David Isaac
JNS, Feb. 18, 2025
“In 2023, it spent most of its budget, or $31 million, on opposition to judicial reform.”
As billionaire Elon Musk and his youthful team of tech wizards tear through America’s administrative state, exposing waste and misuse of funds, reports emerged that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) funded judicial-reform protests in Israel.
While this would constitute a blatant case of U.S. interference in Israel’s internal affairs, the way in which funds bounce from one group to another before reaching their final target makes it difficult to produce hard evidence.
However, reports of heavy foreign funding of key groups opposed to the Israeli government’s plan to reform the judiciary led Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself to weigh in last week in a Knesset speech, blasting what he called the “almost inconceivable” amounts of foreign money that drove the protest movement.
Israel’s Ministerial Committee for Legislation approved a bill on Sunday to impose an 80% tax on donations from foreign entities to Israeli non-profits. Currently, those donations are tax-free.
The heart of the current debate is Blue and White Future, an Israeli NGO that funded and ran the headquarters for the coalition of groups opposing judicial reform. A significant percentage of its funding came from foreign sources. ….SOURCE