Weeks before the controversial US and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) launched its operations in Gaza, a UK-based dark money think tank helped Israel launder smears against UNRWA – the main body historically responsible for aid distribution across Palestine.
Significantly, the report originated from right-wing foreign policy think tank the Henry Jackson Society (HJS). The group has long embedded itself amid a nexus of pro-Israel groups participating in the active apartheid, persecution, and expulsion of Palestinians from their land. It has also played a prominent role proliferating Islamophobic discourse and policy in the UK.
Now, investigations by the Canary have uncovered the sprawling network of pro-Israel family foundations and organisations that lie behind the think tank today, with intimate links to the genocidal settler state and its military apparatus.
Israeli government propaganda: Henry Jackson Society report smearing UNRWA
On 7 May, the official X account of the Israeli government wheeled out a video citing the ‘findings’ of a report by British neoconservative think tank the Henry Jackson Society amplifying claims about Hamas’s infiltration of the key UN relief body:
The one-minute-long piece of social media agitprop included familiar claims that the UN “covers for Hamas”, Israel’s well-rehearsed line about Hamas using Palestinian civilians as human shields, Hamas tunnels under UN facilities – and ergo, the incongruous lie that Israel “is forced to defend itself”. Overall, it served as another cynical ploy to smear established aid mechanisms, and feeble justification for its weaponisation of aid to starve the remaining 2.1 million population of Gaza.
The slick piece of propaganda boasted how the report:
tells the story the UN repeatedly chooses to leave out
In reality of course, the genocidal settler state glossed over and spun the facts for its colonial agenda. Across the 80-odd page document, the HJS regurgitates Israel’s baseless claims as irrefutable proof, citing sources as concrete evidence throughout that it regularly derived directly from none other than the Israeli government itself.
There was however, unsurprisingly, a key piece of information that the Israeli government left out of its social media psy-op. This was the fact that the HJS has long acted as a mouthpiece for Israel’s propaganda.
The HJS: long-embedded in the pro-Israel donor network
The HJS is registered with the Charity Commission, so enjoys nonprofit status in the UK. In 2023, it brought in £1.2m in donations – more than half of which came from its US-registered charitable arm, the Henry Jackson Society Incorporated (HJS Inc). Donations from HJS Inc made up £555,173, followed by general donations at £526,696. A further £27,053 came from membership fees. The group hosts a number of membership levels ranging from annual £50-350 donations offering various ‘benefits’, including invitations to exclusive events and “networking” opportunities.
Over the years, journalists and researchers have uncovered evidence that the HJS is deeply embedded in the UK and US pro-Israel lobby.
A 2015 report published by Spinwatch identified a number of its donors between 2009 and 2014.
Topping the list was the Atkin Charitable Foundation, with £450,000 in donations across five years. It’s the philanthropic vehicle of millionaire businessman Edward Atkin, who sold his baby care company Cannon Avent for £300m in 2005. Atkin is a prolific donor to the Conservative Party, and over the years has poured significant funds into climate denial group the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF). Amid its list of grant recipients were also a number of Zionist groups and causes. The report highlighted organisations like the New Israel Fund – a financier of Birthright Israel – that, as it described:
arranges and finances trips to Israel for Jewish young adults around the world aged 18–26 years old, with the aim to strengthen their relations with Israel.
Another recipient was the United Jewish Israel Appeal, and the right-wing Islamophobic Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), among more controversial pro-Israel entities.
Other significant donors included the Stanley Kalms Foundation (£100,000) of the late British businessman behind the Dixons electronics retail fortune. Kalms was a Conservative peer until July 2024, and a member of Conservative Friends of Israel. Through his foundations, Kalms has donated to a number of notorious Zionist groups. There are also numerous other partisan links with Islamophobic initiatives, and causes or prominent UK policy-makers promoting Israel.
The Rockefeller Foundation of major US petroleum industry family infamy was another major donor (£103,840), next to the Ford Foundation of vehicle manufacturer fame (£100,000).
A history of ‘normalising the demonisation and exclusion of Muslim communities’
SOAS University of London further explored these funding connections in a 2021 report. Titled The Threat to British Democracy and Society Caused by Security Think Tanks, this brought a number of new donors to the fore.
Between 2009 and 2014, the following organisations made contributions to the HJS:
Overall, the SOAS report noted that:
whilst HJS does not disclose its funding, this pattern of reported funding ultimately links HJS to a network of organisations in the UK and the US that appear to be funded with the common purpose of normalising the demonisation and exclusion of Muslim communities within Western public, political, social, cultural, and economic life.
