‘UN Watch’, a Zionist Asset Masquerading as an ‘Independent’ Swiss NGO

By David Miller – Jul 8, 2024

The Dutch parliament recently offered a rare opportunity to cross-examine a leading figure from the Zionist movement and the executive director of Geneva-based UN Watch.

Hillel Neuer appeared before a parliamentary committee arguing that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency should be shut down, thus contributing directly to the genocide in Gaza.

Neuer was politely asked by MP Danielle Hirsch of the Green/Social democrat alliance in the country to disclose where his pro-Israel lobby group UN Watch gets its funds from.

“I tried to find out data on your website and couldn’t find it so maybe you can enlighten me? Who are your main funders? How do you remain independent from those same funders and can you tell us about your relationship with the Israeli government (regime) and if you receive any direct or indirect funding from the Israeli government (regime).”

Neuer was immediately on the defensive and launched his own attack on the Dutch lawmaker.

The answer is we receive no money whatsoever directly or indirectly from the Israeli government (regime). This is a Hamas propaganda point that has been propagated in particular by a Hamas-affiliated group called the Palestinian Return Centre… and we get no money from any government. So I take note that the member hasn’t challenged any of the points of fact that we have. And the only thing that the member can try to do is to throw mud but it doesn’t stick. We are one of the leading human rights organizations at the United Nations

In response, Hirsch stated:

“I asked some very clear factual questions, I am not throwing any mud. I am trying to understand where your funding comes from, normally it should be on your website…. I am asking for things that are normal for any organization.”

Neuer was then asked by the chair to reveal the funding and he pointedly refused.

“The funding, if I’m allowed to continue, our funding only comes from private donations that are made from around the world. These are made in Switzerland, America, Europe, Australia, and all around the world. I could give you the names of the donors, but I think that you might expose them to all kinds of threats.”

The incident showed the absolute refusal of Zionists to be held accountable for their anti-Palestine activities. The point-blank refusal to reveal even one donor is extremely instructive.

The idea that asking for transparency is akin to Hamas propaganda is obviously ludicrous.

But Palestine Declassified, the show I produce twice a week for Press TV, was able to reveal that the attempt to smear the London-based Palestinian Return Centre is a reference to a research report compiled by the lobbying watchdog Spinwatch.

It was co-authored by Sarah Marusek and myself and not by the Hamas resistance movement. Its contents make interesting reading and do not support Neuer’s claims.

Neuer was both evasive and deceptive about who funds his organization. Here’s how.

Neuer claimed that UN Watch is completely independent. But the truth is that it is a front for the American Jewish Committee as the AJC website made clear in 2001, announcing that UN Watch was “fully integrated” into the AJC.

So when he claimed that the Zionist regime did not fund UN Watch either directly or indirectly, this is misleading.

This is because the AJC has closely collaborated with the Zionist entity for many decades. Though initially (until the late 1940s) the AJC was non-Zionist (as opposed to anti-Zionist), it then became an active element of the Israel lobby.

• Its chief Washington lobbyist from 1967 until 1986, was Hyman Bookbinder, a former special assistant to Hubert Humphrey. Bookbinder was very clear as to what his role entails, as reported by Lee O’Brien, in her fascinating book-length study of the lobby American Jewish Organizations and Israel, (Washington DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1986.): ‘I consider it my job, as an involved, acknowledged, unembarrassed friend of Israel, to get whatever information I can from the Israelis, from our State Department, from any sources, and to put the best possible light on the Israeli case.’
• In the 1970s and 1980s, the AJC was a coalition partner in the Soviet Jewry Campaign. This was an initiative of Nativ the ultra-secret Zionist intelligence agency. Nativ was alternatively known as the Lishka or the Liaison Bureau. Its covert “emissaries” in the United States worked, reports Fred Lazin, “to put the Soviet Jewry issue on the public agenda.”
• In the 1990s, the AJC was one of a handful of US and European Zionist groups to collaborate with the Mossad in the campaign to blur the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.

