Mr. Netanyahu may announce that the Israeli government is not expanding Jewish colonies, but millions of tax-free private US dollars are heading to Israel in support of colonization. 60% of settlement construction is funded by private money, says Peace Now.

Right-wing mogul Irving Moskowitz is a top U.S. funder. His colorful California bingo parlor is one source of his support for settlement growth. See two articles below, and one about how U.S. law is used by a non-profit group to shield its donations to settlement growth. Q-PI

Peace Now Refutes News Stories of Settlement Freeze

- filed under: <http://www.fmep.org/search?Subject%3Alist=Israeli%20Policy>Israeli Policy, <http://www.fmep.org/search?Subject%3Alist=Settlements>Settlements

Peace Now | August 18, 2009

According to news released this morning, August, 18, 2009 in the Israeli media, Netanyahu and Barak have agreed to freeze construction in the settlements until early 2010.

Peace Now Research Shows the Following:

Fact No. 1: In the West Bank Settlements and in East Jerusalem there are over 1000 housing units under construction right now.

This means that on the ground there is NO settlement freeze. A real freeze is the end of all construction, even those yet to be completed. Anyone who visits the settlements, can see large and small construction sites where construction continues at a rapid pace.

Fact No. 2: In the past 9 months, since November 2008 the govt has not published any new tenders for construction in the settlements. (Though a few tenders were published for completion of infrastructure, roads, etc. but no new tenders for apartments).

However govt sponsored construction of government only constitutes about 40% of all construction in the territories. Most of the building is through private initiatives from settler groups, NGO's etc.

Thus, even if there is a complete freeze of construction bids on behalf of the government - at least 60% of all construction in the settlements continues as before.

For more details contact our Settlement Watch Director: 054 4556052

U.S. group invests tax-free millions in East Jerusalem land

By Uri Blau, Haaretz Correspondent 17/08/2009

American Friends of Ateret Cohanim, a nonprofit organization that sends millions of shekels worth of donations to Israel every year for clearly political purposes, such as buying Arab properties in East Jerusalem, is registered in the United States as an organization that funds educational institutes in Israel.

The U.S. tax code enables nonprofits to receive tax-exempt status if they engage in educational, charitable, religious or scientific activity. However, such organizations are forbidden to engage in any political activity. The latter is broadly defined as any action, even the promotion of certain ideas, that could have a political impact.

Financing land purchases in East Jerusalem would, therefore, seem to violate the organization’s tax-exempt status.

Daniel Luria, chief fund-raiser for Ateret Cohanim in Israel, told Haaretz Sunday that the American organization’s registration as an educational entity stemmed from tax considerations.

“We are an umbrella organization that engages in redeeming land,” he said. “Our [fund-raising] activity in New York goes solely toward land redemption.”

Although Ateret Cohanim also operates a yeshiva, Ateret Yerushalayim, in the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City, fund-raising for the yeshiva is handled by a different organization: American Friends of Yeshivat Ateret Yerushalayim.”

American Friends of Ateret Cohanim was founded in New York in 1987. Like all tax-exempt organizations, it must file detailed annual returns with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. An examination of them reveals that the organization describes its “primary exempt purpose” as: “[to] provide funding for higher educational institutes in Israel.”

“That’s because of the tax issue,” Luria said, explaining that due to American law, the American Friends organization “has to be connected in some fashion with educational matters.”

He also estimated that 60 percent of Ateret Cohanim’s money is raised in the U.S.

The Friends organization’s most recent return, filed in 2008 for fiscal 2007, shows that it raised $2.1 million in donations that year. Of this, $1.6 million was transferred to Ateret Cohanim in Israel.

The remainder was used to cover administrative overhead, including fund-raising expenses and an $80,000 salary for Shoshana Hikind, the American organization’s vice president and de facto director, whose husband Dov is a New York state assemblyman and well-known supporter of the Israeli right.

