Tag Archives: Israel Lobby

May 16 Capitol Calling Party: Palestine & the Nakba

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May 16, 2023 at 7:00pm – 8:00pm (CDT)
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On Tuesday, May 16, in honor of the million Palestinians driven from their homes in the 1948 Nakba, CODEPINK Congress invites you to join us as we examine the Palestinian resistance movement 75 years later.

From challenging censorship to organizing campus divest campaigns to expressing solidarity with Palestinians under attack, CODEPINK Congress will offer concrete suggestions for countering the power of the Israel lobby to suppress debate in Congress and educational institutions.

Our conversation will expose the Israel lobby’s intimidation tactics to silence the truth amid increasing Israeli state-enforced violence against Palestinians, including attacks in Gaza that kill entire families in an effort to assassinate resistance leaders. 

Featuring:

Huwaida Arraf is a Palestinian American activist and civil rights attorney who co-founded the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a Palestinian-led organization using non-violent protests and international pressure to support Palestinians. In March, Arraf became the target of vicious lies after speaking about anti-Palestinian racism at an event on diversity and equity at a Detroit high school. Her appearance sparked such controversy the school’s principal, as well as the district’s superintendent, resigned! 

Noura Khouri is Palestinian from the Bay Area/Ohlone land and has worked for the past two decades as a human rights activist, campaign strategist and community organizer. She lived in Palestine and Egypt, prior to which she co-led the Middle East Peace Program for the American Friends Service Committee. Noura currently works as a preschool teacher, and serves as an Al-Awda Palestine right to return coalition, national committee member, Green Party delegate and is part of Beloved Community circles – where she conspires to destroy walls, and build bridges of solidarity at the intersections of labor, faith and social justice.

Taher Herzallah is the Director of Outreach & Community Organizing for American Muslims for Palestine (known as AMP). He helps build campus groups and develop AMP chapters across the country. Tahir was one of the ‘Irvine 11,’ a group of students who were prosecuted when they walked out of a speech given by Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren at UC Irvine in 2010. He was also  arrested at a Senate Hearing for protesting the appointment of David Friedman as US ambassador to Israel in 2017. Tahir received a BA in Political Science from UC Riverside and currently doing a Ph.D. in American Studies at the University of Minnesota.

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They tried to erase us, but they failed

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Last night, Americans for Justice Palestine (AJP Action) led a historic event alongside IMEU, Project48, AFSC, USCPR, VCHR, JVP Action, DAWN, and EMGAGE Action on Capitol Hill to acknowledge the 75th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba with our partner Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib.

Rep. Tlaib and the organizers commemorated Nakba75 on Capitol Hill with an overflowing room

Far-right speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy, tried to deny us from commemorating the Nakba, our history, on Capitol grounds. But he failed. Despite his attempts to displace us from the buildings we pay for with our tax dollars, the event continued, and we were not silenced. The room was overflowing with attendees encompassing activists, advocates, reporters, and Palestinians from the homeland and diaspora. At the event, Palestinian American survivors of the Nakba shared their harrowing personal stories. Congresswoman Tlaib introduced a historical Nakba resolution alongside five cosponsors.

Rep. Tlaib honored a Nakba survivor with a signed copy of her Nakba resolution

McCarthy and his likes attempted to whitewash our history this week by denying the truth of what happened to Palestinians and trying to stop us from conveying what happened to Palestinians during the Nakba in 1948. The Nakba has shaped every Palestinian’s life and is the root cause of injustices Palestinians face today. Palestinians were massacred, families separated, and hundreds of Palestinian towns were destroyed for Israel to be established, leading to the violent expulsion of 75 percent of the Palestinian population. This was and continues to be a “catastrophe” for Palestinians, most of whom have never been able to return to their homes and continue facing daily Israeli violence, occupation, siege, and oppression.

This is beyond hosting an event; it’s symbolic of Palestinian resilience, resistance, proof of our authentic existence, and determination to make our true history known and recognized. 

McCarthy may be aspiring to revive his own version of McCarthyism in America, and he may be confident in his ability to achieve this. However, we assure him and those of his likes that their efforts will fail, just as he failed to silence the voice of Palestine in the House of the People.

