taxpayer-money-subsidizing-jewish-terrorism-against-arabs

Besides Lehava, the Central Fund has been linked to groups such as Honenu, which gives money to Israeli Jews convicted of violent acts against Palestinians, and Im Tirtzu, which once released a viral video in which it labeled the leaders of four major Israeli human rights organizations "foreign agents," predictably igniting a wave of death threats. The Central Fund also funnels donations to a West Bank yeshiva called Od Yosef Chai, whose rabbi was convicted last year in an Israeli court of inciting violence against Palestinians.

Critics such as Jacobs, the head of T'ruah, have long said that the Central Fund is abusing its nonprofit status. In 2015, Jacobs filed a complaint with the IRS, which appears to have triggered an investigation by law enforcement officials.

Jacobs learned that her complaint had been picked up when she received an email from IRS Investigation Special Agent Dan McWilliams.

"I work very closely with the IRS personnel that work charity investigations full time," McWilliams wrote in the email, which has not been previously reported. "I would like to speak to you about these organizations."

He also wrote that he would be reaching out to the Interpol unit at the Israel Police and the Israel Tax Authority's narcotics and money laundering unit. 

McWilliams' email suggests that the IRS opened an investigation into the Central Fund of Israel, according to Marcus Owens, a former director of the Exempt Organizations Division at IRS. Owens now works for the law firm Loeb & Loeb LLP, advising nonprofits that are undergoing government investigations.

"The IRS receives a fair number of complaints and doesn't have the resources to follow up on many of them," Owens told the JTA. "What that [email] means is the IRS did read the complaint and did decide there was enough to open an investigation."

The fact that Central Fund still operates as a nonprofit more than six years later means the investigation was closed, according to Owens.

A representative of the Central Fund told Haaretz in 2016 that the IRS had come looking but found nothing improper. The group did not respond to a request for comment. McWilliams referred a JTA inquiry to the IRS's press office, which did not respond to questions.

The result of the 2016 presidential election could have played a role in whatever transpired.

"The Trump administration came in and basically closed down the IRS for all intents and purposes," Owens said. The defunding of the IRS ramped up under President Donald Trump but it had started years earlier.

In the years since the Central Fund first attracted scrutiny, it has not only managed to shrug off its critics but has also expanded rapidly — revenues have quadrupled from $12 million in 2012 to $48 million last year, according to IRS data.

To the dismay of rabbis who signed the letter, the Jewish Communal Fund is one of the major backers of the Central Fund, giving $1.6 million last year, and a total of $23 million since 2002, according to IRS records.

A mainstream charity with ties to the UJA-Federation of New York, the Jewish Communal Fund operates as a donor-advised fund. (UJA-New York supports 70 Faces Media, JTA's parent company.) As such, it collects contributions from individuals, rewarding donors with anonymity and an immediate tax break, and doles out the money according to the recommendation of the donors.

Of $520 million distributed to 10,325 grantees in the year ending June 2021, the vast majority went to unobjectionable entities like schools, libraries and health centers. According to the rabbis' letter, however, the Jewish Communal Fund should draw a line against a certain category of donations, rejecting requests by donors to pass money to the Central Fund of Israel. The letter asks the JCF to publish funding guidelines to "ensure that funding does not reach other organizations that support violence in Israel, in the United States, or anywhere else."

The letter's recipient, JCF's CEO Susan Dickman, did not respond to a request for comment.

JCF is far from the only Jewish charity contributing to the Central Fund. In an analysis IRS data, JTA found dozens of Jewish donors to the Central Fund, including the Houston Jewish Community Foundation and the Karen Tikvah Foundation.

Donor-advised funds in the Jewish world, such as JCF, have come under increased scrutiny in recent years with questions about what criteria they use to screen donor requests. A few have taken action as a result: In 2018, the San Francisco Jewish Community Federation, a major Jewish charity, said it would stop directing donations to the Central Fund after the Forward revealed payments to Canary Mission, an online blacklist targeting college students who criticize Israel.

