Derek Seidman
Truthout / December 2, 2024
A US nonprofit funnels money from billionaires like Home Depot’s co-founder to effectively subsidize Israeli troops.
Israel’s war on Gaza — marked by extensive war crimes, and widely seen as an ongoing genocide — has been backed by the U.S. government, which has provided Israel with billions of dollars in weapons to be used against Palestinians. On the ground and from the air, the genocidal siege has been carried out by Israel’s military, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), whose soldiers regularly post videos and images on social media of them destroying Palestinian neighborhoods, looting Palestinian homes and abusing Palestinian prisoners.
“The main and sometimes only machinery of repressing, killing, genociding and ethnically cleansing Palestinians is the IDF,” Haim Bresheeth, author of the wide-ranging history of the Israeli military, An Army Like No Other: How the Israel Defense Force Made a Nation, told Truthout. “This is an illegal, immoral army.”
In the U.S., there’s one group that has long worked to mobilize ironclad support for the Israeli military: the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces (FIDF).
Founded in 1981, the FIDF is a nonprofit organization that raises tens of millions of dollars annually to fund a range of programs that effectively subsidize the Israeli military by providing numerous services and benefits for Israeli troops. It also channels major donations from a host of powerful billionaires toward these programs.
In building and maintaining support for the IDF, particularly among U.S. Jews, the FIDF promotes and reproduces the dominant Zionist notion that American Judaism is synonymous with support for Israel, and that the essence of support for Israel is support for the Israeli military.
The “Friends of the IDF”
Bresheeth, the son of two Holocaust survivors, served as a second lieutenant in the Israeli military’s Golani Brigade during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. It was an experience that disillusioned him forever.
“This is where my anti-Zionism started,” Bresheeth, a filmmaker and photographer who taught at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London before retiring, told Truthout.
Bresheeth argues that the Israeli military is at the core of Israeli national identity. It is the vehicle through which Israeli identity was historically constructed, he says, and it continues to hold Israeli national identity together amid the tensions and contradictions of Zionism.
“It’s the organization that dictates identity in Israel,” says Bresheeth.
The FIDF is a nonprofit organization that raises tens of millions of dollars annually to fund a range of programs that effectively subsidize the Israeli military.
According to its website, the U.S.-based FIDF’s vision is “to secure the survival of Israel, providing a thriving homeland for Jews worldwide.” It describes itself as “the single organization authorized to collect charitable donations on behalf of the soldiers of the IDF across the United States.”
The FIDF is a substantial operation. It has nearly two dozen chapters across the U.S. and 60 board members. It oversees programs ranging from scholarships for Israeli soldiers, to funding construction projects, to support for wounded soldiers, to helping donors subsidize foreign-born soldiers in the Israeli military or even whole military units.
The FIDF reported nearly $175 million in net assets in 2022. Covering an FIDF fundraiser in late 2023, journalist Sophie Hurwitz noted that the group “has a history of aggressive and effective fundraising,” raking in tens of millions every year.
Indeed, the FIDF is a fundraising powerhouse. Its galas typically raise millions of dollars and feature A-list celebrities. From 2018 to 2022, FIDF received $450 million in gifts, grants, contributions and membership fees. It raised more than $50 million in the weeks after October 7, 2023.
While FIDF calls itself a “non-political, non-military organization,” it also describes itself as “the official U.S. partner of Israel’s soldiers.”
Speakers at FIDF galas include top Israeli political and military leaders like Benjamin Netanyahu and Benny Gantz. One past CEO, Meir Klifi, served as a military secretary to Prime Ministers Ehud Olmert and Netanyahu before joining the FIDF, and another past CEO, Yitzhak (Jerry) Gershon, was a major-general in the Israeli army. (Both stirred controversy in the pages of Haaretz for accepting unusually large nonprofit salaries with the FIDF.)
Its fundraisers have also featured John Hagee, the far right U.S. televangelist who is the founder and chairman of Christians United for Israel, and who is notorious for making antisemitic and homophobic remarks.