AJP Action is proud to have been one of the lead organizers of this event, and we reiterate our commitment to fighting for the rights of Palestinians. Here is to a free and liberated Palestine.

In solidarity,

Dr. Osama Abu Irshaid

Executive Director, AJP Action

Americans for Justice in Palestine Action (AJP Action), an affiliate of American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), is a 501(c)(4) nonprofit organization lobbying for legislation that supports the human rights of the Palestinian people.

Jewish doctor denied payment for refusing Israel pledge

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Dr. Steve Feldman, pictured on a trip to the West Bank. Feldman was denied payment from the state of Arkansas for refusing to sign a pledge promising not to boycott Israel. (Courtesy of Steve Feldman)

ANDREW LAPIN, JEWISH TELEGRAPHIC AGENCY, MAY 3, 2023

Dr. Steve Feldman, a dermatologist, delivered a Zoom lecture to University of Arkansas at Little Rock medical students in February, for which he was entitled to a $500 honorarium from the state. But Feldman said that the state is withholding payment because he refused to sign a pledge, required for public contractors under Arkansas law since 2017, to commit to not boycotting Israel.

“They have a law in place that makes contracts with Arkansas dependent on your agreement not to boycott Israel, which I think is wrong,” Feldman, who is a professor at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “To me, growing up Jewish, the very strong lesson of the Holocaust that I learned is it’s wrong to mistreat other people.”

Arkansas is one of dozens of states that have passed laws aiming to combat the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement targeting Israel. The laws either bar the state from investing in companies that boycott Israel or, as in Arkansas’ case, mandate that state contractors promise not to boycott the country. Most of those laws have been struck down by courts, but Feldman’s lecture took place the same month the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to Arkansas’ law. His case is the latest example of how such laws are affecting what would otherwise be ordinary state business transactions.

Feldman has close relatives who live in Israel. But he said the pledge conflicted with his religious and moral views. In addition to his medical work, he is a pro-Palestinian activist who created the online-only Jewish Museum of the Palestinian Experience. The website says that the Jewish commitment to fighting injustice should lead Jews to stand up for Palestinian rights. Feldman said he does support boycotting Israel. 

“I think the only thing that will lead to Israel allowing Palestinian families to return to their homes, so that everybody can live together peacefully, will be some kind of boycott,” he said.

While the Arkansas law, passed in 2017, applies only to contractors earning more than $1,000 from the state, Feldman said he was still refused his $500 payment. The justification, he said, was that being added to the state’s vendor system would make him eligible for future assignments that could add up to more than $1,000.

Feldman told JTA he is exploring his legal options and wouldn’t rule out a lawsuit against the state as a means of advocating for Palestinian rights and challenging last year’s federal Eighth Circuit Court ruling that the law was constitutionally protected. “I would love to sue and have the Circuit Court either retract what they said, or go to the Supreme Court in order for people to see things that they didn’t know,” he said.

Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin, a Republican, has said the law combats discrimination on the basis of nationality. Following the Supreme Court’s decision not to hear the case, he told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that he works to “ensure that taxpayers aren’t required to pay for anti-Israel and anti-Israeli discrimination.”

Feldman’s story was first reported by the Arkansas Times, a publication that has itself become entangled in the state’s anti-boycott law. The paper’s publisher, Alan Leveritt, challenged the law in court after he was asked to sign the anti-boycott pledge so that the paper could run advertising from a state university. The suit, which is the one that reached the Supreme Court, argued that the law was a violation of the publication’s First Amendment rights and attracted support from progressive Jewish groups, as well as opposition from some pro-Israel groups. Leveritt argued that he doesn’t have strong feelings about Israel boycotts but that his paper does not take political positions in exchange for advertising. 

Since the inception of state-level laws prohibiting Israel boycotts, some state lawmakers have used them as a template for legislation barring other types of divestment campaigns, such as those targeting fossil fuels or the firearms industry. 

Feldman mused that he could have signed the pledge, taken the money and then engaged in an Israel boycott to see how the state would react, but concluded, “I can’t lie on a form. That also goes against my Jewish moral character.”

