November 27, 2003 | Read Time: 2 minutes
The Ford Foundation, in New York, announced last week that it would cut off support to a Palestinian advocacy group. Ford said it made the move because of concerns about the group’s financial management, but the decision also comes after several Jewish organizations and 21 members of Congress complained to Ford about its support of the organization.
Ford said it had terminated the remaining two years of a five-year, $750,000 grant to the Palestinian Society for Protection of Human Rights and the Environment, in Jerusalem. The organization has accused Israel of practicing apartheid and has recommended that Israel face charges in international courts for alleged abuses of Palestinians’ human rights.
A Ford official said that termination of the grant had little to do with the Palestinian group’s political views. “We have had longstanding concerns about their lack of fiscal control,” said Alexander Wilde, a Ford spokesman. Ford pulled the grant after performing an audit, the results of which Mr. Wilde declined to detail.
United Nations Meeting
The American Jewish Congress, in New York, and several other Jewish organizations had encouraged Ford to investigate its grant-making practices in the Middle East after a news report appeared in October on the Palestinian organization’s activities at the 2001 United Nations World Conference on Racism, Xenophobia, and Other Related Intolerance, in Durban, South Africa. The report, by the Jewish Telegraph Agency, questioned Ford’s oversight of its grants in the Middle East and cited alleged examples of the Palestinian group’s leading meetings that were anti-Israel and anti-Semitic.
Members of the Palestinian Society for Protection of Human Rights and the Environment could not be located for comment.
After hearing the concerns of Jewish groups, 21 members of Congress sent a letter to Ford last month urging the foundation to review its grantees’ activities to ensure that they were not promoting anti-Semitic beliefs.
In a letter sent last week to U.S. Representative Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, Susan V. Berresford, president of Ford, said that the foundation was “disgusted by the vicious anti-Semitic activity at Durban” and said that the Palestinian organization lacked sufficient financial controls.
She added that Ford would work harder to keep grants from groups that practice anti-Semitism and would institute more-demanding financial standards for grantees working in the Middle East.
