Alternative Information Center - Palestine (AICP)

Introduction

In 2016 the Israeli Registrar of Non-Profits asked for a court order for the dissolution of AIC on the grounds that the ”association’s activities are conducted in violation of the law, or regulation aims ….” and that ”deficiencies in its conduct does not allow the Registrar to supervise the operations and control the use of its assets and therefore, raise fear to conceal assets and improper conduct of the organization ….[and] shows that the association is working illegally and does not submit documents in accordance with Article 38 of the law … ”

In 2019, AIC decided to “renew and re-register the organization with the Palestinian Authority under the name Alternative Information Center – Palestine.”

Profile

Country/TerritoryPalestinian Authority
Websitehttps://aicpalestine.org/
Founded1984
In their own words“established in the 1980s to provide deep insight into the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and to promote the joint struggle to end the occupation and enable the Palestinian people to attain their freedom, independence and national rights.”

Funding

Activities

AICP Ties to Terrorism

  • Prior to the organization’s founding, AIC co-founder Michael Warschawski was a leader of “Matzpen,” the anti-Zionist Trotskyite organization. Warschawski was jailed in the 1990s for publishing an informational pamphlet for the PFLP terror group (verdict on file).
  • Director of AICP, Nassar Ibrahim, is also the President of Defense for Children International-Palestine’s (DCI-P) General Assembly until at least 2017.
    • Ibrahim is the former editor of El Hadaf – the PFLP’s weekly publication.
    • On May 1, 2014, the PFLP unveiled a mural “developed by writer and journalist Nassar Ibrahim,” honoring PFLP founder George Habash. Several PFLP members attended and spoke at the event.
    • In 2002, together with Majed Nassar, Ibrahim published the book The Palestinian Intifada: Cry Freedom, which is unabashedly supportive of the terror campaign of the early 2000s:
      • “The Palestinian resistance movement has therefore concluded that every check- point, every soldier and every settler are legitimate targets in the struggle for freedom and independence, thus rendering all theories and strategies of supremacy irrelevant. In essence then, everything becomes a target: Jerusalem, Haifa, Hadera, Tel Aviv, Ashkelon, the settlements, the checkpoints, the military installations and even the Israeli Ministry of Defense” (page 94)
      • “No Palestinian accepts that the political parties that have struggled over the last fifty years should be regarded as ‘terrorist organizations,’ simply because their cause of liberation is anathema to the United States and its stepchild, Israel” (page 117).
    • In February 2019 and July 2016, Ibrahim published articles on the PFLP’s Lebanon website. He is also quoted on the PFLP’s Syrian branch’s website.
  • AIC Board of Directors member (2008) Rifat Odeh Kassis has links to multiple NGOs with PFLP ties and was arrested and imprisoned several times by Israel. Kassis is the founder of DCI-P (see below); the general coordinator of Kairos Palestine, a major BDS effort steeped in Christian theology; and was a member of an advisory group for DanChurchAid.
  • In October 2017, Michel Warschawski, co-founder of AIC, attended an event by the Union Juive Française pour la paix (UJFP) in France. During the event, Warschawski participated in a protest focusing on releasing Georges Ibrahim Abdallah – an individual convicted and sentenced by a French court to life in prison for “’complicity in the assassinations” of Charles R. Ray in 1982, a US military attaché serving in Paris, and Yacov Bar-Simantov, a second counsellor at the Israeli embassy in Paris.
  • An article, “No to normalization, yes to joint struggle,” (February 20, 2014), advocates that “normalisation [with Israel] is betrayal of the homeland” and describes a series of conferences organized by Palestinian groups, including the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terror organization.