Now, the Canary has investigated the pro-Israel entities financing its work in the years since, including some who’ve funded it during Israel’s present genocide in Gaza.
Hidden donors
In total, the Canary traced close to £1.4m of the HJS’s donations for the 10 year period spanning 2015-2025:
Of course, this still leaves the bulk of the think tank’s donors unaccounted for. For instance, of the £1.2m in donations it brought in for 2023, the Canary was able to identify the source of just £225,490. It means that the origin of nearly £1m in funding – for that year alone – remains unknown.
On top of this, more than £100,000 in donations from 2015-2025 came via ‘donor-advised funds’ (DAFs). DAFs are charitable funding vehicles that enable organisations and individuals to make donations without needing to disclose the ultimate beneficiary of the grant. In this way, donors can conceal their identity from the public. A number of known pro-Israel charitable foundations, and right-wing-linked donors utilise DAFs.
Some of the HJS’s donors from previous years have dropped off the list of funders. Meanwhile, others have stayed steadfast supporters of the think tank’s work. What’s immediately evident is that its donors now – and in the past – are deeply embedded in a wealth network propping up the war crime perpetrator and genocidal apartheid regime:
The points on the network graph represent a non-exhaustive sample of the pro-Israel, right-wing, and Islamophobic organisations the HJS donors have funded. There were a multitude more donations to Israeli universities, Zionist religious groups and sites of worship, alongside numerous other Zionist-connected causes we haven’t captured in the visualisation. Moreover, the graph focused solely on donations, so does not account for non-monetary connections, of which there are innumerable more.
Nevertheless, it paints a picture of the vast ties between the HJS, the pro-Israel lobby in the UK and US, and the Israeli state itself.
Property development empires at the heart of HJS donations
By far the biggest donor the Canary could identify was the Bernard Lewis Family Charitable Trust. It’s owned by the billionaire Lewis family of River Island clothing fame. Spinwatch noted that the Sunday Express had:
referred to co-founder David J. Lewis in his obituary as a ‘pioneering champion of Zionism’.
The Canary found that in recent years, the trust has provided funding to pro-Israel lobby groups the Community Security Trust (CST), the Jewish Leadership Council, and the Zionist Federation. In addition, the Catherine Lewis Foundation is tied to the Lewis family, and has given a number of donations to the HJS and organisations supportive of Israel.
Two vast property development empires are also at the centre of the HJS’s donor pool.
US property mogul Myron Zimmerman’s charitable group the MZ Foundation has ploughed over £150,000 into the HJS. Zimmerman has been a long-term supporter of pro-Israel groups like Stand With Us and the AMCHA Initiative, among others. It has bankrolled illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank via funding to the Central Fund of Israel. Our research found a dizzying number of pro-Israel causes – some of which we’ve included on the network graph.
Bankrolling occupation and displacement
The Sir John Ritblat Family Foundation is another significant donor. It’s the philanthropic enterprise of John Ritblat, who built major UK property development firm British Land.
In recent years, the foundation has also been a donor to the CST. In addition to this, it has given substantial sums to various Zionist synagogues in the UK, such as United Synagogue. The Israel-based Weizmann Institute of Science’s charitable arm is another key recipient.
Ritblat was previously a governor at the institute. He currently sits as a vice-president for the UK nonprofit that funnels funding towards its work. As the BDS Movement has noted, the institute:
intricately collaborates with Israel’s top weapons manufacturers, including Elbit Systems and Israel Aerospace Industries. It also offers an MA program for soldiers and has opened a pre-military academy that will prepare high school seniors for “meaningful military service.”
Founded by former Manchester University chemist and Zionist activist Chaim Weizmann in 1934, the institute has operated as an science-orientated soft power-play for Israel’s colonial expansionism from the beginning. It was integral to research and weapons manufacturing efforts for the Zionist militias that violently dispossessed Palestinians to establish the state of Israel.
All three donors have continued to bankroll the HJS throughout the past five years. Filings for both the Bernard Lewis Family Charitable Trust and MZ Foundation are not yet available for 2024. But both organisations maintained sizeable donations from 2020 through to 2023. Meanwhile, the Sir John Ritblat Family Foundation has continued to donate to the HJS. It made a £25,000 donation in 2024.
Lack of transparency preventing accountability
To be clear, these were just the donors the Canary was able to identify through our research.