Sierra Club: Stop Supporting Environmental Racism

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Adalah Justice Project

Why are we asking you to write to the Sierra Club Board candidates?

In March 2023, the Sierra Club sponsored a “nature outing” to Israel that willfully ignored ongoing Israeli settler colonialism, Israel’s illegal military occupation, and its brutal siege on Gaza. 

Although the Sierra Club canceled a similar trip last year after meeting with a coalition of Palestinians, Indigenous leaders from Turtle Island, and Jewish and Black allies, it failed to come through on its commitment to cancel future trips.

These trips support Israeli apartheid and Israel’s abuses of the Palestinian people. They are part of Israel’s greenwashing strategy to cover up settler colonialism and environmental destruction.

The reality is:

Israel commits water apartheid, where settlers use three to eight times as much water as the Palestinian people whose lands they occupy in the West Bank, redirecting water to prioritize Israeli settlers.

Only 11% of trees in Israeli forests are indigenous species. The rest are non-native species replanted by Israel to quickly take over land where lies the ruins of at least 182 destroyed Palestinian villages.

The Israeli state has designated much of Palestinian land stolen in 1948 as protected nature parks and reserves, similar to U.S. conservationists’ establishment of national parks on plundered native land. Colonization and erasure of Indigenous people is never green—it’s deadly greenwashing.

Sierra Club claims that it is promoting environmental justice by attempting to repair past harm toward Black and Indigenous communities. However, it cannot make this claim if it excludes Palestinians who are still being ethnically cleansed by the state of Israel.

Fortunately, we have an opportunity to take action together.

Sierra Club members are currently voting on their next Board of Directors.

Candidates for open board positions are taking questions from Sierra Club members and supporters up until voting ends on April 26th. This is our opportunity to push candidates to take a stand, and clarify their position on the Sierra Club’s greenwashing tours.

You can write directly to the candidates for the Sierra Club Board of Directors and ask them to take a stand against environmental colonialism.

We have a small window of time to influence the incoming board. It is vital that we ask them now to stand with Palestinians and honor the Sierra Club’s commitment to cancel these greenwashing trips.

More on Israeli Greenwashing and Environmental Justice for Palestine
 

The State Department Should Deny Smotrich Entry

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Please take this action aimed at the State Department. It is outrageous (and against US law) that someone who openly advocates for the genocidal “erasing” of an entire Palestinian town is allowed to freely visit the U.S. and spread his venomous hatred.

We are informed that the main restraint of Israeli ethnic cleansing in Massafer Yatta and other areas is the opposition of the U.S. State Department. They need to know that there’s a large constituency for Palestine.

The State Department must follow its condemnation of settler attacks on Hawara with action

One of the highest Israeli officials who endorsed the recent settler attacks in the town of Hawara and has publicly stated Israel should “erase” the town is planning to visit the US next week, while the affected town is still grappling with the aftermath of the brutal assault.

Sign our petition to call on the U.S. government to cancel Israeli Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s visa and deny him entry into the United States. The Biden Administration should make it clear that criminals advocating for genocide are not welcome in our country.

On February 26, 2023, armed Israeli settlers attacked the Palestinian villages of Hawara, Burin, Zaatara, and Asira al-Qibliya in a pre-planned raid. Now, Israeli media reports that the army knew of the intention of the settlers to attack Hawara and did nothing to stop them. Dozens of Israeli settlers rampaged through Palestinian towns on Sunday night, torching cars and homes, injuring more than 100 Palestinian civilians, and killing Sameh Aqtash in his home. Earlier that day calls to descend on the villages were shared on social media networks. Prior to the attacks, Bezalel Smotrich “liked” a tweet posted by settler leader Davidi Ben Zion, who said the town of Huwara should be “erased.” Given a chance to explain himself the next day, Smotrich doubled down, saying: “I think that the town of Hawara needs to be erased. The State of Israel needs to do it, and not, heaven forbid, private citizens.”

After the attacks, U.S. State Department Spokesperson Ned Price condemned the statements, saying “I want to be very clear about this. These comments were irresponsible. They were repugnant. They were disgusting.” Condemnation is good, but words are not good enough and condemnation is only valid when followed by real, substantive action.

