Lawsuit Aims To Revoke Tax-Free Status of Donations to Israel
Image by Institute for Middle East Understanding
A lawsuit naming the U.S. Treasury Department and Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew aims to revoke the nonprofit status of groups that the litigants claim have given billions of dollars in tax-exempt donations to Israel.
A group of American citizens filed the suit Dec. 21 in a U.S. court, Al Jazeera reported Wednesday. One of the litigants was identified by Al Jazeera as a Palestinian-American writer and human rights activist, Susan Abulhawa.
The Treasury Department has 60 days to respond. It declined to comment to Al Jazeera, citing the pending litigation. The department is led by Lew, an Orthodox Jew.
According to the suit, about 150 nonprofit groups have sent about $280 billion to Israel over the last 20 years.
Groups such as the Falic Family Foundation, Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces, American Friends of Ariel, Gush Etzion Foundation, American Friends of Har Homa and Hebron Fund have funneled the tax-free donations to Jewish settlements and the Israeli military, the suit claims.
It says the groups directly contributed to violations of U.S. and international law, subverted U.S. foreign policy, and contributed to crimes and human rights abuses against Palestinians, according to Al Jazeera.
“These charities’ agenda is to rid the West Bank and EJ [eastern Jerusalem] of all non-Jews, consistent with perceived biblical imperatives,” the suit charges, according to Al Jazeera. “They have been very successful in that endeavor, as detailed herein, primarily because of the Treasury’s abject and long-standing failure to monitor and prevent their criminal activities for at least the last 30 years.”
A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
