The Jewish Agency gave $43,000 to a group that has called Israel an apartheid state at the behest of donors who asked that the agency do so, the agency’s top leaders said on Sunday.
The revelation came in a letter sent by Doron Almog and Yehuda Stone, the Jewish Agency for Israel’s chairman and director general, respectively, to Knesset member Limor Son Har-Melech, in response to a complaint she made last week.
The complaint was over the provision of 160,000 shekels ($43,000) in funding by the Jewish Agency in 2023 to Physicians for Human Rights – Israel (PHR-I), which critics say is an anti-Israel group. PHR-I says it promotes “a just society where the right to health is granted equally to all people under Israel’s responsibility.”
Son Har-Melech was among several political figures in Israel who last week protested the funding, exposed by the B’tsalmo human rights group.
Critics cited PHR-I’s record of accusing Israel of practicing apartheid; blaming it for the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in the northwestern Negev on Oct. 7, 2023; and offering to help the International Criminal Court build a war crimes case against the Jewish state.
“The Jewish Agency does not and has not funded” PHR-I, Almog and Stone wrote in the letter obtained by JNS. They added, however: “In 2023, at the request of Jewish donors, we made a one-time donation of 160,000 shekels as emergency aid to foreign workers in Israel who supported the economy during the war, for basic and medical needs.”
The letter neither specified the donors who requested this nor acknowledged any failure on the Jewish Agency’s part. “We strongly reject the attempt to discredit the Jewish Agency. We will continue to work with full force to unite the Jewish people and strengthen the resilience of the State of Israel,” wrote Stone and Almog.
Following the revelation by B’tsalmo, which found the funding in PHR-I’s annual budget report, Yaakov Hagoel, chairman of the Executive of the World Zionist Organization, asked Almog to “look into grants for groups whose work is the subject of great public sensitivity.”
The World Zionist Organization, a constituent body of the Jewish Agency, has received complaints and queries about the funding for PHR-I, Hagoel added.
Gael Greenwald, a deputy chairman of WZO, also sent Almog a letter requesting a probe, adding that even the facilitation of donations by a third party would be inappropriate for the Jewish Agency, a storied Zionist institution in charge of aliyah.
“Unfortunately, over the years, this organization [PHR-I} has proven that it neither stands by the Jewish people nor strengthen the Zionist idea—values that constitute the foundations of the existence and operation of the Jewish Agency,” Greenwald wrote.
“Under these circumstances, there is a fundamental need to examine the agency’s support for bodies whose activities are not in line with the vision and missions of the Jewish Agency.”
Last week, a Jewish Agency spokesperson told JNS that the donation “aligns with one of the Jewish Agency’s goals—supporting those in need.”
Shai Glick, the director of B’tsalmo, told JNS the Jewish Agency should commit to stop funding directly or indirectly or cooperating with “groups that fund Hamas terrorists.” This was a reference to several attempts by PHR-I to advocate for terrorists in Israeli prisons, including Khader Adnan, a deceased senior Palestinian Islamic Jihad member.
Almog, a reserves major general in the Israel Defense Forces, was among the first targets of the anti-Israel lawfare promoted by PHR-I and others. In 2016, he left the United Kingdom shortly after arriving there because a British judge had issued a warrant for his arrest on war crimes suspicions.
Following the Oct. 7 murder of some 1,200 Israelis and the abduction of 251 others to Gaza, PHR-I wrote in a statement: “These events can only be understood within the context of a brutal 15-year siege on two million Gazan residents, half of whom are children and most of whom are refugees or the children and grandchildren of refugees. The militants who infiltrated southern Israel yesterday were born into a reality of perpetual humanitarian crisis, air raids, deaths and injuries, and utter lack of hope. Pain breeds pain.” The NGO also condemned the attacks.
In 2022, PHR-I wrote with 10 other groups to Karim Khan, chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, encouraging him to visit Judea and Samaria in preparation for legal action against Israel for alleged war crimes.
“Crimes, indeed, have been and are being committed,” the 2022 letter reads. “The court has jurisdiction to investigate and prosecute; and, we are all committed to assisting.”
Following the ICC’s arrest warrants issued last year for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his then-defense minister Yoav Gallant on war crimes charges, PHR-I praised the move along with other groups with a text that called the warrants “important and necessary.”
In 2022, PHR-I joined other groups in publishing a statement that said that “The occupation and apartheid in the oPt [occupied Palestinian territories] have made Jewish supremacy the de facto law of the land, and the new government seeks to adopt this into their official policy.”
NGO Monitor, a Jerusalem-based group that monitors anti-Israel nonprofits, has said that “Under the guise of medical expertise and scientific fact, PHR-I promotes distorted and false narratives, aimed at demonizing and delegitimizing Israel in the international arena.”