Demonization of Israel

  • Co-founder of AIC, Michael Warschawski asserts that “one has to unequivocally reject the very idea (and existence) of a Jewish state, whatever will be its borders.” (The Haifa Conference for the Right of Return, June 2008).
  • Shir Hever, economic researcher at AIC, is a pro-BDS political activist and accuses Israel of being “a colonialist regime, in which there’s apartheid.” He also participated in the 2010 London Session of the Russell Tribunal of Palestine.
  • In October 2021, AICP condemned the decision by the Israeli Ministry to designate six Palestinian NGOs as terrorist organizations. According to AICP, “This appalling decision is the culmination of decades of attempts by the occupying power to control the Palestinian people, and to silence and undermine the work of independent Palestinian civil society organizations in defense of Palestinian human rights, especially their inalienable right to self-determination.”
  • In September 2021, following the escape of six Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jail, AICP Director Nassar Ibrahim referred to the escapees as “heroes” that have “achieved a genius Palestinian achievement by all standards.”
  • In August 2021, AICP published on its website an article written by Hadar Eid, a Professor at Al-Aqsa University in Gaza, titled “The limits of Palestinian nationalism in the fight against Apartheid,” which called for Israel to “move away from Bantustanization and separatism.”
  • In May 2021, AICP published an article titled “The World Is Watching The Ethnic Cleansing Of The Palestinian People Happen Right Now.” According to the article, “The situation in Palestine now is not a matter of religion. It is a matter of apartheid, ethnic cleansing, oppression and violence.”
  • On December 30, 2019, AICP and other Palestinian NGOs launched a “Palestinian National Campaign to Reject Conditional Funding.” The campaign, which rejects the EC’s “conditioned funding” and “so-called anti-terrorism clauses and policies…on preventing terrorism that affect the history and struggle of our people” (emphasis added), justifies the use of violence and claims that the “Palestinian resistance factions are not terrorist organizations,” (see video clip).
  • In July 2020, AICP published an article by Haidar Eid, a Professor at Al-Aqsa University in Gaza, alleging that the “Israeli government’s goal is clear: establish an apartheid regime through annexing parts of the West Bank, and liquidate the Palestinian cause all together.” Eid furthered that “it is of paramount importance that we situate the one-state discourse and BDS, within the Palestinian radical tradition through links to the works of Ghassan Kanafani, Edward Said, and the anti-Stalinist Left.” Kanafani was a spokesperson for the Popular Front of the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP),  a terrorist organization designated as such by the USEUCanada, and Israel.
  • In 2020, Shir Hever, AICP economic researcher, participated in a Stop the Jewish National Fund UK webinar series aimed at “explor[ing] the role of the Jewish National Fund in the historic and ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.”
  • On May 12, 2016,  Amnesty International held an event together with Al Quds Andalucía, featuring Ahmad Jaradat and Sergio Yahni of the Alternative Information Center (AIC), to mark the 68th anniversary of the “Nakba.” At the event, Irene Carretero of Amnesty International alleged that activists and human rights organizations are harassed and persecuted in order “to prevent them from supporting the BDS movement against apartheid” (NGO Monitor translation).
  • In a 2009 article, “Yes to Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS),” Warschawski claims that there are “similarities” between Israel and the South African apartheid regime: “both are racist states with (different kinds of) apartheid. He goes on to state: “For us, Zionism is not a national liberation movement but a colonial movement, and the State of Israel is and has always been a settlers’ colonial state. Peace, or, better, justice, cannot be achieved without a total decolonization (one can say de-Zionisation) of the Israeli State; it is a precondition for the fulfillment of the legitimate rights of the Palestinians—whether refugees, living under military occupation or second-class citizens of Israel.”
  • Following the 2008-9 Gaza War, Michel Warschawski compared Israelis and Nazis, stating, “Ehud Barak, Tzipi Livni, Gabi Ashkenazi and Ehud Olmert…You are not representing any continuity with the Warsaw Ghetto, because today the Warsaw Ghetto is right in front of you, targeted by your own tanks and artillery, and its name is Gaza.”
  • In December 2008, Michel Warschawski accused the State of Israel of “conducting a rampant genocide against the people of Gaza, using the weapon of almost-starvation, electricity cuts and deprivation of drinking water, provoking epidemics and preventing basic health-care.”

BDS Activities

  • Shir Hever, AICP economic researcher, was involved in compiling the discriminatory UN database of businesses operating across the 1949 Armistice line, aimed at bolstering BDS campaigns against Israel. According to Hever, “nobody can really see any kind of use for that list except in order to organize boycott, divestment and sanctions against these particular companies. So, of course it has something to do with the BDS movement. The BDS movement is the movement that has now the responsibility to take that list and make use of it. So now it’s up to people, for example, myself living in Heidelberg, to protest against Heidelberg Cement and what this company is doing.”
  • In July 2020, AICP shared an infographic made by the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) titled “Israeli apartheid is not ‘green’” that called for BDS against “Multinational corporations like AXA and HSBC, that invest in fossil fuels, are complicit in Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people. They invest in companies arming Israel, financing its illegal settlements and pillaging Palestinian land and natural resources” (emphasis in original).
  • In July 2020, Hever spoke out against the German Bundestag’s joint resolution defining BDS campaigns against Israel as antisemitic, referring to it as a “very dark spot on the record of the German Bundestag.” According to Hever, “Trying to shut down these meetings and censor BDS is not going to make the BDS movement weaker, maybe even the opposite. It will make the outrage against Israeli apartheid and colonialism even worse.”
  • Signed a 2015 petition against the Swiss Federal Council and Swiss Parliament demanding “not to buy surveillance drones from Israel and to stop the whole military collaboration with Israel until it complies with international law and Palestinian rights.”
  • In July 2014, AIC posted a statement calling on “conscientious people all over the world, to act, protest, and intensify the boycotts, divestments and sanctions against Israel until it ends this murderous attack on our people and is held to account.”
  • Published a template email (February 2014) urging readers to “send a message to your Ministry of Foreign Affairs and ask them to uphold international law and oppose Israel’s violations of Palestinian human rights by publishing warning to business about the problems and risk associated with doing business” with Israel.
  • Signed a 2009 letter to the Norwegian Government Pension Fund, together with other NGOs, calling “upon the Norwegian people to join us in our efforts and to stop investing in the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.” The letter accused a number of Israeli and international corporations of “provid[ing] specifically designed equipment for the surveillance and repression of Palestinian population through restrictions of movement and collective punishments.” The campaign resulted in the Pension Fund’s divestment from the Israeli company, Elbit Ltd.

Partners

Partial list of foreign donations

*Amounts for 2012/13 and 2016 are based off of quarterly reports submitted to the Registrar of Non-Profits; 2014/15 are based off of the organization’s annual reports.

Donor20162015201420132012
Diakonia (Sweden)314,820323,585362,158483,860501,521
Papa Giovanni XXIII 74,53977,038
European Union20,929
Mundubat (Spain) 434,877259,645
CCFD (France)56,37621,70537,75995,856
Commission Nationale Consultative des Droits (France) 71,760
Foundation France47,890
UJFP (France)37,152
Municipality of Geneva202,473209,02323,692
ICCO (the Netherlands)202,492
Alternative Tourism Group20,880147,343
Basque Government242,176126,823
Asociacion Extremenade Comunicacio80,011

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