Genocide as Charity: a critical look at the Mizrachi Organization of Canada

PHOTO CREDIT: The Israeli military’s Duvdevan Unit training in March 2022. The Duvdevan Unit is one of many Israeli bodies accused of committing war crimes and human rights abuses that donors can support through the Mizrachi Organization of Canada. (Photo: Israeli Defence Forces Spokesperson’s Unit)

Originally published in Mondoweiss

By Miles Howe  December 4, 2024 

The work of the Mizrachi Organization of Canada shows how Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity are embedded within the Canadian charitable sector.

No one charity epitomizes the synergy between rampant financial complicity in the aiding and abetting of Israeli war criminality and the laissez faire attitude that plagues the Canadian tax regulator, better than the Mizrachi Organization of Canada. Legally registered as a charitable organization as of 1979, Mizrachi Canada’s bold-faced website advertises itself as the Canadian home of the Religious Zionist Movement, ready and energized to move tax-deductible donations to supposedly worthy causes in Israel. With Canadian Jewish private and public foundations sitting on multiple billions of dollars, Mizrachi Canada serves as the most overt conduit for Canadians looking to support Israeli war crimes – and earn a charitable tax credit in the process. 

Welcome to Canada, where Palestinian erasure is a charitable pastime and the Canada Revenue Agency, the charitable sector regulator, is either complicit or inept.  

For starters, as I’ve written about in detail here, Mizrachi Canada operates as a tax receipt-issuing conduit for the Israeli website, jgive.com. Jgive.com, the forward-facing platform for the Israeli-based organization, ASUR Fund, plays virtual host to thousands of Israeli-registered charities. Thumbing its nose at customary international legal frameworks, like the Geneva Conventions and the Rome Statutes (which Canada has internalized into its own Criminal Code) hundreds of these Israeli charities are physically located in illegally occupied Palestinian territory. 

Beyond their role in adding permanency to Israel’s illegal occupation, consider the operational parameters of some of the other Israeli charities hosted by jgive.com: Regavim works to delegitimize Palestinian territorial claims, specifically in so-called Area C of the West Bank. Elad Ir David runs an illegal settlement/tourist attraction that uses an ever-expanding, pseudo-archaeological, dig site as justification for expelling Palestinians from the town of Silwan. Women in Green claims to be an apolitical organization, yet is bent upon the destruction and subsequent Israeli settlement of Gaza. Im Tirtzu, an actual fascist organization, actively turns away aid trucks bound for Gaza. 

In terms of overt support to the Israeli military, jgive.com also lists numerous ‘Hesder Yeshivas’ as Israeli charities. These quasi-educational facilities operate in a complementary capacity to military service in Israel, where soldiers undertake Talmudic studies alongside active duty. Dozens of other Israeli charities on jgive.com, like the Duvdevan Foundation, for example, provide material and financial support to active members of the Israeli military, drawing them into direct financial complicity in the aiding and abetting of an ever-expanding list of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. Mizrachi Canada’s financial support of these internationally illegal Israeli recipients is listed in Table 1.

Table 1 – Illegal Israeli Intermediaries named by Mizrachi Canada
(Source: Mizrachi Canada 2023 Schedule 2 – Overseas Activity)

 Internationalizing the scheme, jgive.com has aligned itself with a variety of charitable partners, which provide Zionist donors in America, Great Britain, and Canada the opportunity to use the jgive website to donate to the Israeli charity of their choice, in their home currencies, and receive charitable tax receipts in their home countries. None of this would be possible without ‘home country’ partners, because the Israeli charities themselves don’t have charitable status outside of Israel. In America, jgive.com’s charity partner is the Jerusalem-registered, Friends of Asor Fund USA. In Great Britain, the charity partner is registered as UK Toremet. For Canadian Zionists, the charitable tax receipting service is provided by Mizrachi Canada.

This isn’t actually legal in Canada. In Canada, if you’re a charity and you want to move money into the hands of an international intermediary, like an Israeli charity, you need to demonstrate direction and control over the money you’re providing and be able to prove that the international recipient is undertaking charitable programming that wouldn’t have taken place without your money. You can’t just blanket fundraise for pre-existing operations over which you have no control, like what Mizrachi Canada does for jgive.com. That’s called being an illegal conduit.

Canadian charities are also required to obey Canadian public policy statements. Global Affairs Canada has made it clear that the Canadian government does not consider the post-1967 Israeli presence in the occupied Palestinian territory to be “permanent” and, importantly, considers the Fourth Geneva Convention to be legally applicable and “establishes Israel’s obligations as an occupying power”. 

As we all know, Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention notes that the transferring civilian populations into occupied territory, along with forced deportation and transfer of indigenous populations, are war crimes. Canadian charities are legally responsible for the actions of their international intermediaries. And so, regardless of whatever passes for charity law in the apartheid state, Mizrachi Canada is legally responsible to Canadian law for the activities of its Israeli recipients.