Virtually all Jewish funds have some rules or expectations arising from mission statements and guidelines, but there's pressure to acquiesce to donor priorities, whatever they may be, according to Lila Corwin Berman, a professor of history at Temple University who has studied Jewish philanthropy extensively.

"There are very few cases of an organization saying, 'No, we are not going to do what you want with the money,'" Berman said. Part of the reason is that donors can bypass restrictions imposed by Jewish entities and go with commercial firms like Fidelity and Charles Schwab.

"There is now a much wider landscape of funds that are free of any mission-driven impetus," Berman said. "With the rise of those options, it's so much harder for Jewish groups because their customers, so to speak, can walk."

In their letter, the rabbis acknowledged that a decision in their favor would hardly limit the flow of cash to the Israeli groups. 

"While ending grants to the Central Fund of Israel will not shut down Lehava or the other extremist groups, doing so will send a clear message that New York Jews refuse to tolerate violence," they wrote.

[yankeedoodle]

US charitable donations are funding the displacement of Palestinians
Join the Campaign to Defund Racism, which seeks to stop the exploitation of U.S. charitable status to fund Israeli settler-colonialism.
https://mondoweiss.net/2022/04/us-charitable-donations-are-funding-the-displacement-of-palestinians/?utm_source=mailpoet&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=daily-email-hgs-mailpoet

Editor's Note: A version of the following article first appeared in Truthout on April 4, 2022.  https://truthout.org/articles/us-charitable-donations-are-funding-displacement-of-palestinians/

Several gunshot bangs pierced the sky. Israeli soldiers shot a Palestinian protester with live ammunition. Chants and cheers from Israeli settlers from Modi'in Illit rang out through the air as they stood upon a mound of dirt overlooking the Israeli apartheid wall. Israeli soldiers fired multiple rounds of tear gas into the crowds. As protesters scattered to evade the gas and live fire, young volunteer Palestinian paramedics darted through the tear gas to quickly grab and attend to the injured. That five minutes of Palestinian nonviolent resistance on April 1, 2022, captured the essence of Land Day: Despite facing the heavy hand of the Israeli military, Palestinian protesters and international solidarity activists refused to leave their land.

https://twitter.com/Shepherds4Good/status/1509856036898979843?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1509856036898979843%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fmondoweiss.net%2F2022%2F04%2Fus-charitable-donations-are-funding-the-displacement-of-palestinians%2F

It's been 46 years since Land Day, a day when Palestinians organized en masse against the Israeli government's program of colonization and Indigenous erasure. On March 30, 1976, Palestinians took to their ancestral lands as an act of sumud, of steadfastness, organizing a general strike and protest marches in response to the Israeli government's decision to confiscate another 20,000 dunams (about 5,000 acres) of Palestinian land in the Galilee. The Israeli state had already taken some 75,000 dunums from the Indigenous communities the previous decade.

Every year since then, many of us have taken time at the end of March to remember the lives of the Palestinian protesters that Israel killed that day: Khair Muhammad Yasin from Arrabeh; Raja Hussein Abu Riya, Khader Abd Khalaila and Khadija Shuwahna from Sakhnin; Muhsin Yusuf Taha from Kafr Kana and Rafat Zuhairi from Nur Shams.

In the Palestinian village of Bil'in, our community honors Land Day and our own family members who resisted Israel's attempt to take our lands — Bassem Abu Rahma, Islam Bornat and Jawaher Abu Rahma — who were all murdered by Israeli forces.

Land Day has always been a point of national unity, bringing together Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line to resist Israeli colonization. Back in 1976, when the first Land Day occurred, Palestinians understood full well that the land grab by the Israeli government served several purposes. First, the intent was to expand the Jewish-only settlement of Carmiel in the north as a tactic to limit the natural growth of Palestinian towns. Israel's planning regime has always operated on the premise that by taking away the lands of the surrounding Palestinian villages, the communities would have nowhere left to build — that those families would eventually leave for a life outside of historic Palestine.