The organization also raised substantial sums in previous years: $1.3 million in 2006, $900,000 in 2005 and about $2 million in 2004.

By comparison, American Friends of Yeshivat Ateret Yerushalayim raised only $189,000 in 2007.

In its IRS returns, American Friends of Ateret Cohanim said its purpose is to “promote,” “publicize” and “raise funds for” Ateret Cohanim institutions in Israel. These institutions, it continued, “encourage and promote study and observance of Jewish religious traditions and culture.”

In reality, Ateret Cohanim in Israel focuses mainly on purchasing Arab property in East Jerusalem. Since its founding in the 1970s, it has bought dozens of Arab buildings for Jews to reside in. Just this April, for instance, it moved Jewish families into an Arab house it purchased in the Muslim Quarter.

One noteworthy donor to its Friends organization is casino magnate Irving Moskowitz, a well-known supporter of rightist causes, who also owns the Shepherd Hotel in East Jerusalem. That hotel made headlines recently when Moskowitz obtained a permit to build 20 apartments for Jews there, sparking angry protests from the U.S. government.

In response, Ateret Cohanim chairman Mati Dan insisted that the Friends organization “is an independent organization that decides for itself whom to fund.” Moreover, he added, “we engage in education constantly … I don’t know what Daniel Luria told you, but we are active in the field of [educational] institutions.”

As of press time, no comment had been obtained from the Friends organization.

Nir Hasson contributed to this report

==================================================

Gambling with peace: how US bingo dollars are funding Israeli settlements

* California charity 'a barrier to West Bank resolution'

* Millionaire's foundation must be curbed, critics say

<http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/chrismcgreal>Chris McGreal

<http://www.guardian.co.uk/>guardian.co.uk, Sunday 19 July 2009

An Israeli construction worker keeps an eye on a crane working above the building site for an extention to the Maale Zeitim. Photograph: David Silverman/Getty Images

For the winning punters chancing their luck at Hawaiian Gardens' charity bingo hall in the heart of one of California's poorest towns, the big prize is $500. The losers walk away with little more than an assurance that their dollars are destined for a good cause.

But the real winners and losers live many thousands of miles away, where the profits from the nightly ritual of numbers-calling fund what critics describe as a form of ethnic cleansing by extremist organisations.

Each dollar spent on bingo by the mostly Latino residents of Hawaiian Gardens, on the outskirts of Los Angeles, helps fund Jewish settlements on Palestinian land in some of the most sensitive areas of occupied East Jerusalem, particularly the Muslim quarter of the old city, and West Bank towns such as Hebron where the Israeli military has forced Arabs out of their properties in their thousands.

'The majority of bingo customers don't realise where their money is going'

Over the past 20 years, the bingo hall has funnelled tens of millions of dollars in to what its opponents - including rabbis serving the Hawaiian Gardens area - describe as an ideologically-driven strategy to grab land for <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/israel>Israel, as well as contributing to influential American groups and thinktanks backing Israel's more hawkish governments.

But the bingo operation, owned by an American Jewish doctor and millionaire, Irving Moskowitz, has taken on added significance in recent weeks as President Barack Obama has laid down a marker to Israel in demanding an end to settlement construction, which the White House regards as a major obstacle to peace. "Moskowitz is taking millions from the poorest town in California and sending it to the settlements," said Haim Dov Beliak, a rabbi serving Hawaiian Gardens and one of the Jewish religious leaders in California who have campaigned to block the flow of funds to the settlers.

"The money Moskowitz puts in to the settlements has changed the game. Moskowitz has helped build a hardcore of the settler movement that may number 50-70,000.

"He's not paying for all of it but he puts the money up front for the vanguards that get things off the ground. That ties Israel's hands. That ties the hands of the Obama administration. If the administration wants to be serious about stopping the settlers it has to begin in Hawaiian Gardens."

