Ron Prosor, Israel’s ambassador to Germany, has leveled sharp criticism against the Green Party-affiliated Heinrich Böll Foundation after it was revealed that the organization provided financial support to and cooperated with left-wing extremist, antisemitic Palestinian NGOs.
The Green Party-affiliated foundation, which receives most of its funding from German taxpayers, worked together with and provided large sums of money to the Palestinian NGOs Al-Haq and Addameer, two groups with links to the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and which have been classified as terrorist organizations by Israel, the daily Berliner Zeitung reports.
The PFLP has been classified as a terrorist organization by the United States and European Union as well.
Between 2019 and 2022, the Heinrich Böll Foundation provided €232,600 to Addameer, money which allegedly went toward funding “legal advice to prisoners in Israeli and Palestinian courts.” Meanwhile, in 2019, the foundation provided Al-Haq with €10,400 for a project that allegedly sought to investigate the “consequences of climate change in the Hebron region.”
Commenting on the revelation, Ambassador Prosor told Berliner Zeitung that the fact that German tax money was being used to subsidize “terrorists with Jewish blood on their hands,” is both “shocking” and “incomprehensible.” He highlighted that despite the fact that Addameer had been designated as a terrorist organization by the Israeli defense ministry in 2021, the “Heinrich Böll Foundation found it acceptable to continue to support it afterward.”
“German tax money must never contribute to terrorism,” he continued. “All political foundations must take measures to prevent the flow of money to organizations that support terrorism. They must put in place strict control mechanisms to ensure compliance and transparency.”
Several leading figures in Addameer have links to the PFLP. One is Khalida Jarra, a politician who served as the deputy head of Addameer until 2017. In 2015, she was sentenced to one year and three months in prison after being found guilty of membership in a terrorist organization and incitement to violence. According to a report from Apollo News, she has called for Israeli soldiers to be taken hostage in order to gain “bargaining leverage for the release of Palestinian prisoners.”
In 2019, Jarra was arrested for terrorist activities and was accused by Israeli authorities of leading the PFLP in the West Bank and being linked to a PFLP terrorist cell that was responsible for the killing of a 17-year-old Israeli girl.