Donations Sent to Israeli Groups Blocking Humanitarian Aid to Gaza Are Tax Deductible in the US

Sameena Rahman

While Gaza and multiple refugee camps across Palestine are facing widespread extermination campaigns by Israel, far-right ultranationalist groups aid in this process by blocking humanitarian aid from reaching Palestinians. It has recently been revealed that U.S law permits those funding these terror groups to deduct these donations from their taxes.

Receiving over $200,000 in tax-deductible donations from the U.S. are groups like Mother’s March, Torat Lechima and Tzav 9, who have organized Israeli settlers to physically block trucks and other humanitarian aid from entering Gaza.

Last month, the State Department sanctioned Tzav 9 for “repeatedly [thwarting] the delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza, including by blockading roads, sometimes violently, along their route from Jordan to Gaza, including in the West Bank…Tzav 9 members [also] looted and then set fire to two trucks near Hebron in the West Bank carrying humanitarian aid destined for men, women, and children in Gaza.” These terrorist acts are encouraged by ultra right-wing rhetoric from Israeli politicians like Ben-Gvir and Netanyahu.

While sanctioning one group, the Biden administration continues to allow private tax-deductible donations from the U.S. to fund other Israeli right-wing groups to do the same thing. Groups not sanctioned by the U.S. are continuing to use the same websites to raise funds to continue punishing Palestinians. This clearly exposes that Washington’s claims of wanting aid to reach Gaza are purely lip-service to assuage dissent.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars to terror organizations

Associated Press revealed that donations were mainly funneled through nonprofit nongovernmental 501(c)(3) organizations Givechack and JGive, Israeli and U.S.–Israeli websites, respectively. American donors receive a tax-break because of the nonprofit status granted these terror organizations that directly fund the dispossession and disenfranchisement of Palestinians.

Other organizations like Israel Land Fund and Central Fund of Israel are also involved in raising funds for Israel. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz estimated that private U.S. donors sent nearly $220 million to Israeli settlements between 2003 to 2013 using a similar network of tax-exempt nonprofits. Additionally, the American Friends of the Bet El Yeshiva Center received “$1.8 million to $3.5 million every year from 2011 to 2021… Israel Empowered [raised] $56,000 to $151,000 [annually since 2015].”

While Washington claims to be against these settlements, Americans funding Israeli settlements and being rewarded for it with tax breaks is not a new occurrence and has been ongoing for the last four decades. These funds have increasingly empowered illegal settlers to attack Palestinians displaced into nearby refugee camps with impunity.

For example, the Israel Land Fund backed the eviction and displacement of Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah in 2017. It additionally threatened the homes of 2,000 Palestinians and was even condemned by 25 House Democrats, who called on Israel to halt evictions. Biden also sanctioned violent settlers in the West Bank earlier this year. However, tax-exempt U.S. charities continue to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars yearly for these same groups, despite the fact that their activities undoubtedly qualify as terrorism.

Holy Land 5

For many decades Palestinian activists have widely condemned and raised the alarm regarding the leading role of the U.S.-backed charities that facilitated the illegal takeover of Palestinian land. While the U.S. encourages funding of terrorist acts against Palestinians by Israel by permitting funding groups to operate as charities, it has charged with ”aiding terrorism” true charities backed by Palestinian-Americans and jailed their members.

The largest U.S. Muslim and Palestinian-backed charity organization, the Holy Land Foundation, had its assets seized and was labeled a terror organization by the U.S. government. The FBI and the Treasury Department conspired to target the HLF’s leaders, popularized as the Holy Land 5 or HLF 5.

HLF, in compliance with charity laws in the U.S., raised funds for displaced and orphaned Palestinians and supported other displaced communities in the Middle East. The Clinton administration targeted HLF leaders under false terrorism charges and sentenced the HLF 5, Shukri Abu Baker, Mohammad El-Mezain, Ghassan Elashi, Mufid Abdulqader, and Abdulrahman Odeh, to decades in prison.

This exposes Washington’s double-standard of criminalizing Palestinian charities while allowing widely documented terrorist Israeli right-wing organizations to raise funds as charities to continue an ethnic cleansing campaign in Palestine. This hypocrisy exposes one more aspect of the dominating role played by the U.S. government in the genocide of Palestinians.