Moskowitz is an 80-year-old retired doctor and orthodox Jewish millionaire who built a fortune buying and selling hospitals. In 1988 he also bought the faltering bingo hall in Hawaiian Gardens which, under California law, can only be run as not-for-profit operation so Moskowitz brought it under the wing of a charitable foundation he had established in his own name.

The foundation, which did not respond to requests for an interview, bills the bingo operation as of great benefit to the local community through donations to a number of groups, such as the Hawaiian Gardens food bank, as well as scholarships. It has also given money for disaster relief in Central America, Kosovo and parts of the US.

But tax returns show that the bulk of the donations go to what the foundation describes as "charitable support" to an array of organisations in Israel.

"The loss of many of Dr Moskowitz's relatives during the Holocaust strengthened his conviction that Israel must be maintained as a safe haven for Jewish people from all over the world. In Israel, the Foundation supports a wide array of religious, educational, cultural and emergency services organisations," the foundation says on its website.

What it does not say is that the focus of the donations is a number of Jewish organisations intent on claiming Palestinian territory for Israel and ensuring that occupied East Jerusalem remains in the Jewish state's hands.

Beliak calculates that the foundation has given Jewish settlers well over £100m, beginning with the construction 20 years ago of 133 houses on land confiscated from Palestinians by the Israeli government.

Beliak helped launch the Coalition for Justice in Hawaiian Gardens & Jerusalem to stop the flow of money from the bingo hall to the settlements. Its investigations of tax records show that the Moskowitz Foundation's donations include grants to Beit Hadassah, a militant Jewish settlement in the heart of the West Bank city of Hebron.

Thousands of Arabs have been forced from their homes and businesses around Beit Hadassah ostensibly for their own security after an American-born settler Baruch Goldstein murdered 29 Palestinians nearby in 1994. Goldstein was himself shot dead and his grave is regarded as a shrine by some settlers. Moskowitz has made excuses for Goldstein's actions by blaming Palestinians for pushing him too far.

The foundation has also given more than £3.5m to Ateret Cohanim, a right wing group that houses Jews in the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem's old city. In other parts of East Jerusalem, Moskowitz has funded Jewish colonies situated to box in or cut off Palestinian neighbourhoods that fits in with a broader government strategy to ensure total Israeli control over the city.

"What Moskowitz pioneered was trying to break up the continuity of the Arab population centres in Jerusalem," said Beliak. "The consequences are radically different from just mom and pop buying a little piece of land. These are political statements and facts on the ground, and every [US] administration has allowed him to do this."

Among the most contentious of the organisations backed by Moskowitz is the City of David Foundation in the heart of an Arab neighbourhood of Jerusalem, where about 1,500 Palestinians are facing expulsion ostensibly in the name of archaeological preservation of a site where the organisation says King David established a city 3,000 years ago.

Four years ago, the City of David Foundation director, Doron Spielman, told the Guardian that "the goal of our organisation is to increase the presence of Jews in the neighbourhood as much as possible … We cannot trust that if this is an Arab neighbourhood, Jews will be safe here".

To that end Palestinians have been driven from their homes, sometimes at gunpoint, while others are fighting in the courts to cling on to their properties.

Moskowitz has made no secret of his hostility toward the Palestinians. He opposed the Oslo peace accords, likening them to the appeasement of the Nazis. In 1996 he told the Los Angeles Times that peace talks represented a "slide toward concessions, surrender, and Israeli suicide".

He was also an outspoken opponent of Ariel Sharon's removal of Jewish settlers from the Gaza strip four years ago and provided the settlers with funds to fight the pullout.

Now Moskowitz is building a much bigger bingo hall in Hawaiian Gardens which will increase the flow of cash.

Beliak is particularly angered that the fundraising takes place without interference from the American authorities. In contrast, he says, Muslim charities which raise money to help Palestinians have been targeted for investigation, shut down and some of their administrators jailed because providing welfare to Gaza indirectly helps Hamas.

"After 2001 there was a whole discourse about how supposedly Muslims [in America] used these charitable donations to support violence.

