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The revocation of the Jewish National Fund’s and Ne’eman Foundation’s charitable status suggests a massive shift is underway in how Canada views the illicit funding of West Bank settlements following the ICJ’s opinion on the Israeli occupation.
By Miles Howe August 17, 2024
It’s official.
Two high-profile ‘proposal to revoke’ notices, published in the August 10, 2024, edition of the Canada Gazette, suggest a sea change may be underway within the charities enforcement arm of the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA). The first revoked recipient, The Jewish National Fund of Canada (JNFC), is a long-time, Zionist, indoctrination apparatus that for decades has operated within Canadian Hebrew schools and places of worship. The JNFC has attempted to teach generations of Canadian Jews that planting trees atop the wreckage of former Palestinian villages is a spiritual, charitable, act, and has been an integral distorter of ancient Jewish value systems concerning community support and care. It operates as a Canadian charitable conduit for the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) and the illegal settlements in the occupied territory. Under the auspices of greenwashing Palestinian ethnic cleansing efforts that have been foundational to building the state of Israel, the JNFC has moved tens of millions of dollars CDN in tax-deductible donations into the so-called Jewish state.
The second proposed revocation was sent out to the Ne’eman Canada Foundation, which is presided over by Chaim Katz, the former mayor of Shilo, an illegal settlement in the occupied Palestinian territory. While its Israeli recipient base is less clear, Ne’eman operates as a charitable flow-through, specifically for Canadian private foundations – from which it receives the vast majority of its donations – looking to move their charitable donations into the illegal settlements. While Ne’eman operates on a smaller scale than does the JNFC, since its establishment in 2011 it has moved millions CDN into Israel.
While providing financial support to the Israeli military and the illegal settlements are both contraventions of the Income Tax Act, until this point the CRA has shown little appetite to revoke the charitable statuses of Zionist charities funneling money to the IDF or the illegal settlements, despite its duty to enforce its own mandate. Apparently, this is now changing.
To be clear, the CRA has long been aware that the Canada-to-Israel charity pipeline, which moves about $278 million CDN in subsidized donations per year between 2018-2022, is rife with illegal activity; much Canadian case precedent involving undirected and uncontrolled international recipients is directly related to Canadian charities and their illicit Israeli intermediaries. More recently, high-profile revocations of charities such as Kupas Hachesed Meoroth, Chasdei Levy Yitzcok, and Colel Chabad Lubavitch Foundation of Israel suggest these charitable organizations operated as little more than multi-million dollar cheque-cashing schemes; indeed, their operations were so corrupted that the CRA’s own investigative team, in many cases, could not even establish if or how money actually arrived in Israel, or whether any charitable activity had even taken place. Alternately, the revocations of Gates of Mercy and the Beth Oloth Charitable Foundation point towards hundreds of millions of dollars CDN moving without accountability, direction, or control, into the supposed hands of thousands of intermediaries in Israel. My own, ongoing, research suggests that anywhere between 15-25% of all donations moving from Canada to Israel are unaccountable and potentially illicit.
That said, the above revocations hinge upon more mundane contraventions of the Income Tax Act, specifically as it relates to a lack of direction and control of (Israeli) intermediaries, and of operating for non-charitable purposes. The CRA did make mention, in passing, that some of Beth Oloth’s purported charitable activities were taking place within the illegal settlements, but connections to the illegal settlements were not the crux of the regulator’s investigation.
To find the government’s last attempt at a charitable status revocation that actually centralized the unlawfulness of moving charitable donations into the illegal settlements, one has to go way back to 2002, when then-Revenue Canada proposed to revoke the status of Canadian Magen David Adom for Israel (CMDAI) due in part to the fact that equipment it had purchased (ambulances, communications systems, etc.) had been operating in the Occupied Territories, in contravention to Canada’s longstanding positions at the United Nations regarding the illegal settlements.
Although the Federal Court of Appeal ultimately revoked CMDAI’s charitable status, Judge Rothstein, in the dissent, noted that he could find no clear and publicly available statement concerning Canada’s position vis a vis the occupied territory, its UN voting record notwithstanding. As a result, Revenue Canada’s argument surrounding CMDAI’s operations in the occupied Palestinian territory was struck from the justification for revocation, and Canada’s position concerning doing charity in the illegal settlements was thrust into a legal limbo.
Things, however, have changed.