Ideologically, the FIDF projects extreme Zionist views. It regularly uses maps that depict Israeli borders from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea and include the Golan Heights in Syria. It has reposted trolling posts against Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan). One of its attempts to solicit donations asked: “What is the most direct way for you to help Israel’s IDF soldiers, the defenders of Western values?”
Earlier this year, FIDF drew scrutiny for inviting donors to a talk by Israeli military intelligence veteran Eliyahu Yossian, who has said that “there are no innocents in Gaza” and that Israel should attack Gaza “with the aim of revenge, zero morality, maximum corpses.” Yossian has also said “there is no population in Gaza, there are 2.5 million terrorists.’”
Subsidizing Israeli soldiers
Donors can subsidize entire military units through the FIDF’s “Adopt a Battalion” or “Adopt a Brigade” programs, funding services such as “financial grants” (likely cash grants to soldiers), flights home, holiday vouchers and events intended to “boost morale and team spirit.”
For example, the Miami chapter of the FIDF has sponsored the Golani Brigade — the same brigade Bresheeth belonged to in the 1960s. The brigade “is considered the first combat brigade of the IDF” whose soldiers “have fought in all of Israel’s wars,” including its current siege of Gaza.
According to the FIDF’s most recent tax disclosure, in 2022 it spent about $2.5 million on the Adopt a Brigade program to “sponsor the needs of the 24 brigades adopted by FIDF (over 50,000 soldiers).”
From 2018 to 2022, FIDF received $450 million in gifts, grants, contributions and membership fees. It raised more than $50 million in the weeks after October 7, 2023.
One of the FIDF’s flagship programs is its “Lone Soldiers” program that provides thousands of foreign-born recruits to the Israeli military with cash gifts when they begin their service, holiday vouchers, housing, flights home and recreational activities, like visits to water parks.
In 2022, the FIDF spent about $5.8 million “sponsor[ing] flights” for over 6,800 for lone soldiers, and $5.5 million on providing “economic relief” to about 68,300 soldiers “who are in financial distress through the provision of cash subsidies, holiday gift packages, food vouchers, and other assistance to their families.”
A 2018 Haaretz report on the FIDF’s Lone Soldier program noted that young Jewish adults “often learn about foreign-born IDF recruits, so-called ‘lone soldiers’ on sponsored trips to Israel or college campuses” and that “every year, hundreds of American teenagers and college graduates decide to enlist in the IDF with the wide support of American Jewish institutions.”
In the article, the FIDF said it “does not promote or take part in the process of recruiting or encouraging soldiers to enlist in the IDF,” despite offering millions of dollars’ worth of financial support to “lone soldiers.”
While the FIDF doesn’t donate military equipment to Israeli troops, some of its leaders participate in operations that send weapons to Israel. For example, FIDF board member David Hager has a personal foundation that donates to the One Israel Fund, which sends military supplies to settler militias in the occupied West Bank. Hager also serves on the board of a nonprofit that supports the Netzah Yehuda Israeli military battalion that has been tied to alleged abuses against Palestinians.
In 2016, the FIDF was among the defendants in a $34.5 billion lawsuit filed by 30 Palestinian Americans over connections to Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
The FIDF also finances construction projects for Israeli troops that include “sports centers, culture halls, synagogues, memorial rooms, swimming pools, sports facilities, and soldiers’ homes throughout Israel.” It’s currently finishing up a building project (named after the family of entertainment billionaire Haim Saban, which donates millions to the FIDF) that will house 222 of Israel’s “lone soldiers.”
Billionaire donors
While many supporters are smaller donors to the group, several billionaires give huge amounts to the FIDF.
Bernie Marcus, the billionaire co-founder of Home Depot, gave nearly $13 million to the FIDF from 2009 to 2022, including over $6.6 million between 2018 and 2022 alone, according to a Truthout analysis of tax records of Marcus’s philanthropic arm.
Marcus made several donations per year specific to different FIDF programs, prior to his death in November 2024. His biggest donations until 2022 came in 2012 and 2013, when he donated $2 million each year to the FIDF’s “Lone Soldier Program – Soldier Aliyah Fund.”
