Funding Espionage?

An eye-opening report by Geoffrey Alderman in this week's Jewish Chronicle (subscription required) about funding for the Israeli organisation Peace Now by European governments, in particular the government of Finland, which made a substantial grant to the private activist group:

Members of the Knesset interior committee have been poring over documents which confirm that the Finnish government has been funding Peace Now. To be precise, they have been perusing a grant application made by Peace Now to the Finnish government, which the Finns decided to support to the tune of 50,000 Euros — roughly £33,000.

As befits all bona fide grant applications, the applicants naturally had to indicate why they wanted the money. Peace Now was refreshingly frank. It wanted the money to conduct surveys of housing construction within Jewish settlements in Judea, Samaria, Gaza, the Golan and Jerusalem. Twice a month, said Peace Now, it needed to rent a light aircraft to conduct reconnaissance flights over these areas, and take photographs. It also needed road transport — to be precise, armoured cars — to shift its volunteers from one part of the territories to another.

As also befits all bona fide grant applications, Peace Now had to declare what its objective was. It did so, de-claring it to be the production of “tangible graphic and quantitative data” to assist in “the fulfilment of the Road Map.”

And, as yet again befits all bona fide grant applications, Peace Now had to demonstrate how it would disseminate its findings. Again, it did so. The findings were to be distributed to the international diplomatic corps, the international press and, of course, the Israeli public. (It did not mention the usefulness of the findings to the PLO — which has Peace Now maps pinned to the walls of its offices.)

Faced with such chutzpah, members of the interior committee were left to ponder the contents of the Israeli penal code and, in particular, the section of that code that quite sensibly defines “photography of sensitive areas of Israel for any foreign power” as an act of espionage punishable by up to 10 years’ imprisonment.

While settlement construction sites are not “sensitive areas” in the military sense, they are not exactly insensitive in the eyes of those enemies of Israel intent on attacking both military and civilian targets. And if it turns out that there are grounds for prosecution, I hope such a prosecution will be brought. If there are no grounds under present law, the law needs amending without delay.

But, irrespective of the outcome of any prosecution, there is another line of action open to the government of Israel which I hope it will take: to demand a full, public apology from the Finnish government, failing which, the Israeli ambassador should be withdrawn from Helsinki.

What right and what business had the government of Finland in advancing funds to a private group for the express purpose of carrying out activities designed to undermine the democratically elected government of a country with which Finland is at peace? In making available such funds, the Finnish government was surely interfering in the internal affairs of another country, in circumstances which brook of no legitimate justification.

I have been told that the motives of Finland were merely to advance the cause of peace. In that case, I am bound to ask why, in approving the grant, the Finns did not also insist that Peace Now extend its surveillance to areas under the control of the Palestinian Authority — say to rocket-making factories in Gaza and to Islamic terrorist academies on the West Bank.

The fact that they did not do so speaks volumes.


As a literary translator, I've been involved with Finland and Finnish literature for many years - I'm currently working on a Scottish-Finnish poetry anthology with the Scottish Poetry Library and the Finnish Literature Centre - and it troubles me to read this report. I hope that the Finnish government will take note of the Knesset protest, and issue a public apology for this evident breach of international protocol.

Increasingly,I'm concerned about the attitude towards Israel taken by the governments of Nordic countries. It really does at times appear now that there is deep hostility in Scandinavia towards the state of Israel. This was surely not always so - or perhaps it was, and only now is the truth coming out.