"There was never ever in the US anything substantially that made that case. But here they did have a case where somebody was using money to support settlers, money that fosters extremism and violence, and they completely ignored it," said Beliak.

Irving Moscowitz, U.S. Donor to Israeli Settlements and Related Causes

- filed under: <http://www.fmep.org/search?Subject%3Alist=U.S.%20Policy>U.S. Policy, <http://www.fmep.org/search?Subject%3Alist=Settlements>Settlements

Right Web | May 24, 2007

The following report, dated May 24, 2007, profiles the charitable donations of Irving Moscowitz to Israeli settlements and related activities. Moscowitz is the owner of the Shepherd Hotel in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem where he plans to build a new settlement with the approval of the Government of Israel. In July, 2009, the Obama administration protested this plan which defies the administration's request for a total settlement freeze.

For the full profile follow this link to Right Web's site:

<http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/Moskowitz_Irving>http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/Moskowitz_Irving

Irving Moskowitz is a Florida-based bingo and gambling magnate who uses proceeds from his businesses to fund right-wing pro-Israel organizations in the United States and radical Israeli settler groups. Moskowitz, a retired doctor and millionaire who originally built his wealth by buying and selling hospitals, also funds social service outfits in Hawaiian Gardens, California, a small, mostly Latino city just outside Los Angeles where Moskowitz's gambling business is located. A controversial figure both in the United States and Israel, Moskowitz's Hawaiian Gardens casino has been unsuccessfully sued by concerned citizens in the United States for alleged abuses committed against its workers (see the website of the Coalition for Justice in Hawaiian Gardens & Jerusalem, stopmoskowitz.org). In Israel, Moskowitz has been severely criticized for using his wealth to try to dictate government policy and making controversial land purchases in Palestinian enclaves in Jerusalem and the Occupied Territories.

Commenting on his influence, a Jewish news agency reported in a 1997 article entitled "Is Irving Moskowitz a Hero or Just a Rogue?": "An Israeli doctor working in a Manhattan hospital asked his colleague last week, 'Who's the prime minister of Israel?' 'This week, of course, it's Dr. Irving Moskowitz,' Joseph Frager told his questioner." At the time, Frager headed the American Friends of Ateret Cohanim, one of a number of U.S. groups that support taking over territory in Palestinian areas and rebuilding the temple where the Dome of the Rock is located. Frager was referring to a dispute between Moskowitz and then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over a controversial home he had purchased in eastern Jerusalem and given to three Jewish families. Reported the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA): "After heated negotiations, Netanyahu convinced Moskowitz to kick the families out of the Arab neighborhood in eastern Jerusalem, on the Mount of Olives. Instead 10 yeshiva students will guard and maintain the property. For years Netanyahu supported Moskowitz's Jerusalem land purchases. The two have been close ever since Moskowitz was instrumental in opening a research institute named after Netanyahu's brother, Yonatan, who died during the famous Entebbe rescue in 1976."

Earlier in 1996, Moskowitz pressured Netanyahu to open a controversial tunnel next to the Temple Mount, which sparked several days of rioting in Palestinian areas, resulting in some 70 deaths. A plaque in the tunnel commemorates Moskowitz, who funded the tunnel's construction (ibid, JTA). In 2000, the Temple Mount tunnel provided the spark that set off the second intifada, the al-Aqsa uprising, when then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon visited the tunnel (Yehuda Litani, "Stop Temple Works," Ynetnews.com, February 8, 2007).

Moskowitz is also a longtime funder of a number of U.S.-based neoconservative outfits that have been key promoters of an expansive war on terror aimed at reshaping the Middle East. These include the Hudson Institute, the American Enterprise Institute(AEI), the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, and the Center for Security Policy (CSP). Praising Moskowitz's generous funding, David Wurmser, an adviser on the Middle East to Vice President Dick Cheney and a former AEI fellow, once said that the bingo mogul was a "gentle man whose generous support of AEI allows me to be here" (quoted in Jim Lobe, "New Cheney Foreign Policy Adviser Sets Sights on Syria," Foreign Policy In Focus, October 22, 2003; see also, the Irving I. Moskowitz Foundation, 2005 Form 990).

