Affiliates OneVoice Israel got $233,500 from the State Department to spend in Israel and OneVoice Palestine got another $115,776 to spend in the Palestinian Territories. That adds up to a little more than $349,000.
The question is: Do those contributions amount to funding "anti-Likud, anti-Netanyahu groups in Israel for tomorrow’s election"?
How OneVoice says the money was spent
Given that residents of the Palestinian Territories can’t vote in national Israeli elections, it’s hard to see how money spent there would influence voters in Israel. That leave us to account for $233,500.
Payton Knopf, senior director of global communications for OneVoice, said the money helped fund a series of "town-hall style meetings on university campuses and provided support to the Knesset Caucus for the Two-State Solution in organizing a meeting with 300 Israeli students and (Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud) Abbas in February 2014."
Knopf told us the State Department money was spent by November 2014 -- nearly four months ago. OneVoice, he said, never "spent any U.S. government funds in connection with the recent elections in Israel. Claims to the contrary are simply wrong."
There are two important points to unpack there. If OneVoice says it spent the money by November 2014, that would be before the Israeli elections were even scheduled. That happened in December after Netanyahu called for early elections.
The State Department said
in a briefing that "no payment was made to OneVoice after November 2014."
That would contradict the way the claim in the blog was phrased. "Has been sending" says the money continues to flow. In this case the money was spent and disbursed months ago.
Second, while Netanyahu waffled on the notion of a two-state solution
in the run-up to the Israeli elections, the prime minister had been on record supporting a two-state strategy in November and the months before it.
Blog claims U.S. funded anti-Netanyahu election effort in Israel