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It was early afternoon on October 7th 2023, while 6,000 Hamas operatives were still on the ground in Israel, burning homes, kidnapping many from babies to grandparents, raping, and brutally murdering Jews, when the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) here in the UK was already applying for the required permissions to hold an anti-Israel march the following day. And it was on these marches that took place on October 8th that the genocide libel directed at Israel’s defensive military campaign had already begun taking root.
While people were marching, calling for Israel’s destruction, blaming Israel for the brutal murders and abductions of their men, women and children, Israel was shaken to its core; parents still frantically searching for their children, bodies still being found and counted. But already an organised campaign to vilify every Israeli for simply existing, and to turn the world at large against Israel had begun.
It quickly became apparent that the organisational body behind these marches and the spread of information online was large and very sophisticated, with multiple organisations acting in unison. For many of us looking on it’s evident that a complex web of activity, information, and the movement of money was already in place, almost as if it was prepared and warned about what was to come. But proving it is another matter.
NGO Monitor, a Jerusalem-based research institute that analyses and reports on discrepancies among the activities of NGOs with specific interest in the Israel-Palestine conflict, has spent the last nearly three years investigating this web, and last month published their report on the matter. What it shows isn’t surprising but is very revealing.
There are two areas specifically concerning to the public. First is where gaps in transparency showed, implying likely intended influence by foreign players over British politics. Second is the charity system and its generosity that puts taxpayer money back into the pockets of charities for their selfless work… or perhaps not so selfless, as the case may be.
Britain has one of the most generous charitable systems in the world. Through Gift Aid — through which the charity can reclaim an additional 25 pence from HMRC for every pound donated — as well as tax reliefs and other concessions, the state gives charities financial advantages that are not available to ordinary organisations. The principle is straightforward: charities serve the public, and encouraging charitable giving is therefore considered to be in the public interest.
What a charity is not is a political organisation with a different tax status. The Charity Commission is explicit that a charity’s mission cannot be political and funds must be used for public benefit.
The question is whether the boundaries between charitable campaigning and political campaigning are sufficiently clear and sufficiently well enforced, particularly where organisations receiving the benefits of charitable status are also involved in highly political campaigns and public demonstrations.
The activities surrounding Britain’s post-October 7 pro-Palestinian protest movement raised enough red flags for potential abuse of this system to be investigated. Since the initial protests began on October 8th 2023, the day following the most deadly massacre of Jews in one single day since the Holocaust, NGO Monitor has been investigating the organisations involved in the protests along with their funding sources, foreign backing and wider campaign activities. Last month they published their findings in a report entitled Imported Influence: Foreign Funding, Regulatory Black Holes and Extremist Connections of the Post-October 7 UK Protest Infrastructure.
The report attempts to map the organisational and financial infrastructure behind post-October 7 protest activity in Britain. It identifies 40 organisations involved in protest and mobilisation activity and examines their legal structures, funding and relationships.
The report’s findings are striking. Of the 40 organisations it examines, NGO Monitor identifies:
10 as registered charities;
8 as companies;
9 as hybrid entities;
13 operating without a formal UK regulatory structure.
It further reports that 19 of the organisations receive UK government support either through FCDO funding or Gift Aid. The report also argues that substantial sums are entering the wider protest network through donations, memberships and other funding mechanisms, while the full amount spent on demonstrations is difficult to establish because of limitations in public disclosure.
A few notable examples from the report:
The MAB Charitable Trust, charity no. 1147031, is a Gift Aid-eligible registered charity operating under the name “Muslim Association of Britain Charitable Trust”. Separately, the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB) is one of the organisations involved in the national Palestine Coalition. The available evidence does not establish that charitable funds have been used to finance demonstrations, but the relationship between the two entities — and any overlap in personnel, resources or finances — warrants scrutiny.
War on Want, charity no. 208724, is a Gift Aid-eligible charity with £4.05 million income and £2.73 million expenditure in 2024–25. Its own annual report describes extensive political campaigning on Palestine and Gaza. This does not demonstrate misuse of charitable funds, since charities may campaign in pursuit of their charitable purposes, but it illustrates the difficulty of maintaining a clear distinction between charitable activity and political campaigning.
