Biden accused of meddling in Israeli Elections

Last year, Israel365 News revealed that in 2013, the U.S. State Department provided a little-known organization called OneVoice Israel and OneVoice Palestine with two grants equaling $349,276. Soon after the end of the grant period, OneVoice began its support of V15. V15 was a front organization whose sole mission was to oust Netanyahu during Israel’s 2015 elections. This was one of the most obvious cases of a US president (Obama) meddling in Israel’s elections.

Is it still happening?

Author and Middle East expert Lee Smith recently submitted that the Democrat tradition of election interference in Israel is alive and kicking. In a recent piece in Tablet Magazine, Smith asserts that US President Joe Biden is currently interfering in Israel’s elections (that are still being tallied) “by strong-arming the Emiratis into publicly distancing themselves from Bibi (Netanyahu).”

Last week, Al-Jazeera reported that the UAE suspended its participation in an Abraham Accords summit that was to take place between Dubai, Israel, the United States, and all other signatories to the agreement. The reason for the suspension according to reports was because Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used UAE Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan (MBZ) as an “election prop” and that MBZ is “outraged” at what he sees as Netanyahu “exploiting the normalization deal with Israel as a part of his election campaign”.

But Lee asserts that the crown prince doesn’t really care about how he’s portrayed in Israeli elections and that the Biden administration pressured him to suspend the summit using Netanyahu’s behavior as an excuse to make him look bad right before Election Day in Jerusalem. Lee adds that his claim is ” substantiated by Israeli reporting, the source of the upset isn’t in Abu Dhabi but in Washington.”

A history of Democrats meddling in Israel’s elections

NGO-Monitor reported that in July 2016, the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a report detailing the use of resources developed with State Department funding to advance the V-15 campaign. The subcommittee concluded that One Voice did not directly use U.S. funds for its election campaign or violate its agreement with the U.S. government. However, it sharply criticized the State Department for not properly evaluating One Voice before grant approval and monitoring the organization during the course of the project. The State Department “failed to adequately guard against the risk of OneVoice using government-funded resources for political purposes… [d]espite OneVoice’s previous political activity in the 2013 Israeli election.”

But even before Obama, Democrat presidents worked to influence Israeli elections. In an interview broadcast on Israel’s Channel 10 news in April 2018, former-President Bill Clinton admitted working to help Shimon Peres in his unsuccessful run against Netanyahu in 1996.