Sign our petition now urging the Biden Administration to deny Smotrich’s visa to the United States! AJP Action will hand deliver the petition to U.S. officials at the Department of State next week.

According to US law, the State Department can, and should, deny visas to any individuals who incite violence against civilians. Not only that, some human rights organizations believe that Smotrich has possibly committed the act of incitement to genocide, which also would prevent him from acquiring a U.S. visa under US law. If the US truly condemns such behavior, denying him entry should be a given.

Sign our petition today and spread it far and wide. Let’s say it loud and clear: genocidal racist Israeli leaders are not welcome here, and the United States must take the necessary steps to end its long-standing enablement and abetting of Israel’s apartheid against the Palestinian people.

Sign Our Petition Here

In solidarity,
Ayah Ziyadeh
Advocacy Director, AJP Action
 

160 Organizations Demand Congress Stop Funding Israel’s Massacres

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160 organizations representing Palestinian communities, Palestinian solidarity organizations, and the racial justice movement have signed on to the new joint statement “Stop Funding Israel’s Massacres,” calling out the U.S. government’s complicity and racist dehumanization of Palestinian life. Read the statement below:

Israel’s horrific murder of 10 Palestinians in Jenin, unprecedented for two decades in the West Bank, demands action

After Israeli forces massacred at least 10 Palestinian people in Jenin refugee camp on Thursday, Jan. 26, leaving dozens of injuries and destruction in their wake, Palestinian journalist Mariam Barghouti called the Palestinian reality under Israeli military occupation a “slaughterhouse.” 

While most U.S. politicians and media focused attention on a shooting by a Palestinian individual in an illegal Israeli settlement in East Jerusalem that followed, they remained silent on Israeli forces killing Palestinians in the Jenin massacre. This silence continued following the Israeli government’s moves to institutionalize their collective punishment and retribution responses to the shooting, including expediting gun permits for Israelis and punishing family members of Palestinian attackers by demolishing their homes and revoking social security benefits. This dehumanizing disparity reinforces the racist devaluation of Palestinian life. Peace is not possible without justice, which begins with an end to Israel’s military occupation, theft of Palestinian land, and attacks on Palestinian lives.

When this context is explained, it is clear all this violence is rooted in Israel’s brutality against the Palestinian people. The Jenin massacre was the bloodiest in the West Bank in about two decades, in one of the deadliest months: Israeli forces killed 35 Palestinians in the West Bank in 2023 so far, killing on average at least one Palestinian person each day. This Israeli violence marks an acceleration since 2022, when Israel killed 146 Palestinians in the West Bank, including killing Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh while she was reporting in Jenin. And in Gaza, Palestinians living trapped under Israeli blockade endure structural violence each day, and have endured multiple Israeli bombing massacres over the last two decades, which have killed thousands of Palestinians including 49 people in August 2022.

This week, Secretary of State Blinken is meeting with the new increasingly fascist, far-right Israeli government. Blinken’s statements said nothing about the Israeli government’s plan to entrench illegal settlements, reaffirming the U.S. refusal to even recognize the context of Israel’s military occupation. We will not accept his politics-as-usual of words of concern without U.S. policy change, which gives Israel a free pass to keep massacring the Palestinian people. The images coming out of Jenin—an elderly woman killed by Israeli sniper bullets, hospital patients suffocating with Israeli tear gas, and ambulances denied access to the wounded by Israeli forces—are part of apartheid Israel’s greater systematic violence, which our government has chosen to fund with $3.8+ billion of U.S. taxpayer dollars a year. 

The Palestinian people’s ongoing demands for freedom in their homeland and basic human rights must be met by people around the world rising up with them. We demand Members of Congress take immediate policy action towards accountability: Stop arming Israel’s massacres against the Palestinian people by ending U.S. military funding to Israel. Real justice will not begin until we do.

