NGO Monitor released a report on European Union NGO funding in 2019 in which the organization analyzed the European Commission updated details about grants allocated to NGOs in 2019 by the European Union.
According to the new report by NGO Monitor, the EU allowed in 2019 a total of €30.1 million split into 32 grants were issued for projects listed under “Palestine,” and an additional 9 grants totaling €3.3 million for projects listed under “Israel,” involving Israeli NGOs and human rights.
NGO Monitor pointed out that the intended beneficiaries of EU funding to Israeli NGOs for human rights projects are mainly Palestinians - 5 of 9 grants, totaling €1.87 million - and not - with a few exceptions - to address human rights issues affecting Israeli citizens.
Moreover, according to the report, the overwhelming majority of funding to organizations claiming to promote human rights - 6 of 9 grants, totaling €2.47 million - are for political initiatives related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
This indicates, as claimed by NGO Monitor, that "the EU views its engagement with human rights in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza strictly through the filter of the conflict, not an objective appraisal of a diverse range of human rights challenges."
Research by NGO Monitor found that over the last nine years the EU has handed €25 million to Palestinian groups which have refused to disavow terror.
Yet, ANNEX II of the general conditions attached to EU grants includes an anti-terror clause in the funding contract, Article 1, 1.5bis, which states: "Grant beneficiaries and contractors must ensure that there is no detection of subcontractors, natural persons, including participants to workshops and/or trainings and recipients of financial support to third parties, in the lists of EU restrictive measures."NGO Monitor Vice President Olga Deutsch noted that “Our report highlights core problems with how the EU selects NGO partners, as well as how those NGOs then select their projects. Some of these NGOs are even tied to internationally proscribed terror groups, as in the case of senior NGO staff accused of planning and executing the August 2020 murder of 17-year-old Rina Shnerb.”
Analysis by NGO Monitor revealed that 3 grants totaling €5.8 million were issued for NGOs tied to an EU-designated terrorist group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Some €31.2 million had already been allocated to NGOs with ties to the PFLP between 2011 and 2018.
Deutsch added that “some of these NGOs promote antisemitism, the teaching of radicalism and anti-normalization in schools, and anti-peace narratives and conspiracy theories.”
Indeed, an additional 7 grants totaling €5.6 million involve NGOs which promote hateful antisemitic conspiracy theories and glorify terror, such as Land Research Center (LRC) and Applied Research Institute Jerusalem (ARIJ) which are partners of the €700,000 grant “Assessing the impediments before the two-state solution.”
LRC have published hateful conspiracy theories in its statements, such as in “Balfour Declaration .... and the ongoing conspiracy,” from 2016, which declared that the declaration “placed a toxic dagger in Palestine that aims at restricting the advancement of the Arab Nation and disconnecting its east from its west.”
Seven other grants totaling €11.8 million involve Jerusalem, including highly politicized goals such as ‘preserving Palestinian identity of East Jerusalem’ and ‘protecting Islamic and Christian religious and cultural heritage from Israeli violations and threats.’
Finally, another 3 EU grants totaling €1 million aim to directly influence Israeli democracy via public influence campaigns, lobbying, and legal intervention.
According to NGO Monitor report, most of the grants authorized in 2019 will run for 36 months, and are therefore ongoing as of October 2020.HOWEVER, EU's enlargement commissioner Olivér Várhelyi vowed recently to order an investigation into whether EU funds were being used to finance Palestinian terror. Speaking at a meeting in May, Várhelyi said: “There is no terror financing from EU funds, as long as there are EU funds that will not be happening, this will not be tolerated, and if it happens, it will be rectified. And I will see it to it myself that it is done and delivered.”
Last June, European Parliamentarians had called for a thorough investigation into how European taxpayers’ money is ending up in the hands of Palestinian terrorists, insisting that any loopholes in the law through which the money is slipping must be closed.Hundreds of millions of euros are donated annually by the EU to the Palestinian Authority. Approximately 50 million euros each quarter are passed on by the PA to the Palestine Liberation Organization, which in turn finances organizations such as the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, which has carried out suicide attacks in Israel.
Donna Rachel Edmunds contributed to this report.