Moskowitz is also a "contributing expert" to the Ariel Center for Policy Research, a hardline advocacy and research institute founded in 1997 that espouses a Likud Party line on Israeli security, arguing on its website that the "peace process" is "a paradox whereby a minuscule democracy is being forced to provide its totalitarian enemies-scores of times its size-the only thing it lacks: territory." The group maintains that any peace effort that "will force Israel to its pre-1967 borders, i.e. losing those territorial assets critically needed for the very existence of the Jewish State, will not be but a recipe for war." Among the organization's other contributing experts are a number of U.S.-based researchers aligned with the U.S. pro-Israel right and the neoconservatives, including Meyrav Wurmser and Anne Bayefsky of the Hudson Institute; Ilan Berman, vice president of the American Foreign Policy Council; Rachel Ehrenfeld, head of the Center for the Study of Corruption; and Frank Gaffney of the CSP.

Moskowitz established the Irving I. Moskowitz Foundation in 1968. A year later, according to the JTA, he began his controversial property acquisitions in Jerusalem with proceeds from the sale of one of his hospitals. In 1988, Moskowitz purchased the Hawaiian Gardens bingo parlor. "It was a move," reports the JTA, "that changed his life-and ultimately, he hopes, the character of Jerusalem." Moskowitz converted the bingo business into a non-profit organization, nearly all the proceeds of which go to the Moskowitz Foundation. "Through bingo profits, Moskowitz's charitable giving has soared from the thousands to the millions, propelling his foundation to one of the top 1,000 private foundations in the United States. Moskowitz's foundation gave away $57,000 in 1987. In 1991, he gave away $1.5 million, according to the foundation's tax returns. By 1994, he had given $4.3 million and about $6 million in 1995. More current figures are not available."

In an exhaustive 1996 account of Moskowitz's background and charitable giving, the Los Angeles Times highlighted a number of his more controversial initiatives. Reported the Times: "Many beneficiaries ... are American 'pass through' organizations designed to help Israeli counterparts, including groups involved in the property purchases and settlements in contested areas. Foundation records show that the largest single amount in 1994, $1.03 million, went to American Friends of Everest, which Moskowitz set up 'to acquire an important religious building in the holy city.' And the leading recipient through 1994, getting $2.35 million, was American Friends of Ateret Cohanim, which supports a yeshiva in the Arab quarter of Jerusalem. Members believe they have a God-given mission to buy property and protect Temple Mount, revered as the site where Abraham offered to sacrifice his son, Isaac, and the site of the First and Second Jewish temples, the latter destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD. Ateret Cohanim members believe that the rebuilding of the temple, and the coming of the messiah, are imminent. But that would mean tearing down the third-holiest site in the Islamic world, the Dome of the Rock and Al Aqsa Mosque, built over the temple ruins. ... In June [2006], Moskowitz visited the yeshiva to donate a Torah scroll in memory of a student stabbed to death by Arabs. By now, some of his eight children, two of them rabbis, were raising their own families in Israel. 'After 2,000 years of sacrifice for the dream of returning to Jerusalem, we cannot allow it to be taken away,' he said" (Hope Hamashige, Paul Lieberman, and Mary Curtius, "Bingo King Aids Israeli Right Wing," Los Angeles Times, May 9, 1996).

According to more recent tax statements, by 2005 the foundation's yearly charitable donations had climbed to nearly $6.5 million, including donations to nearly 80 organizations, the majority of which are Israel-oriented groups. In that year, his bingo and gambling businesses contributed more than $30 million to the foundation. Its total assets as of the end of 2004 were just over $52 million (Irving I. Moskowitz Foundation, 2005 Form 990).

