Follow the Netherlands’s example: Don’t fund terrorist fronts

The bomb that ended Israeli teenager Rina Shnerb’s life in August 2019 also ended Dutch support for the nongovernmental organization that employed her killers. It just took about two years to happen.

Last Wednesday, the Dutch Cabinet upheld its decision to cut funding to the Union of Agricultural Work Committees, a Palestinian nonprofit group whose stated goal is to help local farmers. Faced with incontrovertible evidence, the Dutch couldn’t deny that the UAWC simply had too many employees who moonlight for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine or vice versa.

The United States , European Union , Canada , Israel, and others have branded the PFLP as a terrorist group. The group gained notoriety in the 1960s and 1970s for high-profile hijackings and attacks against Israelis. In the early 2000s, it carried out the only assassination of an Israeli minister by a terrorist group. In 2014, the PFLP claimed responsibility for an attack on a Jerusalem synagogue that left six dead, including three American rabbis. And then there was the PFLP cell that killed Shnerb in 2019.

Soon after, the Dutch government began to hear reports that the PFLP was working with a Palestinian charity, the UAWC, that enjoyed Dutch state funding. While the allegations mounted, Amsterdam halted funding to the UAWC in July 2020. The Dutch government also hired an outside investigative firm to get to the bottom of the UAWC’s ties to the PFLP.

In the end, the findings were damning: Dutch government funding for the UAWC partly covered the salaries of Shnerb’s killers; 34 UAWC individuals worked with the PFLP between 2007 and 2020, when the Dutch government funded the UAWC. Of those 34, 28 were UAWC board members, indicating their senior roles in the organization. A dozen of these people served in both organizations simultaneously.

Admittedly, the report failed to nail down the financial flows between the UAWC and the PFLP. This partly stemmed from a Dutch Cabinet requirement that all information be verifiable, which excluded certain evidence, such as government intelligence.

But the episode was far from over. The Shnerb murder also prompted an Israeli investigation into the PFLP NGO network. Immediately following the attack, Israel confiscated numerous weapons and arrested some 50 PFLP members. This included the suspects, who were current or former employees of the UAWC, Addameer, and the Union of Health Work Committees Palestinian NGOs.

In January 2020, Israel declared the UHWC to be an illegal organization. Then, in October 2021, with information gathered during the counter-PFLP operation, Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz designated the UAWC, al Haq, the Bisan Center, Defence of Children International-Palestine, Addameer, and the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees as fronts for the PFLP.

Israel has not yet and might never publicly release the evidence behind this decision. The designations came amid a murder investigation, so Israel’s judicial system cannot release information that might influence the trial or that would compromise its intelligence collection.

However, a leaked Israeli dossier provides a clearer picture. It depicts a network of NGOs illicitly transferring funds from European donors to the PFLP. In a confession included in the dossier, Said Abedat, a former accountant for the UHWC, stated: “The institutions affiliated with the PFLP are interconnected and constitute a lifeline for the organization from an economic and institutional standpoint, that is, money laundering and funding of the PFLP’s activities.”

Wiretaps and other confessions in the dossier detail how Palestinian NGOs overinvoiced, well above the actual cost of projects, and sent the difference to the PFLP. According to the dossier, NGOs even worked with local contractors to produce fake receipts to justify the inflated figures.

With evidence mounting, institutions worldwide have started to cut ties with the PFLP NGO network. In recent years, credit card companies have terminated services to al Haq, the UAWC, and the DCI-P for their ties to the PFLP. As of December 2021, Ernst & Young and PricewaterhouseCoopers confirmed that they would no longer provide services to the UAWC and DCI-P respectively.

But these NGOs have received tens of millions of dollars from the United Nations, the European Union , European charities , and individual European countries , particularly Sweden, Spain, and Norway. As the evidence continues to mount, it’s time to halt all aid to these terrorist-funding NGOs.

David May is a senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Follow David on Twitter at  @DavidSamuelMay. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, non-partisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.