FIDF drew scrutiny for inviting donors to a talk by Israeli military intelligence veteran Eliyahu Yossian, who has said that “there are no innocents in Gaza.”
As Truthout has previously noted, Marcus was a megadonor to conservative and Zionist organizations, anti-union groups and exchange programs between U.S. and Israeli police.
Entertainment billionaire Haim Saban, who also sits on the FIDF board and has chaired lavish Beverly Hills FIDF fundraisers, has donated tens of millions to the FIDF over the past two decades. In 2017, for example, he pledged over $9 million to the group.
Casey Wasserman, the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics power broker and heir of Hollywood baron Lew Wasserman, donated $525,000 to the FIDF in 2019 toward an “outdoor athletic center.” Paul Singer, the billionaire founder of Elliott Management, one of the world’s biggest hedge fund firms, gave over $1.7 million to the FIDF from 2011 to 2019, including over $1 million in 2015.
The largest donation to FIDF may have come in 2017, when Larry Ellison — the co-founder and chairman of Oracle, and who is worth over $200 billion — gave the group $16.6 million. Ellison also donated $10 million in 2014.
Another huge FIDF donor is WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum, who is worth $16.3 billion. Koum donated over $6.8 million to FIDF from 2018 to 2022, including $200,000 in 2022 toward a lone soldier center and $5.3 million alone in 2018. Koum has also donated to the Elad NGO, which supports settlement expansion in East Jerusalem.
Koum, Marcus and Singer were also all among the top AIPAC donors in the 2024 election cycle.
Late billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and his widow Miriam Adelson have given millions to FIDF. The Adelsons and the Israeli army came under scrutiny in 2017 in the pages of Haaretz when the billionaires were flown to an Israeli military base for a private visit, permitted by the Israel military, to view a sports auditorium they funded.
Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of Donald Trump and former top adviser to Trump during his first presidential term, formerly sat on the FIDF board of directors, and Kushner’s family has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the FIDF.
In addition to billionaires’ donations, many corporations also offer matching gifts to the FIDF for their employees who donate, according to the FIDF website.
Some of the corporate donors offer matching gifts of anywhere between $1,000 and $15,000, and include asset managers and banks like BlackRock, Vanguard Group, KKR, Apollo Global Management and Bank of America; weapons companies like Northrop Grumman, Honeywell and Moog; tech companies like Google, Microsoft and Apple; and grocery and restaurant companies like Starbucks, McDonald’s and Aldi.
In April 2024, a group of Apple shareholders and former and current employees wrote an open letter demanding that the company halt its matching donations to organizations tied to Israeli atrocities in Gaza and the West Bank. The FIDF was among several groups named in the letter.
In Canada, activists succeeded in revoking the charitable status of the Jewish National Fund of Canada over its support for illegal expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. In the U.S., activists and elected officials in New York are attempting to advance the “Not On Our Dime!” act to “prohibit not-for-profit corporations from engaging in unauthorized support of Israeli settlement activity.”
“They are supporting the instrument of genocide”
While the FIDF channels millions of dollars to the Israeli military’s soldiers, the money is a tiny drop in a large bucket. The U.S. has given at least $22.76 billion in military aid to Israel since October 7, 2023, on top of the billions it annually gave in the years prior.
Ultimately, Bresheeth says, the FIDF’s larger impact is more ideological than financial.
“Every penny is useful, but what’s more useful is the almost semi-religious connection between American Jews and the Israeli army,” he says. “The army is the essence of Israel, and not just for the Palestinians, but for many Zionist Jews in America.”
Bresheeth laments how Zionism — which he calls “a replacement of Judaism” and “basically a non-religious religion” — has become the dominant force shaping Jewish identity, replacing previous values of cosmopolitanism, progressivism and “even socialism.”
He says the “main tenet” of American Jewish support for Israel pivots around the military, reflected in groups like the FIDF.
“They are supporting the instrument of suppression, of murder, of destruction, of genocide,” he says.
Derek Seidman is a writer, researcher and historian living in Buffalo, New York