The Islamic Human Rights Commission Trust, charity no. 1106120, provides the clearest financial example. In 2025 it received £499,630 in donations plus £106,458 in Gift Aid, while transferring £481,431 to associated organisation Islamic Human Rights Commission Ltd for projects including research, advocacy/casework, Gaza, and Genocide Memorial Day. This does not establish that Gift Aid funded political activity, but it demonstrates how substantial tax-supported charitable income can flow through an associated organisation undertaking advocacy and campaigning-related work — precisely the type of relationship that merits careful scrutiny.
A separate issue arises in relation to the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), one of the principal organisations coordinating the national demonstrations, through which the above charities and others investigated in the report established involvement in the political activity.
NGO Monitor’s 2026 investigation did not identify a specific foreign government or prohibited organisation as a source of PSC funding. Its finding was more fundamental: it was unable to establish PSC’s sources of funding from publicly available information.
PSC is not a registered charity but a company, and unlike a charity it is not subject to the same level of public financial disclosure. PSC states that it does not accept money from governments, political parties or large businesses and describes itself as being funded by members and supporters. Yet its reported income rose to approximately £3.8 million in 2025, while the public has no detailed breakdown of those donors. This does not demonstrate that PSC is receiving improper or foreign funding. It does, however, create a significant transparency gap when an organisation with millions of pounds of annual income is playing a central role in organising sustained political demonstrations and influencing public debate. The issue is therefore not that PSC has been shown to receive suspicious money, but that the public has limited means of independently verifying the provenance of the money it does receive.
The report essentially provides a research map: a list of organisations, relationships and financial questions that can be checked against primary sources such as Charity Commission filings, Companies House records, government grant databases and the organisations’ own published accounts. But it also uncovers how loopholes are being abused in ways that enable a political ideology to disrupt the lives of Londoners simply trying to exist in an already challenging society and economy, and to hijack the attention of the press and the public at large with rhetoric that ultimately dehumanises an entire nation that also comprises a section of British society.
Remember all those “journalists” who turned out to be members of Palestinian terror groups dressed in press vests? The broadsheet legacy media headlines lifted straight from their trusty “objective journalistic” partner, Al Jazeera? In other words, conventions that instil trust in the wider public, specifically targeting the more educated and financially comfortable classes.
Well, tapping into the charitable status sector of British society not only abuses the financial loopholes in British government policy but it gives the impression that these organisations are acting out of need, rather than hate. Out of compassion rather than malevolence. After all, that’s what charities do, don’t they? When a charity acts, it clearly defines the boundaries of innocent and harmful.
It uses a model that has already gained compassionate trust to veil a well-funded and highly organised political network, that campaigns for a particular policy outcome, and promotes a narrative that dehumanises Israelis, denies the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state, or presents its destruction as a legitimate political objective. There is an important distinction between criticising the Israeli government, advocating Palestinian statehood or campaigning for Palestinian rights — all legitimate subjects of political debate — and promoting an ideology in which an entire national or ethnic group is portrayed collectively as illegitimate or inherently culpable.
When organisations operating within such a network also benefit from charitable status, Gift Aid or other forms of public support, the issue ceases to be simply one of political expression. It becomes a question of whether public resources are inadvertently helping to amplify a political narrative that can marginalise Jewish citizens, legitimise hostility towards Israelis and normalise the proposition that the Jewish state itself should cease to exist. This does not mean that every organisation receiving charitable funding shares such an objective, nor that criticism of Israel is inherently antisemitic. It means that where evidence exists of organisations promoting or facilitating such narratives, their use of charitable structures and access to taxpayer-supported benefits warrants particularly careful scrutiny.
Ultimately, it further marginalises Israel. It furthers the narrative that Israel’s very presence in “Occupied Palestinian Territories” is purely for evil purposes and has no valid claims to safety or protection of lives — even when it is protecting the rights of the Palestinians themselves.
And for Jews like myself in the diaspora, living surrounded by impressionable minds with little grasp on wider history and merely a desire to see good triumph over evil, it leaves us all the more powerless against the increasingly powerful narrative that demonises Israel and fetishises the Palestinians.
This, of course, was the intention all along. This is why sophisticated coordination between the groups was so vital and why the legal status of different groups was so well-planned. But none of it came cheap. It required millions of dollars, only some of which is traceable, and the abuse of any system it could to create the coordinated campaign that has got this far.
Increasingly, I wonder what the heck the future holds for any of us.
But it’s why organisations such as NGO Monitor, UN Watch, and the many individuals working to expose the lies and deception as it abuses the very systems that are meant to (but fail miserably) to protect us.
We must never stop documenting every bit of this story and, one day, we hope, we will be able to tell our story to listening ears once more.
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