While Elon Musk sifts through the misuse of USAID money to fund left-wing political agendas, Israel is working to institute legislation to stop that funding from influencing Israeli politics. A closer look reveals that this tactic has been used by the Democratic party for several years, most notably against Netanyahu, to little effect.
Two weeks ago, Israel’s Ministerial Committee for Legislation approved a bill to impose an 80% tax on donations from foreign entities to Israeli nonprofits. Until the new legislation was passed, those donations were tax-free.
The legislation was focused on Blue and White Future, an Israeli NGO that funded and ran the headquarters for the coalition of groups opposing judicial reform. A large percentage of its funding came from foreign sources.
According to its filings with Israel’s Registrar of Associations, the NGO’s finances got a major boost in 2023, with donations jumping to 134 million shekels (~$38 million) from 824,730 shekels ($232,000) in 2022. While over 83 million shekels ($23.4 million) originated from abroad, primarily the United States, tracing specific sources proves challenging. The largest single donation – nearly 64 million shekels – came through PEF Israel, facilitating tax-deductible donations from the US to Israel, obscuring the original donors.
The Middle East Peace Dialogue Network (MEPDN) increased its typical annual donation from hundreds of thousands of shekels to 14 million in 2023. The American website Data Republican claims MEPDN functioned as an indirect channel for USAID funds, though Blue White Future categorically denies receiving US government funding.
The judicial reform protests were wildly anti-Netanyahu, despite his election just a few months earlier. The protests stopped after the Oct. 7 attack but were reincarnated as protests against the war being waged by the Likud-led coalition.
Blue and White Future was founded in 2009 as Blue and White Peace. Its initial purpose was to “enhance and highlight” public support for the “two-state solution.” In July, the Knesset voted overwhelmingly to reject the plan.
It changed its name to Blue and White Future by the end of that year and then revised its stated purpose in January 2023 when Justice Minister Yariv Levin announced the government’s judicial reform plan. The new goal was “to preserve the democratic character of the State of Israel.”
In September 2023, it hired Washington-based PR firm Trident DMG, for a three-month contract of $75,000 for “strategic communications services” to boost its cause in the United States. Democratic Party strategist Josh Galper, former CNN journalist Eleanor McManus, former Clinton White House special associate counsel Adam Goldberg and former Clinton lawyer Lanny Davis founded Trident DMG.
One of the major organizations behind the judicial protests was the Movement for Quality Government (MQG), which has received over $38,000 in funding from the Biden administration’s State Department. MGQ brought numerous court cases against Prime Minister Netanyahu, including a petition to the Supreme Court that called for declaring him unfit to hold public office. In addition, MQG is primarily funded by the New Israel Fund, a US NGO that funds many anti-Israel organizations that promote a narrative portraying Israel as an apartheid state.
The organization’s website protest groups supported by Blue and White Future, including Achim L’Neshek (“Brothers in Arms”), which called for reservists to refuse service, and Bonot Alternativa (“Women Building an Alternative”), which introduced “Handmaid’s Tale” costumes to the protests.
The “two-state solution” is a political agenda that would create an unprecedented militarized Palestinian state inside Israel’s borders, ethnically cleansed of Jews, with its exclusively Muslim capital in Jerusalem. While the plan is wildly unpopular with both Israelis and Palestinians, it is the basis of the Democratic Party’s Middle East policy.
While Biden frequently voiced his opposition to the judicial reforms in Israel, his criticism of Netanyahu may have been a continuation of the US Democratic Party’s long history of meddling in Israeli politics and elections, most notably in opposition to Netanyahu.
This was manifested in V15, which stands for Victory 15, an NGO established during the 2015 elections specifically to oppose Netanyahu. V15 was aided by One Voice, an NGO that supports the creation of an “independent and viable Palestine” alongside Israel, which assigned Jeremy Bird, a field director in both of President Barack Obama’s winning White House runs, with the task.
While using foreign funds in an election campaign violates Israeli election law, V15 sidestepped the law, stating that they were not affiliated with or campaigning for any specific party. Their only interest was to oust Netanyahu from office.
NGO-Monitor reported that in July 2016, the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a report detailing the use of resources developed with State Department funding to advance the V-15 campaign. The subcommittee concluded that One Voice did not directly use U.S. funds for its election campaign or violate its agreement with the U.S. government. However, the subcommittee criticized the State Department for not correctly evaluating One Voice before approving the grant and for failing to monitor the organization during the project. The final report stated that the State Department “failed to adequately guard against the risk of OneVoice using government-funded resources for political purposes… despite OneVoice’s previous political activity in the 2013 Israeli election.”
But even before Obama, Democrat presidents worked to influence Israeli elections. In an interview broadcast on Israel’s Channel 10 news in April 2018, former President Bill Clinton admitted to working to help Shimon Peres in his unsuccessful run against Netanyahu in 1996.
In addition, a US Senate inquiry in 2016 confirmed that a grant of $350,000 from the US State Department was given to OneVoice International and was used to organize a campaign to prevent the reelection of Netanyahu in 2015. Although the Obama administration’s actions were not considered illegal, the bipartisan committee rebuked the State Department for procedural shortcomings.
