How a Canada-based Zionist charity funds illegal settlements in West Bank

The Canada Revenue Agency is under increasing pressure from activists to investigate a Zionist charity that has raised funds from Canadians and funnelled them to illegal Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Mizrachi Canada, a religious Zionist movement, which has staunchly defended Israel’s brutal war in Gaza, has also given funds to organisations associated with the Israeli military for years.

Between December 2022 and January 2024, CRA received five specific investigation requests regarding Mizrachi Canada.

A petition, which has urged Canada’s government to look into Mizrachi Canada’s activities, has amassed over 8,000 signatures since April 10th. The petition has been floated by Just Peace Advocates and Independent Jewish Voices Canada (IJVC).

In a recent open letter published by the advocacy groups, it was highlighted that Mizrachi Canada failed to disclose the intermediaries receiving its funds, sidestepping its legal obligations as a Canadian charity.

In official records, Mizrachi Canada has been listed as a charity organisation since 1979.

But it was only in 2022, after activists exerted pressure for more information, that it disclosed that some of the recipients of its funds in Israel were organisations like Regavim, a radical pro-settler group that is forcibly taking over Palestinian lands.

The CRA has yet to take any action against Mizrachi Canada, which faces multiple allegations including violation of the Income Tax Act, the Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act, and going against official Canadian policy.

Hoodwinking the Canadian government

Mizrachi Canada is not the only charity violating Canadian law but the "sheer egregiousness and outrageousness of the organisations in Israel that it's funding," has made it a subject of attention, Corey Balsam, IJVC’s national coordinator, tells TRT World.

Some of the organisations funded by Mizrachi Canada through tax-deductible donations include “Im Tirtzu”, a far-right Israeli group, openly involved in blockades of vital aid trucks destined for Gaza where a famine is looming.

There’s also “The Duvdevan Foundation”, an Israeli charity providing assistance to current members of the Duvdevan Unit of the Israeli military, which is known for carrying out extrajudicial assassinations of Palestinians.

International donors can visit jgive.com, a website managed by ASOR Fund, an Israeli charity based in Jerusalem, and select from a range of Israeli charitable organisations listed on the site.

What's concerning is that this website allows donors from the UK and Canada to contribute in their home country's currency and receive tax receipts from their respective countries.

In this way, the donations are not directly allocated to the chosen Israeli charities. Instead, they are initially routed to a Canadian charity, in this case, Mizrachi Canada, which then forwards the funds to Israeli organisations, Miles Howe, an Assistant Professor of Critical Criminology at Brock University, tells TRT World.

While the website offers a range of complicit Israeli organisations as options, Mizrachi Canada forwards the donations to the selected charity upon receiving them.

Moreover, it has the discretion to allocate funds received from the website or elsewhere to any grantee organisation it chooses, as charities are permitted to distribute donations according to their preferences.

In either scenario, it simplifies the process of funding Israeli crimes for Canadian donors through their tax contributions.

Funding the illegal settlements

What's more concerning about Mizrachi Canada is that for years, it predominantly used its website to transfer funds outside Canada, yet for most of this period, it failed to disclose any of the recipients.

Activists have discovered that for a five-year period spanning from 2017 to 2021, Mizrachi Canada neglected to properly list its agents. “In 2021, only a few were listed, and between 2017 and 2020, none were listed at all,” Balsam says.

After facing pressure, Mizrachi Canada published its first recipient list in 2022, which included many Israeli organisations.

"What we found in going through that is that 28 of those agents are located in the Israeli settlements, the occupied territories in East Jerusalem. And several of those agents are involved in highly problematic activities," says Howe, who has conducted extensive academic research on the activities of Israeli charities in Canada.

The amount of money involved was also significant. Based on its tax returns, the organisation reported cumulative revenue exceeding $37 million and expenses exceeding $30 million between 2018 and 2022. More than 75 percent of these expenses were reportedly allocated for "charitable programming" in Israel.

Double standards among charities

Khaled Mouammar, a Christian Palestinian who was expelled from his hometown of Haifa in the 1948 Nakba when he was 7 years old, is one of the activists actively pressing for action against Mizrachi Canada.

Mouammar and his colleagues copied their requests regarding Mizrachi Canada multiple times to the director of the agency as well as to Marie-Claude Bibeau, the Minister responsible for the Canada Revenue Agency. Yet, they are still waiting for any action to be taken.

This inaction highlights the double standards of the Canadian government, which has promptly investigated Muslim charities whenever it has received a similar request, says Mouammar.

“The CRA acts swiftly and decisively in those cases. However, in these instances, which actually violate Canadian foreign policy because Canada opposes Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the government officials are not even responding," he tells TRT World.

According to the United Nations Security Council, Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territories, including East Jerusalem, are illegal.

The settlements contradict the Geneva Convention and The Hague Regulations and contravene fundamental rules of international humanitarian law, such as the right to life, the right to equality and the right to freedom of movement.

Canada does not recognise permanent Israeli control over territories occupied in 1967 and opposes illegal Jewish settlements and outposts in the West Bank.