Soros Documents Reveal Evidence of Systemic Anti-Israel Bias
Soros Documents Highlight Irresponsible and Unaccountable Funding to Political NGOs
NGO Monitor
- On August 14, a number of leaked documents from the Open Society Foundations – a political framework funded by George Soros – were posted anonymously on the DC Leaks website. The material covered many different aspects of this activity around the world. For background information on OSF and other Soros funding mechanisms, see Bad Investment: The Philanthropy of George Soros and the Arab-Israeli Conflict (How Soros-funded Groups Increase Tensions in a Troubled Region), Alexander H. Joffe and Gerald M. Steinberg, NGO Monitor, 2013.
- OSF’s declared objective is “to work to build vibrant and tolerant democracies whose governments are accountable and open to the participation of all people.” This is the basis for OSF’s often intrusive activities in both closed and democratic societies, including large scale funding of political NGOs.
- A number of these as yet unverified documents deal with OSF’s grants to political NGOs through its “Arab Regional Office (ARO) – Palestinian Citizens of Israel” department. Headed by Ammar Abu Zayyad, the ARO is one of a number of funding mechanisms for Israeli and Palestinian NGO’s in the OSF network.
- The secrecy and lack of transparency inherent in the OSF’s activities is highlighted in the ARO documents: “For a variety of reasons, we wanted to construct a diversified portfolio of grants dealing with Israel and Palestine, funding both Israeli Jewish and PCI (Palestinian Citizens of Israel) groups as well as building a portfolio of Palestinian grants and in all cases to maintain a low profile and relative distance—particularly on the advocacy front.”
- The list of ARO grantees (current and discontinued) is located here. (See screenshots attached). The 2013 NGO Monitor report includes a number of Soros funding frameworks that are not included in the leaked documents, meaning that- if they are accurate- the actual funding is significantly higher than indicated by this leak.
- The US-based New Israel Fund (NIF), funder of such politicized NGOs such as Adalah, B’Tselem, Breaking the Silence and others, received $837,000, including for the advancement of Palestinian legal advocacy.
- In addition, ARO funds a number of Israeli NGOs in the NIF network, including some recipients that deny the legitimacy of Israel and Jewish sovereignty, and are involved in demonization campaigns. Grantees include Adalah ($2.7 million), Mossawa ($260,000), Mada al Carmel ($700,000), and I’lam ($1.08 million), which criticizes Israeli media for its coverage of the Nakba.
- In addition to direct funds, OSF facilitates lobbying efforts for its grantees in both the U.S. and the EU. This support amplifies the anti-Israel narratives and messaging of these radical NGOs adding to the alienation between the EU and the Israeli public.
- Amongst the leaked files are instructions on pressuring the EU to adopt product labeling policies touted by many NGOs as the first step to EU-sponsored BDS, and supporting Palestinian ascension to the International Criminal Court (ICC).
- On Iran, one of the leaked documents details how the Open Society Foundation is comfortable to ignore the human rights of Iranian citizens in order to promote a political agenda: “Human rights defense work remains an important priority for the Iran Program, but should not be pursued to the exclusion of all other work, including work on supporting better policy outcomes such as support for a nuclear deal with Iran.”
DC Leaks Publishes George Soros’ Files Showing Millions Contributed to Anti-Israel Causes
Jewish Hungarian-American business magnate George Soros, whose company files were hacked by the same outfit that in June hacked the DNC computers, was a major contributor to anti-Israel and anti-Zionist causes, as appears from an archive of leaked documents of the DC Leaks website.
Soros, one of the 30 richest people in the world, is known as “The Man Who Broke the Bank of England” in 1992 with his short sale of $10 billion in British pounds, which made him a profit of $1 billion and brought Black Wednesday upon the UK currency, has a special spot for groups that fight Israel and Israelis on multiple levels.
The list of groups hostile to Zionism and to the Jewish State that received funds from Soros is very long:
Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, received a $400,000 grant in 2014-15 and 14 additional grants since 2001 totaling $2,688,561. The recently released document under the banner of the Movement for Black Lives, labeling Israel as an “apartheid state” and accusing Israel of committing “genocide” against Arabs, is the handiwork of Nadia Ben-Youssef, Adalah’s US representative, which the document lists as an “author and contributor.”
Incidentally, according to NGO Monitor, Adalah’s promotion of BDS directly contravenes the stated policies of its funder, the New Israel Fund (NIF). NIF’s position on BDS states that it “will not fund global BDS activities against Israel nor support organizations that have global BDS programs.” Nevertheless, from 2008-2015, NIF donated $1,975,826 to Adalah.
And, lo and behold, NIF is also listed as a recipient of Soros’ support, 9 grants totaling $837,500 since 2009. One of these grants, for $60,000, was given in 2015 to the Herman Schwartz Human Rights Law Fellowship, to “strengthen the capacities of young Palestinian legal professionals in legal advocacy by undertaking an LL.M. degree in human rights law in the US along with internships opportunities in Israel.”