Among the foundation's largest recipients in 2004 were:

The American Friends of Bet El Yeshiva ($785,000), a "pass through" group that supports the Bet El Yeshiva religious center, a sharply conservative outfit known for its hard line on land-for-peace deals and efforts to push for government protection of the settler movement. In 1995, Bet El "called on Israeli soldiers to refuse to obey orders connected with the evacuation of West Bank military installations as part of Stage 2 of the peace process" (Hillel Halkin, "Israel, Rabbis Battle for Soul Of Their Army," Forward, July 21, 1995).

City of Hawaiian Gardens ($510,000).

American Friends of Mercaz Harav Kook ($500,000).

The Hawaiian Gardens Food Bank ($480,000).

The Central Fund for Israel ($369,000).

The American Friends of Old City Charities ($300,000).

The Hebron Fund ($210,000), which supports settler groups in the volatile West Bank city that Israel occupied after the 1967 Six Day War.

The Battalion of Deborah ($100,000), a Christian dispensationalist group based in Texas that believes "the Land of Israel is promised by God to the Jewish people. We oppose any policy that fails to take God's word into account and attempts to separate the Jewish people from the Land of Israel. We believe such policies will serve only to hinder the establishment of a just and lasting peace between the people of Israel and the Arab nation" (see <http://www.battalionofdeborah.org>www.battalionofdeborah.org).

Although notoriously media-shy, Moskowitz, an Orthodox Jew who reportedly lost several dozen family members in the Holocaust, has on occasion spoken out in defense of his activities in interviews with reporters and letters to major newspapers, often using World War II-related themes to make his points. For example, he once told the Jerusalem Post: "I was 10 years old at the time and still vividly remember the profound sadness that enveloped our home in the wake of the Munich signing. There was an atmosphere of mourning for the tragedy we knew would follow, since belligerent dictators can never be truly appeased. ... Under political pressure at home and abroad or in the hope of being remembered in the history books-or simply out of sheer desperation-prime ministers can take steps in the name of 'peace' that actually lead to war" (quoted in JTA). Similarly, according to JTA, he once "compared slain Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to Britain's Neville Chamberlain, who sought to appease the Nazis."

Like many of his associates among the right-wing pro-Israel lobbies in the United States, Moskowitz lambastes the Mideast peace processes and rejects land-for-peace deals. In a 1996 interview with the Los Angeles Times, he said that the then-ongoing peace talks represented a "slide toward concessions, surrender, and Israeli suicide" (Los Angeles Times). And in a 1997 letter to the Washington Post, he wrote: "If the peace process is incapable of digesting the presence of 50 Jewish families 860 yards from the Western Wall and barely a mile from the King David Hotel, then its fragility is indeed beyond repair. To rule out the construction of a 50-unit Jewish apartment project on Mount of Olives because of its proximity to Arab residences is to enfranchise Yasser Arafat's thesis that Palestinians are incapable of living on common ground with Israelis in Jerusalem. That would be defined as racism anywhere outside the Middle East" (quoted in JTA).

Moskowitz's wife, Cherna, has also been accused of taking extreme views on Mideast peace issues. For example, the Coalition for Justice in Hawaiian Gardens & Jerusalem reports on its website that she helped set up a website that hosted a game during which players were "invited" to kill moderate politicians, including former Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Reports the Coalition: "In February 2000, the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Aharonot discovered an Internet assassination 'game' that invited visitors to 'destroy' Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Barak and other moderate, pro-peace Israeli political leaders. The game encouraged visitors to click on a leader's picture, which would "explode," accompanied by the sound of screaming. Prime Minister Barak's office condemned the Moskowitz-sponsored game, saying 'The right-wing site creates incitements of a most violent nature that are like those that have brought consequences that all of us remember,' a reference to the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995" (see "The Assassination 'Game,'" Coalition for Justice in Hawaiian Gardens & Jerusalem, stopmoskowitz.org/assassination.shtml).

.