Beyond the confines of the Income Tax Act and Canadian public policy, the actions of Mizrachi Canada’s Israeli intermediaries also contravene various aspects of the Canadian Criminal Code. Under the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, the transfer of civilian populations into a territory under occupation, along with the “extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly”, are war crimes. The Rome Statute has been adopted in full into Canadian law through the Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act (CAHWCA), as have the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, under the Geneva Conventions Act. War crimes and crimes against humanity, within both Acts, are indictable offenses under the Canadian Criminal Code. 

The problem isn’t just limited to the activities of Mizrachi Canada. As I’ve written about in some detail here, Mizrachi Canada is not the only Canadian charity that moves money into the hands of Israeli intermediaries committing war crimes (for whom they are legally responsible). On a solely financial level, the jgive.com empire is certainly the key, international, operator within the world of ‘point and click’ Israeli charity. But the Canadian charitable organization Canada Charity Partners, for example, operates as a conduit for the Israeli-based website israelgives.org. Ne’eman Foundation Canada, prior to its revocation (which I’ve written about here), also hosted dozens of Israeli charities, many of them located within the illegal settlements and/or who provided material and financial support to Palestinian dispossession. 

The overall problem is that these Canadian charitable organizations seem to be able to operate within a space of extra-legality. If/when the Canada Revenue Agency does finally act, as with the case of Ne’eman Canada, the actual repercussions are totally minimal – the charity simply dissolves and its place within the illegal, transactional, system is replaced.

Tragically, by financial accounts, genocide has been very good for those involved in the Israeli charity business. 2023 saw jgive.com’s parent company, the ‘ASUR Fund’ take in over 283 million NIS in donations (about $78 million USD). This is over double the 131 million NIS it brought in in 2022. For its part, in 2023 Mizrachi Canada brought in over $21 million CDN, about triple the over $7 million CDN it declared in revenue in 2022. 

Asleep at the Wheel or In on the Deal?

Beyond the fact that the Canadian charitable sector is now actively an extra-legal hotbed of financial complicity in the aiding and abetting of Israeli war crimes, two serious issues present themselves.

Firstly, as an outside researcher, year in year out, by rights I should be able to chart out all of a Canadian charity’s international activity. Canadian charities are required to divulge their international activity, by intermediary name and received dollar amount, in the ‘Schedule 2 – Overseas Activity’ section of their yearly tax returns. Yet even this baseline of data, via which one might then begin the research process, is frequently absent. Consider that Mizrachi Canada, between 2007-2021, claimed to have moved over $46 million CDN into Israel. Only about $600,000 CDN of this was properly accounted for, by intermediary name and dollar amount, in its yearly tax returns. The rest, over a span of 15 years, quite simply, could have gone anywhere. 

This lack of baseline reporting isn’t limited to Mizrachi Canada, either. The David Hofstedter Family Foundation, for example, consistently moves tens of millions of dollars CDN into Israel per year and simply lists the country code ‘Israel’ as its recipient. The endemic lack of reporting is the same with the United Israel Appeal of Canada, which is the main money-moving arm of the Jewish Federations of Canada and also moves millions of dollars CDN per year.

Having familiarized myself with the sector, it isn’t an underestimate to say that tens of millions of dollars CDN in tax-deductible donations move from Canada to Israel, every year, without any outside ability to know or understand where this money ends up, or what it is intended to do. The Canada Revenue Agency, for its part, appears either unable or unwilling to address this. So, while Mizrachi Canada and its activities are certainly illegal and problematic, the bigger issue is the endemic lack of reporting within the sector – and a regulator either asleep at the wheel or in on the deal.

Without fully delving into the conspiratorial, consider that the same private foundations – tied to family and corporate fortunes in Canada – whose names grace hospital wings, academic chairs, and art prizes, are the same ones underwriting Mizrachi Canada’s financial complicity in war crimes and genocide. Between 2000-2023, Canadian public and private foundations donated millions of dollars CDN to Mizrachi Canada and were responsible for about a third of the overall cash flowing through Mizrachi Canada to Israel during this period. Table 2 illustrates all Canadian foundation donors to Mizrachi Canada, between 2000-2023, that donated a minimum $200,000, cumulatively.

Table 2 – $200,000+ CDN foundation donors to Mizrachi Canada (2000-2023).

This scenario arguably epitomizes the Faustian bargain at the heart of foundational philanthropy in Canada; tax-deductible donations prop up our social service regimes yet also slate resistant indigenous populations for extermination. These are the ‘too big to fail’ of the Canadian charitable sector. The tax regulator, for reasons unknown, has either abandoned its duties, is complicit, or is understaffed to the point of being incapacitated.