Talk about Tikkun Olam…
Soros Hack Reveals Evidence of Systemic Anti-Israel Bias
Liel Leibovitz is a senior writer for Tablet Magazine
The Open Society Foundations, the network of philanthropic organizations funded by billionaire George Soros, appears to have been hacked earlier this weekend, and its confidential reports made available on the website DC Leaks. These newly revealed documents provide a granular look into the extent of the network’s operations in Israel and the Palestinian Authority, with millions of dollars designated annually to organizations highly critical of the Jewish state, some of whom deny its right to exist.
Even more troubling, the documents repeatedly indicate that the network actively tried to conceal its engagements in Israel and the Palestinian territories, and has worked to set up an extensive network of organizations designed to support and promote its views. “For a variety of reasons,” reads the report, “we wanted to construct a diversified portfolio of grants dealing with Israel and Palestine, funding both Israeli Jewish and PCI (Palestinian Citizens of Israel) groups as well as building a portfolio of Palestinian grants and in all cases to maintain a low profile and relative distance—particularly on the advocacy front.”
According to one document, for example, the Arab Regional Office Presidential Portfolio Review, dated August 6, 2015, the Soros network has given $2,688,561 in 14 grants since 2001 to Adalah. A self-described “independent human rights organization” that has been instrumental in accusing Israel of war crimes on numerous occasions in international forums, Adalah has called on governments the world over to sever or downgrade their diplomatic relations with Israel. An additional $1,083,000 in nine grants since 2003 went to I’lam, a Nazareth-based Palestinian media center. In a 2014 publication about the Nakba—the name Palestinians give the creation of the state of Israel, literally meaning “catastrophe”—the center accused Israel of ethnic cleansing and argued that “the practical meaning of the Nakba undermines the moral and ethical foundation of Zionism and, hence, of the State of Israel.” Other similar-minded organizations received similarly large grants, sometimes through the auspices of another Soros grantee, the New Israel Fund, which supported many of the same NGOs.
But perhaps more instructive than the list of grantees itself is Arab Regional Office’s 2014 portfolio review document of the Palestine/Israel international advocacy portfolio, a deep and candid dive into the Soros network’s goals and ambitions in the region.
The ARO, the report indicates, was motivated in part by what it perceived as “a particular shift in political dynamics particularly in the US reflected by the publication of the Walt and Mearsheimer article ‘The Israel Lobby’ in Spring 2006 which pointed out the lobby’s role in, among other things, influencing the Iraq invasion.” Another encouraging shift, according to the report, is the rise of the international movement to boycott Israel: “A number of factors make this a good moment to review this portfolio,” it reads, “including some new or improved opportunities we may choose to exploit. In recent years there’s been heightened international solidarity around Palestinians’ rights, the rise of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement and other economic levers, and increased use and traction of arts and culture by Palestinians as a means to raise awareness of violations and the impact of the conflict.”
Rather than try and impact the conflict, however, by supporting organizations working to directly persuade the concerned parties—namely, Israelis and Palestinians—of the necessity of more equitable conditions for the benefit of both sides, the Open Society Foundations, ironically, took a much less democratic approach and instead focused exclusively on exerting outside pressure on the Israeli government. The ARO, the report indicated,
pursued the following objectives:
1. Local groups are capable of more frequent and effective international advocacy in the US and EU, particularly by Palestinian voices.
2. A dedicated advocacy platform is formed to provide Palestinian and Israeli groups with access to technical resources and knowhow to develop D.C. advocacy.
3. Enhance the capacity and effectiveness of EU advocacy through direct support to local groups and advocacy platforms alike.
4. Civil society actors are better equipped and positioned to rapidly respond to emergencies, and grave violations or concerns for human rights.
The Soros network, the report shows, has also been methodical about supporting a diverse number of groups in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, creating a web of small organizations supporting each other’s goals in the media, vis-à-vis foreign governments, and elsewhere. This, traditionally, is how an echo chamber works: by creating an enclosed system of like-minded partisans that appears sufficiently diverse in scope, it is often able to amplify its messages and lend them credibility. A number of the Soros-funded organizations, for example, including Adalah and others, have been key in promoting the false accusation that the Israel Defense Forces wantonly massacred innocent Palestinian civilians in Jenin in 2002. Coming from a plethora of well-funded Israeli and Palestinian NGOs, all geared exclusively towards communicating with European and American government and lobbying groups, these false accusations were reported extensively in the international media and were widely considered factually true.
Further revelations are likely to emerge as the large-scale document dump continues to be studied, but, for now, there can be little doubt about the Soros-funded extensive and deliberate effort to delegitimize Israel while doing comparatively very little to address real human rights abuses in the Palestinian Authority or elsewhere in the region.