Tell Congress: Stop funding Israel’s massacres of Palestinians

National Organizations:

US Campaign for Palestinian Rights
ActionAid USA
Adalah Justice Project
American Federation of Ramallah, Palestine (AFRP)
American Muslim Bar Association
American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee
Americans for Justice in Palestine Action (AJP Action)
Catalyst Project
Center for Constitutional Rights
Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)
Episcopal Peace Fellowship – Palestine Israel Network
Eyewitness Palestine
Fellowship of Reconciliation USA
Friends of Sabeel North America (FOSNA)
Grassroots Global Justice Alliance
Health Advisory Council of Jewish Voice for Peace
IfNotNow Movement
Israel/Palestine Mission Network of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)
Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions-USA (ICAHD-USA)
Jetpac Resource Center
Jewish Voice for Peace Action (JVP Action)
Kairos USA
MADRE
Media Education Foundation
Methodist Federation for Social Action
Middle East Children’s Alliance
Movement for Black Lives
MPower Change
Muslim Peace Fellowship
Muslims for Just Futures
National Arab American Women’s Association (NAAWA)
National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP)
Palestine Legal
Palestinian American Organizations Network (PAON)
Project South
Promoting Enduring Peace
Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice
Rethinking Foreign Policy
Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ)
Unitarian Universalists for Justice in the Middle East
United Church of Christ Palestine Israel Network
United Methodists for Kairos Response (UMKR)
US Boats to Gaza
US Palestinian Community Network (USPCN)
USA Palestine Mental Health Network
Veterans for Peace
Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, US

Local or State-Based Organizations:

Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine
Americans United for Palestinian Human Rights
Arab American Caucus of California Democratic Party
Arab American Civic Council
Arab Jewish Partnership for Peace and Justice in the Middle East
Arab Resource & Organizing Center (AROC)
Brooklyn For Peace
Bryn Mawr Peace Coalition
California Scholars for Academic Freedom
Chicago Faith Coalition on Middle East Policy
Christian-Jewish Allies for a Just Peace in Israel/Palestine
Corvallis Palestine Solidarity
Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) – Washington
Dallas Palestine Coalition
DC Statehood Green Party
Delawareans for Palestinians Human Rights
Dream Defenders
Episcopal Bishop’s Committee for Justice and Peace in the Holy Land, Diocese of Olympia
Friends of Palestine Wisconsin
Friends of Sabeel – Colorado
Greater Lansing Peace Education Center
Green Mountain Solidarity With Palestine
Historians for Peace and Democracy
Human Rights Awareness: Palestine Israel/MA 3rd CD (HRA:PI/CD3)
Indiana Center for Middle East Peace
Israel/Palestine Mission Network of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) – Bay Area
Jewish Voice for Peace – Austin
Jewish Voice for Peace – Bay Area
Jewish Voice for Peace – Boston
Jewish Voice for Peace – Central Ohio
Jewish Voice for Peace – Chicago
Jewish Voice for Peace – Cleveland
Jewish Voice for Peace – Detroit
Jewish Voice for Peace – Hudson Valley
Jewish Voice for Peace – Los Angeles
Jewish Voice for Peace – New Haven
Jewish Voice for Peace – New York City
Jewish Voice for Peace – Pittsburgh
Jewish Voice for Peace – Sacramento
Jewish Voice for Peace – Seattle
Jewish Voice for Peace – South Bay
Jewish Voice for Peace – Tacoma Washington
Jewish Voice for Peace – Tucson
Jewish Voice for Peace – UCLA
Jews Say No!
Justice for Palestine – Syracuse
Kairos Puget Sound Coalition
LA Jews for Peace
Lutherans for Justice in the Holy Land
Madison-Rafah Sister City Project
Marin for Palestine
Massachusetts Peace Action
Mid-Missouri Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR)
Mid-Missourians for Justice in Palestine
Middle East Crisis Committee – Connecticut
Middle East Crisis Response
Minnesota BDS Community
Monterey Peace and Justice Center
Muslim Students’ Association at University of Michigan
Nevada Green Party USA
No Rights/No Aid
Northfielders for Justice in Palestine/Israel
Olive Branch Fair Trade Inc.
Olympia Movement for Justice and Peace
Pacific Green Party
Palestine Solidarity Committee at University of San Diego
Palestinian American Community Center of New Jersey (PACC NJ)
Palestinian Rights Committee of New York’s Capital Region
Partners for Palestine
Peace & Justice Committee of the Episcopal Diocese of Chicago
Peace & Planet News
Peace Action New York State
Peace Action of San Mateo County
Peace Education Center
People for Palestinian-Israeli Justice – Long Beach, CA
Pittsburgh Palestine Solidarity Committee
Progressive Jews of St. Louis (ProJoSTL)
Quakers Palestine Israel Network
Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism (QUIT!)
Rochester Witness for Palestine
Sacramento Regional Coalition for Palestinian Rights
San Antonio for Justice in Palestine
Shomeret Shalom
Social Justice at Trinity Episcopal Church Asbury Park
St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, Social Justice Committee
Students for Justice in Palestine – Berkeley Law
Students for Justice in Palestine – Butler University
Students for Justice in Palestine – Rutgers New Brunswick (SJP-NB)
Students for Justice in Palestine – UVA
Texas Arab American Democrats
The Whatcom Peace and Justice Center
Tzedek Chicago
Unitarian Universalists for Justice in the Middle East – Ann Arbor
Unitarian Universalists for Justice in the Middle East MA Chapter
Universal Construction
Utahns for a Just Peace in the Holy Land
Valley View Church
Vancouver for Peace and Justice – Vancouver, WA
Vermonters for Justice in Palestine
Veterans For Peace – Linus Pauling Chapter 132
Veterans for Peace – New Hampshire Chapter
Veterans For Peace – NYC
Veterans for Peace – Rachel Corrie Chapter
Veterans For Peace – Santa Fe Chapter
Veterans For Peace – Spokane Chapter #35
Virginia Coalition for Human Rights
Voices for Middle East Peace
Washington Advocates for Palestinian Rights
Watertown Citizens for Peace, Justice, and the Environment
Wellstone Democratic Renewal Club
WESPAC Foundation, Inc.
Women’s International League for Peace & Freedom – St. Louis chaper
Yemeni Liberation Movement
 