Since the CMDAI decision, the Department of Global Affairs has developed a clear public policy statement surrounding Canada’s position on the illegal settlements, and the CRA has developed a summary policy concerning the need for Canadian charities to adhere to public policy, even if the act in which they are engaged is not illegal per se, or face revocation. And while not common, charities do, from time to time, face revocation over contraventions of public policy.
What makes the CRA’s current proposals to revoke compelling, from a social justice and human rights standpoint, is that the JNF Canada and Ne’eman are far from the only examples of Canadian charities operating as illicit funnels for the IDF and the illegal settlements. If the CRA is now ‘cleaning house’ along these justificatory lines, then we may well find ourselves at the broad swell of a long-overdue application of regulatory enforcement.
The Mizrachi Organization of Canada, for example, actively lists dozens of illegal settlement and IDF-supportive organizations among its Israeli recipients. The Jewish Heritage Foundation of Canada also lists numerous recipients within the illegal settlements. The Heseg Foundation is established for the sole purpose of providing support to IDF soldiers, while Bnei Akiva Schools, also a registered Canadian charity, appears to operate as a quasi-recruitment apparatus for the IDF. To be clear, these charities, and numerous others, currently operate not only with Canadian approval but with Canadian taxpayers subsidizing their illegal operations.
The July 19, 2024, Advisory Opinion issued by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has been something of a wake-up call for the CRA. In finding that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory is patently illegal, the ICJ further pronounced that there were clear “legal consequences” for Member states at the United Nations, which were “under an obligation not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by Israel’s illegal presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.”
Why now?
Once/if the revocations against JNFC and Ne’eman are finalized, the public can receive the CRA’s audit investigations via Access to Information request. Until that point, however, the notice in the Canada Gazette stands as the only palpable clue as to the government’s intentions. Any attempt at currently understanding the CRA’s justifications behind these proposed revocations, therefore, quickly descends into a game of conjecture.
That said, having read dozens of CRA investigative audits that have led to charitable status revocation, I will opine that when the regulator does finally bring an investigation to bear upon a transgressional charity, it does so with a professionalism and scope that frequently draws in multiple government agencies. Given the potential of reputational damage caused by a notice of intention to revoke, the CRA doesn’t go off ‘half-cocked’. Knowing the degree of investigation and preparedness that goes into an audit – which frequently takes years to complete – I have little doubt that whatever the CRA has compiled on the JNFC and Ne’eman is damning. This, despite the JNFC’s very public intention to appeal the CRA’s findings, citing, among other things, investigative bias.
Beyond that, I would suggest that it’s very likely that whatever the CRA has uncovered in the audits upon which its intentions to revoke rest, aren’t the first compliance issues it’s experienced with either of these two charities. Within the charity enforcement world, a status revocation due to a failed audit stands in as the penultimate punishment and generally is not delivered lightly, or often; of over 50,000 charitable status revocations since the late 1990s, under 600 have been due to a failed audit. If the CRA is here handing out status revocations, it either means that the JNFC and Ne’eman have done something so totally egregious as to be beyond remediation, as was the case with Kupas Hachesed Meoroth, or that the charities have, for example, failed several audits or have broken an in-place compliance agreement. Bluntly, I’d say there’s either one huge something, or a serial pattern of transgressional activity.
But, why now, when the JNFC has been working to greenwash Palestinian ethnic cleansing since 1967, when it was formally registered as a charity. Have we reached a critical mass of disgust, even within the slow-moving apparatus of the CRA’s charitable enforcement wing? Has Israel finally become such a toxic entity, after over ten months of “plausible” genocide in Gaza and tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians massacred, that the once “special relationship” has soured? Is a nation whose populace would protest in the streets for the right to sexually assault prisoners, as a matter of course, best finally isolated from the rest of the global community, or at the very least ostracized as a recipient of Canadian charity?
I would suggest that the July 19, 2024, Advisory Opinion issued by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has been something of a wake-up call for the CRA. In finding that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory is patently illegal, the ICJ further pronounced that there were clear “legal consequences” for Member states at the United Nations, which were “under an obligation not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by Israel’s illegal presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.”
Thanks in no small part to activist groups like Just Peace Advocates, who have worked tirelessly over the last several years to keep track of illicit activity within the Canada-to-Israel charitable pipeline, the CRA is in receipt of over a dozen unique complaints concerning Canadian charities funneling money to either the IDF, the illegal settlements, or both. With much of the investigative work already done for them, it’s long past time for the CRA to end the Canadian charitable sector’s complicity in the illegal occupation of Palestine.
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Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) national headquarters in Ottawa. (Photo: Obert Madondo/Flickr)