It’s plausible there are other funders whose records exist in the public domain that have also donated to the HJS. However, identifying all the sources of the HJS’s funding on public record would take immense resources. Part of the problem is that the UK and US registers do not upload the majority of the documents using optical character recognition (OCR). What this means is that the PDFs are typically not searchable using traditional digital search functions. So instead, the Canary had to scroll through each individual financial account document to manually search the lists of grantees.
Some of these ran into the hundreds of pages, with the grant organisations making up a substantial portion of these. And, while some were organised alphabetically, this wasn’t always the case. Consequently, the Canary had to constrict the search. In some instances, the Canary could get around this using investigative journalism nonprofit ProPublica’s records. The site hosts the filings of US-registered tax exempt organisations. Some of the records come up as searchable text. However, this isn’t consistent, so we sometimes ran into the same problem with non-OCR scanned PDFs.
Of course, this underlines the considerable problem with the lack of transparency in both the US and UK charity records. While both governments fail to mandate nonprofits disclose their donors, it becomes a needle-in-the-haystack task to identify their sources of funding.
This shroud of secrecy is a convenient smokescreen for both charities and funders alike. Crucially, it obstructs meaningful public scrutiny and enables organisations, alongside their masked donors, to eschew accountability.
Laying the groundwork for the GHF
The Israeli government’s video and the HJS report are part of the genocidal state’s larger efforts to disable existing aid and humanitarian infrastructure on the ground in Palestine.
Since the start of the genocide, Israel has been mounting a concerted smear campaign against UNRWA. This has included the mass deployment of ads designed to discredit the organisation’s operations across the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). It has been drip-feeding these across Google’s search engine page for months.
Some of these ads remain live at the time of writing:
As a consequence of its propaganda, in 2024, 16 governments, including the US and UK, suspended aid to the agency. However, by the close of the year, all bar the US had resumed donations after multiple UN reviews roundly rebuked Israel’s unevidenced claims.
Moreover, in October, the Israeli Knesset voted to ban all of UNRWA’s operations in Israel and East Jerusalem.
Of course, this is all while it has targeted UNRWA’s facilities in Gaza – including schools and aid hubs. It has deliberately demolished them in brutal bombardments during its 20-month-long genocide.
Israel: a strategy of ethnic cleansing and expulsion
The de facto dismantling of existing and well-established aid distribution systems is patently part of its broader strategy.
Since the beginning of March, Israel has blockaded all aid from entering the Strip, intentionally starving Palestinians in Gaza for more than three months.
The Israel-manufactured collapse of aid and humanitarian operations is predictably, rapidly propelling the Gazan population towards a critical famine situation.
Now entering 20 months of Israel’s systematic destruction of all infrastructure essential to life, the genocidal occupying state has begun a new phase in its calculated campaign of ethnic cleansing in Gaza. Its leaked ground offensive plan – that Israel’s occupation forces have titled operation ‘Gideon’s Chariots’ – revealed the Israeli government’s machinations for the next stage of decimation and displacement in the Palestinian enclave.
And of course, Israel’s weaponisation of aid is a fundamental element of this. As the Canary’s Alaa Shamali detailed, Israel is angling to redraw the geographic and demographic map in Gaza. Notably, the plan laid out its intention to establish:
logistical centres to manage the distribution of food and medical aid, and preparing an environment that pushes the population towards the southern Gaza Strip between the Morag and Philadelphia axes, an area that is intended to be transformed into a ‘miniature Gaza’.
This has been almost precisely what the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has orientated itself around engineering in the Strip.
The HJS’s UNRWA smears: a powerful pretext for Israel’s control over aid
The spurious smears HJS flaunted in its distorted report has only served as a powerful pretext for Israel exerting further control over aid.
However, the HJS’s extensive connections to the pro-Israel lobby, and the settler state itself shows that far from a credible arbiter of the facts, it’s an active organ of Israel’s propaganda campaign to incapacitate Gaza’s core aid organisation.
Now, Israel – with the US’s explicit support – has co-opted aid distribution to seize control of the Strip, and heinously perpetrate repeated massacres of starving Palestinians queuing desperately for aid.
Uncovering the dark money web of vested Zionist interests that laid the groundwork for this plots a direct path back to the violent settler colonial occupier. As speculation abounds over the GHF’s mystery multi-million donors, it’s worth bearing in mind the groups and individuals at the heart of this. After all, it’s highly plausible it’s some of the same forces machinating behind-the-scenes, namely, the Israeli government itself.
Featured image via the Canary
By Hannah Sharland
This post was originally published on Canary.
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