by WorldTribune Staff, August 15, 2016
The hacking of a network of organizations funded by billionaire leftist George Soros has laid bare the network’s extensive anti-Israel bias and how it went to great lengths to conceal it.
Confidential reports from the Open Society Foundations, made available on the website DC Leaks, showed the Soros network gave millions of dollars annually to organizations highly critical of Israel, some of whom deny its right to exist.
“Even more troubling, the documents repeatedly indicate that the network actively tried to conceal its engagements in Israel and the Palestinian territories, and has worked to set up an extensive network of organizations designed to support and promote its views,” Liel Leibovitz wrote for the Tablet online magazine.
A leaked document from the Open Society Foundations said that “we wanted to construct a diversified portfolio of grants dealing with Israel and Palestine, funding both Israeli Jewish and PCI (Palestinian Citizens of Israel) groups as well as building a portfolio of Palestinian grants and in all cases to maintain a low profile and relative distance — particularly on the advocacy front.”
According to Leibovitz’s report, a document dated Aug. 6, 2015 shows the Soros network had given $2,688,561 in 14 grants since 2001 to Adalah, a self-described “independent human rights organization” that has accused Israel of war crimes on numerous occasions in international forums. Adalah has called on governments worldwide to sever or downgrade their diplomatic relations with Israel.
The Soros network also funneled $1,083,000 in grants to I’lam, a Nazareth-based Palestinian media center. In a 2014 publication about the Nakba — the name Palestinians give the creation of the state of Israel, literally meaning “catastrophe” — I’lam accused Israel of ethnic cleansing and argued that “the practical meaning of the Nakba undermines the moral and ethical foundation of Zionism and, hence, of the State of Israel.”
The hacked documents also show what the Soros group saw as “another encouraging shift,” the international movement to boycott Israel: “A number of factors make this a good moment to review this portfolio,” one document said, “including some new or improved opportunities we may choose to exploit. In recent years there’s been heightened international solidarity around Palestinians’ rights, the rise of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement and other economic levers, and increased use and traction of arts and culture by Palestinians as a means to raise awareness of violations and the impact of the conflict.”
“Further revelations are likely to emerge as the large-scale document dump continues to be studied, but, for now, there can be little doubt about the Soros-funded extensive and deliberate effort to delegitimize Israel while doing comparatively very little to address real human rights abuses in the Palestinian Authority or elsewhere in the region,” Leibovitz wrote.