Jewish charity in UK under scrutiny over donations for Israeli soldiers
Israeli soldiers stand next to their military vehicles just outside the Gaza Strip, on 10 March 2024
Simon Hooper reports in Middle East Eye on 4 September 2024:
The UK’s charity regulator is assessing a complaint against a major Jewish fundraising organisation accused of facilitating donations to an Israeli charity providing equipment to soldiers fighting in Gaza.
The Charity Commission on Wednesday confirmed to Middle East Eye that it had opened a regulatory compliance case into the Achisomoch Aid Company (AAC). MEE understands that the regulator opened the case in response to a complaint about AAC from a campaign group, the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP).
London-based AAC is a fundraising platform that facilitates Jewish charitable donations – known in Hebrew as tzedakah – to more than 2,000 vetted charities in the UK, Israel and around the world.
In the last financial year, to March 2023, it handled donations totalling almost £65 million ($85m), according to its latest annual report.
The complaint highlights the provision of AAC’s fundraising services to an Israeli medical charity, Ezrat Achim, whose current activities include supplying what ICJP describes as “combat and tactical equipment” to Israeli soldiers.
It cites a fundraising page set up by Ezrat Achim on the Israel-based causematch.com website to support “IDF soldiers and families on the frontlines” which said that donations would be used to purchase equipment including drones, protective gear, gunlights and other items “according to specific daily requests we receive from commanders and individual soldiers”.
It notes that the activities of Ezrat Achim, and the services provided to it by AAC, may amount to “complicity in war crimes”, citing serious concerns about Israel’s conduct of its war in Gaza and ongoing legal proceedings against Israel and Israeli officials at the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court.
More than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed and more than 94,000 injured in Gaza since the start of war last October.
MEE asked both AAC and Ezrat Achim for comment but had not received a response at the time of publication. ICJP legal officer Mira Naseer told MEE: “The opening of a case into the AAC is a positive step. The Charity Commission must take decisive and transparent action against any wrongdoing identified.”
‘Tactical gear’
In addition to its fundraising in support of soldiers in Gaza, MEE also identified a fundraising page for Ezrat Achim asking for donations to supply “tactical gear” including “bullet proof vests and helmets, as well as tactical uniforms” to soldiers based in the Gush Etzion area – an illegal Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank.