Where do left-wing organizations operating within Israel get their money from?
According to a report published in Israel Hayom, close to a billion shekels have been funneled to left-wing and extreme-left-wing organizations over the past decade, funds that originate overseas — with Germany heading the list as the country providing the largest source of income.
At least 150 million shekels have been donated by German organizations in recent years, reaching Israel in a variety of ways, most of them shady.
An investigation conducted by the Im Tirtzu organization has revealed that many of the funds arrive via political entities which have links with German political parties represented in the Bundestag and are supposedly earmarked for use within the German political system.
However, since the political entities used to channel the funds are technically independent organizations, the German government is apparently unable to establish how the funds are being used.
One of the conditions for the granting of German government money is that the recipient organization should hold the same ideological views as the party via which the funds are granted. The lack of transparency in the process has enabled organizations to effectively use party funding for whatever they may desire.
The Heinrich Böll Foundation, for example, has not submitted financial reports since 2014. The Rosa Luxembourg Foundation, which is associated with the Die Linke (left-wing) party, openly flouts the law and does not have an updated operating license. The Heinz Seidel Foundation which is associated with the Christian Social Union likewise has no operating license, but this has not prevented it from channeling over 900 thousand shekels to the Palestinian Authority, which goes against the stated purpose of the Foundation, a public-benefit corporation, and provides legal grounds for having it shut down.
- The Konrad Adenauer Foundation, which has links to the Christian Democrats (the party of former Chancellor Angela Merkel), does have a valid license, but it has broken Israeli law by failing to submit financial reports required of all organizations whose source of funding is overseas.
Another two German organizations operate in Israel as foreign entities without the status of public-benefit corporation, which enables them to remain even more obscure: the Friedrich Neumann Foundation, associated with the Free Democratic Party (FDP), and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, associated with the Social Democratic Party (SPD), the party of Olaf Scholz, the current German Chancellor.
- No documents were found in the files of these two foreign companies showing that they submitted a quarterly report on receiving donations from foreign entities, contrary to the provisions of the law.
Source: Arutz Sheva