A Massacre Took Place in Jenin

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January 26, 2023

This morning, Israeli forces murdered at least 9 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin. They bombed homes, tear-gassed a hospital children's ward, shot at residents, and prevented access to medical aid. This unhinged massacre is the most violent Israeli invasion of the Jenin Refugee camp since 2002.

This Sunday, Secretary Blinken is going to Palestine to meet with the new Israeli government. Rather than another photo op with empty political slogans, it’s incumbent upon him to use this trip to announce a shift in US policy toward Israel.

We demand President Biden and Secretary Blinken make a clear public statement that the actions of the Israeli government will not be tolerated or funded by our tax dollars. It’s time for the U.S. to stop its foreign aid to Israel. 

2022 was the deadliest year for Palestinians in the West Bank in nearly 20 years, with the most deaths since the United Nations began recording fatalities in 2005. The new, far-right Israeli government and its forces remain adamant about continuing, if not increasing, their brutality. We're only 26 days into 2023, and Israel has already killed 30 Palestinians, including five children—setting a pace to double the murder of Palestinians in 2022.

While the brutal invasion of Jenin’s refugee camp is not an exception to the new Israeli Knesset, its outward, right-wing extremism, and determination to violence against Palestinians should be an immediate trigger for the United States to finally take a firm stand against the apartheid government. 

AMP unequivocally condemns the United States’ absurd and tone-deaf call to Palestinians to continue security coordination instead of condemning Israel’s crime and massacre. If the Israeli government expects this massacre to pave the way for annexations within the West Bank, they must rest assured that it will not be accepted by the Palestinian people, by Americans, and nor should it be accepted or enabled by the U.S. government. It’s overdue for the United States to stop enabling Israel's violence against the Palestinian people, and put an immediate end to Israel's settler-colonial, apartheid system.
 

Extreme Israeli group takes root in US with fundraising bid

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Jewish radicals convicted of hate crimes are collecting tax-exempt donations from Americans


Yosef Haim Ben David, center, arrives at court in Jerusalem on March 22, 2016, during his murder trial in the death of a 16-year-old Palestinian boy. (AP Photo/Mahmoud Illean, File)

JERUSALEM (AP) — An Israeli group raising funds for Jewish extremists convicted in some of the country’s most notorious hate crimes is collecting tax-exempt donations from Americans, according to findings by The Associated Press and the Israeli investigative platform Shomrim.