Moshe Decter, who had previously edited the New Leader, which published a double issue in September 1959 on the Jews of the Soviet Union with materials supplied by the Liaison Bureau, had been hired by the Liaison Bureau.

His identity as an employee of the Liaison Bureau was not revealed until many years later.

Under the Bureau’s surreptitious auspices, he headed a research organization on Soviet Jews that was housed in a carriage house on the grounds of the American Jewish Congress in Manhattan.

Nativ oversaw the creation of all the campaigning bodies on this issue including the National Conference on Soviet Jewry created in 1971 in which the American Jewish Committee was a significant player, according to Lazin, along with Israeli intelligence operatives.

Kenneth Stern, an official of the American Jewish Committee is reported to have been the author of the “working definition” of antisemitism which is the main rhetorical weapon used by the Zionist regime to silence its critics.

Stern’s definition never had official status and was withdrawn by the EU in 2013. But after it was abandoned, advocates affiliated with Israel lobby groups including the American Jewish Committee, the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the European Jewish Congress, “lobbied other European bodies to adopt the definition,” according to ELSC.

According to a report in Electronic Intifada by Asa Winstanley

ELSC notes that the initiative to “capture and codify” this supposedly new anti-Semitism in a definition was initially championed by Dina Porat in her capacity as head of the Project on Antisemitism at Tel Aviv University, later renamed the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism. Significantly, … the project headed by Porat “was funded by the Mossad.”… In his 2022 book Whatever Happened to Antisemitism?

Tony Lerman calls Porat one of the “leading promoters of ‘new anti-Semitism,’ of the IHRA ‘working definition’ and the infrastructure of ‘war’ against anti-Semitism.” According to Lerman, Kenneth Stern was given the idea of writing his definition of anti-Semitism directly by Porat.

Are NGOs Infecting Gaza?

Porat openly admits that the American Jewish Committee was a participant in all of these efforts.

So reports on the links between UN Watch and Israeli intelligence are not easily dismissible as simply “Hamas propaganda”.

In addition, significant data on its funding is publically available thanks to the Palestinian Return Centre which commissioned a report on how UN Watch and another Zionist lobby group were conducting a sabotage strategy against the esteemed NGO at the United Nations.

It is this report to which Neuer refers when dismissing “Hamas propaganda”

In fact, the report was published by Spinwatch and I was one of the authors. The report revealed 18 separate charities that were funding UN Watch and another Zionist front group, NGO Monitor.

Neuer refused to reveal the identity of any of the funders of his front group on the grounds that the Dutch politician might “expose them to all kinds of threats”.

But the eighteen named funders have already been in the public domain for almost a decade with not a single threat being made.

Here are the funders as revealed in the research report (p. 18-20). They include many of the major Zionist funders.

1- Abstraction Fund
2- American Jewish Committee
3- Ben and Esther Rosenbloom Foundation
4- CJM Foundation
5- Jewish Community Federation
6- Koret Foundation
7- Klarman Family Foundation
8- Lisa and Douglas Goldman Fund
9- Middle East Forum
10- MZ Foundation
11- Network for Good
12- Paul E. Singer Foundation
13- The Milstein Family Foundation
14- Newton and Rochelle Becker affiliated charities
15- The Shillman Foundation
16- The Snider Foundation
17- Vanguard Charitable Endowment Fund
18- William P Goldman and Brothers Foundation

The fact that UN Watch is an instrument of Zionist foreign policy is further emphasized by the other groups that are funded by these same funders.

Among the core groups are the so-called ‘Friends of the Israel Defense forces, the racist Taglit Birthright programme, the propaganda body CAMERA, the Likudnik think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and two key players in the US, ‘The Islamophobia Network the Middle East Forum’ and the ‘David Horowitz Freedom Center’.

Considered together, there is a tight network of Zionist groups that coordinates closely with the Tel Aviv regime and with the global Zionist movement.

The figure below shows some of the additional connections given by looking at the affiliations of those involved with UN Watch and NGO Monitor.