The US Agency for International Development (USAID), State Department and other federal agencies under the Biden administration failed to prevent nonprofits from using more than $900 million in taxpayer funds to oppose Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to a new report from the House Judiciary Committee.
Last week, the Republican-led committee released a memo based on 380 documents it received in a probe of six NGOs: Blue White Future, Movement for Quality Government in Israel, PEF Israel Endowment Funds, Jewish Communal Fund, Middle East Peace Dialogue Network and Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.
According to the House panel, PEF Israel Endowment Funds sent more than $884 million “to groups involved in anti-democracy protests in Israel,” while the Jewish Communal Fund allocated more than $42.8 million to groups that funded an organiser of anti-judicial reform demonstrations.
Meanwhile, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors “likely” used parts of $20 million in federal grants to fund protests against Netanyahu in Israel, and the Middle East Peace Dialogue Network “may” be violating its nonprofit status due to its funding of “anti-democracy protests in Israel,” according to the committee.
According to the memo, federal funds flowed to Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, which funded PEF Israel Endowment Funds, which in turn distributed money to Blue White Future, which the House committee describes as a “radical anti-Netanyahu organisation.”
“The committee’s oversight shows that Blue White Future, a key player in the anti-Netanyahu protests, may have been a downstream recipient of US grant funding,” the memo stated.
The House panel noted that “the fungibility of money – the ability to easily replace one set of funds with another set of funds of equal value – suggests that PEF donations may have included funding that originated with the US government.”
“More broadly, when an NGO receives government funding for a project, it can use the money previously earmarked for that project on something else which it would have otherwise not been able to fund,” it stated.
The Republican Jewish Coalition called the memo’s findings “outrageous” and said “the Biden-Harris administration transferred nearly a billion dollars to left-wing NGOs in Israel [which had] the goal of undermining the democratically elected government.”
The committee said that its investigations are ongoing.
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