The records in the case suggest that Israel’s far right is gaining a new foothold in the United States.

The amount of money raised through a U.S. nonprofit is not known. But the AP and Shomrim have documented the money trail from New Jersey to imprisoned Israeli radicals who include Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassin and people convicted in deadly attacks on Palestinians.

This overseas fundraising arrangement has made it easier for the Israeli group, Shlom Asiraich, to collect money from Americans, who can make their contributions through the U.S. nonprofit with a credit card and claim a tax deduction.

Many Israeli causes, from hospitals to universities to charities, raise money through U.S.-based arms. But having the strategy adopted by a group assisting Jewish radicals raises legal and moral questions.

It also comes against the backdrop of a new, far-right government in Israel led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, where ultranationalists and extremist lawmakers have gained unprecedented power.

    ISRAEL

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According to Shlom Asiraich’s promotional pamphlets, its beneficiaries include Yigal Amir, who assassinated Rabin in 1995; Amiram Ben-Uliel, convicted in the 2015 murder of a Palestinian baby and his parents in an arson attack; and Yosef Chaim Ben David, convicted of abducting and killing a 16-year-old Palestinian boy in Jerusalem in 2014. The group also assists an extremist ultra-Orthodox man who fatally stabbed a 16-year-old Israeli girl at Jerusalem’s gay pride parade in 2015.

Shlom Asiraich, or “The Well-Being of Your Prisoners,” has been raising money in Israel since at least 2018, and officially registered as a nonprofit in 2020 by a group mostly consisting of Israelis from hard-line settlements in the West Bank. At least five of the group’s seven founders have themselves been questioned by Israeli authorities for crimes related to their activities against Palestinians. Some have been arrested and charged.


Palestinians carry the body of 18-month-old Ali Dawabsheh during his funeral in the West Bank village of Duma on July 31, 2015. The sleeping toddler was burned to death when Jewish assailants set fire to two Palestinian homes, an attack that also killed his parents and critically wounded his 4-year-old brother. (AP Photo/Mahmoud Illean, File)

Recipients of its largesse have hailed the group for coming through in difficult times.

“You have no idea how much you help us,” the family of Ben-Uliel, who is serving three life sentences, wrote in a hand-written letter posted to the group’s Facebook page.

Being a relatively new organization, Shlom Asiraich’s official filing to Israel’s nonprofit registry provides little data and does not indicate how much money it has raised. But in its promotional flyers, recently broadcast by Israeli Channel 13 news, the organization indicated it has raised 150,000 shekels (about $43,000).

Israeli nonprofits have long sought funding abroad, with the U.S. a major source. According to figures published by Noga Zivan, a consultant for nonprofits in Israel, between 2018 to 2020 Jewish-American organizations alone donated $2 billion to Israel each year.

Israeli right-wing groups have long raised funds in the U.S. But Dvir Kariv, a former official in the department of Israel’s domestic security agency Shin Bet that deals with Jewish violence, said it is unusual for extremist Jews such as the ones who run Shlom Asiraich to do so.

He said the group appears to have taken a cue from other far-right Israeli groups, particularly Kach, an anti-Arab racist group that was once banned as a terror organization in the U.S. but which Kariv said was adept at raising money there decades ago.

Itamar Ben-Gvir, a senior Cabinet minister in Israel’s new far-right government, is a disciple of Kach’s founder, Rabbi Meir Kahane, who was once barred from Israeli politics.

It is not clear when Shlom Asiraich began working with the New Jersey-based World of Tzedaka, a nonprofit that says it works “to enable any individual or organization to raise money for their specific cause.”

Donors in the U.S. can enter the Shlom Asiraich site and click on a link that takes them to a donation page hosted by World of Tzedaka. They can also donate directly from World of Tzedaka’s site.

According to an instructional video on the World of Tzedaka site, fundraisers must list a rabbi as a reference and receive approval from a Lakewood religious committee. World of Tzedaka charges $28 a month and a 3% processing fee for transferring funds to an Israeli bank account, the site says.

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