Today, it is easy to see this tactic play out over and over again, whether in the expansions of the Har Homa, Gilo and Efrat settlements that sealed in and cut off Bethlehem, or in the building up of the settlements in the Jordan Valley to push Palestinians into ethnic enclaves. For our community of Bil'in, a community of fewer than 3,000 people, Israel has used myriad colonial tactics to take over our land to expand the Modi'in and surrounding outposts. Secondly, taking the land not only restricted the geographical area, but it also transferred material wealth from the local communities to the settlers that came from abroad. This took away millions and millions of dollars of generational wealth that would have otherwise been passed down from generation to generation.

So for the communities of northern Palestine calling for mass mobilization to preserve their lands — Sakhnin, Arrabeh, Deir Hanna, and others — their future was paramount. Like Palestinians have been doing for generations, they took to the streets knowing that they would face the heavy-handed violence of the Israeli state — and that some would likely pay for their resistance to colonial violence with their lives.

As Palestinians made this call to resist, leaders within the Israeli government and significant figures of the Israeli public made demands to "crush" our resolve. On March 28, 1976, the Israeli Minister of Police Shlomo Hillel declared that officers were "ready to break the Arab villages." Israeli newspapers attempted to delegitimize the resistance, called it "a Moscow-led operation to destroy the state." Others branded it as a violent, racist movement. Then-Minister of Education Zevulun Hammer described Palestinians "as being a cancer unto the land" — land that had always belonged to Palestinians. With Israel's general public calling for open violence against these Palestinian communities, days before the protest was even to be held, Israel sent a heavy military presence to the villages, including armored cars. Every Palestinian knew that attending the protest was risking their lives. Not only were they facing physical assaults from the Israeli forces, they were also facing the financial risk of consequences by their Israeli employers for standing up for their own basic human rights.

In Bil'in, we have continued this tradition of steadfast resistance to colonization.  Starting in 2005, residents of the community have organized weekly protests against the construction of the apartheid wall and Israeli land theft, literally putting our bodies on the line to defend our lands and illustrate the depth to which we are dedicated to Palestinian rights and self-determination. We have continued on despite the massive personal losses we have endured, including the deaths of our friends and family members, as a result of the violence we face in taking this public stand against Israeli settler-colonialism. We know that without being willing to risk sacrifices of time, energy, resources, and even our bodies and lives, we will not be able to protect — let alone decolonize — an inch of our land.

We have initiated the Campaign to Defund Racism https://defundracism.org/ in honor of this tradition, and in light of the vital need to address the structures that allow Israeli settlement to continue. This campaign seeks to stop the exploitation of U.S. charitable status to fund the Israeli settler movement. The campaign addresses the financing of Israeli settler-colonialism, and responds to the decades-long battle to protect our lands and resources from the Galilee to Sheikh Jarrah to Bil'in to the Naqab. As settler organizations coordinate the theft of church properties in Jerusalem and build pressure on the state to displace Naqab Bedouins, we need our allies to take a proactive approach to change the laws in their communities to support our struggle on the ground.

These settler organizations — the Israel Land Fund, Ateret Cohanim, Regavim, and others — are the organizations that use hundreds of millions of dollars to shape Israel's program of Indigenous displacement. Look at Regavim, which is using U.S. charitable dollars to evict the community of Khan Ahmar. Ateret Cohanim is taking over the Petra Hotel at the Jaffa Gate. Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem and founder of the Israeli Land Fund, Arieh King, targets the families of Sheikh Jarrah.

The Palestinians who are most at risk are calling on U.S. attorneys general to enforce the policies guiding charitable funding, cutting off the material resources of the settler organizations that are systematically and discriminatorily targeting our families for displacement. As Palestinians continue to sacrifice their livelihoods and risk their lives to protest and challenge Israel's system of apartheid and settler colonialism, we are calling on people of conscience in the United States to stand in solidarity with vulnerable Palestinian communities. U.S. residents can join us in calling on their local representatives and elected officials, demanding that they take action to ensure that U.S. charitable donations are not financing ethnic cleansing and forced displacement.