Activity

• CCFD-Terre Solidaire (Comité catholique contre la faim et pour le développement-Terre Solidaire) is an association of 29 secular and religious movements, which supports hundreds of projects in 63 countries in collaboration with local partners.
• CCFD-Terre Solidaire has maintained a presence in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza since 1978. It claims to “support educational activities,” following “the initiative of the Platform of French NGOs for Palestine’s priorities of education for intercommunity dialogue, peace and non-violence.”

Funding

• In 2022, total income was €40.4 million, of which €4.2 million was provided by government funding (including €2.9 million from L’Agence Française de Développement (AFD) and  €1.5 million from the EU) and €34.9 million by private donations.
• In 2021, AFD provided CCFD-Terre Solidaire with €850,000 for educative and civil involvement projects for young people in Gaza with the Culture and Free Thought Association (CFTA). .

Funding for politicized NGOs

• CCFD has provided funding to a number of highly biased and politicized NGOs active in the Arab-Israeli conflict including Breaking the Silence, Who Profits, Zochrot, Social TV, HaMoked, Emek Shaveh, and Sadaka Reut. (See table below for further funding information.)
• CCFD does not publish financial information about its funding to NGOs partners. In 2013, following NGO Monitor inquiry regarding funding for a Zochrot conference, CCFD declared: “Our privacy policies do not allow to disclose the amounts given to recipient.”
• Since 2013, CCFD-Terre Solidaire’s subsidiary, the International Solidarity for Development and Investment (SIDI), has been providing funds to the Arab Center for Agriculture Development (ACAD) via its participation in ACAD-Finance, a shareholding company owned by ACAD that provides micro-finance loans. ACAD, which is a member of the highly politicized Palestinian NGO Network (PNGO), supports BDS campaigns against Israel, including the academic boycott of Israeli institutions.
  • Judeh Deeb Ibrahim Jamal, ACAD’s former Board of Directors’ Chairman and, simultaneously, General Director of Qatar Charity was convicted in 2015 for his activity in the Qatar Charity – an illegal organization in Israel due to its ties to Hamas – and for his transferring of funds to the Hamas (on file). Jamal was also the founder of the politicized Palestinian organization Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committees (PARC).
  • Muhsen Abu Ramdan, ACAD’s Gaza Branch Manager, is the former director of PNGO in Gaza. In an article published on the website of the Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC), an “affiliate” of the the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terrorist organization, Abu Ramdan is described as being “an active member of the national campaign to boycott Israeli products” that “called for an escalation of the campaign to boycott Israel, withdraw investments and impose sanctions on it as a mean of resistance…”
• In November 2016, CCFD, together with Mouvement pour une Alternative Non- violente (MAN) and the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Foundation, funded Israeli NGO De-Colonizer’s creating a map depicting “Colonialism in Destru(A)ction,” aiming “to show the historical continuum of the ongoing colonial project until today, and gives an indication on what might be the future if there is no political international substantial mobilization to stop Israel.”
  • The organization De-Colonizer, which claims that the “occupation started at the daylight of the Zionist immigration,” was founded by Eitan Bronstein, founder the NGO Zochrot. Zochrot supports a “One State Solution” or a “de-Zionized Palestine,” and refers to Israel as having an “ethnicized and racialized Zionist” system.

Political Advocacy

• In January 2024, CCFD called on France to “urgently call on Israel to implement the precautionary measures of the International Court of Justice,” specifically to “refrain from committing acts constituting the crime of genocide.”
• In April 2023, CCFD was a signatory on a letter to the United Nations Secretary-General urging the UN to reject the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism. According to the letter, the IHRA definition “opens the door to labeling as antisemitic… findings of major Israeli, Palestinian and global human rights organizations that Israeli authorities are committing the crime against humanity of apartheid against Palestinians.”
  • The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, adopted by nearly 30 countries and counting, represents the international consensus definition of antisemitism, as well as how to distinguish between legitimate criticism of Israel and antisemitism. An example of the latter includes denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.
• In October 2021, CCFD published a press release condemning the decision by the Israeli Ministry to designate six Palestinian NGOs as terrorist organizations. According to the statement, “For years these organizations have been attacked with smear campaigns and accusations of links to terror organizations to delegitimize their work without substantive evidence to back the claims. This latest, unprecedented move comes as a culmination of these preceding efforts to undermine, silence and erase Palestinian rights defenders and civil society at large.”
• In June 2019, CCFD helped organize a visit by a Gazan soccer team to France where Salah Hamouri was honored. In 2005, Salah Hamouri was arrested and convicted for “attempting to assassinate Ovadia Yosef…and for his involvement with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.” The PFLP has referred to Hamouri as a “comrade.” Hamouri works as a field researcher and lawyer for the Palestinian NGO Addameer, an “affiliate” of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terrorist group.
• In May 2018, during the violence on the Gaza border, CCFD stated that it was “horrified by the massacre of unarmed demonstrators in the Gaza Strip…Shooting live bullets at unarmed protesters in Gaza is inhuman and unacceptable. France and the European Union must intervene with the Israeli government to put an end to this violence and oppose a disastrous occupation policy.” CCFD ignored the violent nature of the protests, which have consisted of an organized armed attack on the Israeli border and IDF positions, attempts to destroy and breach the border fence, and sustained arson, rocket, and mortar attacks on Israeli civilian communities.
• On February 7, 2017, CCFD was a signatory on a statement marking the anniversaries of the 1917 Balfour declaration, the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan, and the “beginning of Israel’s occupation in 1967.” The statement calls for “the suspension of the EU’s Association Agreement with Israel.” The statement condemns the 1947 UN partition plan, claiming it “resulted in the 1948 Nakba, the demolition of more than 530 Palestinian villages and the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland, and is thus a process of ethnic cleansing.” It also claims that European countries “made Palestine carry the consequences of the monstrous genocide of the European Jews by the Nazis; and subsequently they did nothing to require that Israel respect UN resolution.”
• In October 2016, CCFD published a report titled “Displacements of populations- Expropriations, evictions and regrouping of Palestinian populations,” accusing Israel of forced displacements against the Palestinian populations in the West Bank, Jerusalem, and within the recognized borders of Israel. According to the report, the Israeli city of Acre is comprised of “ideological settlers” and “gentrification exists elsewhere in the world but here, it is a strategy to replace a population by another. Until the eighties, the policy was to destroy what is Arab;today, it is the strategy of gentrification that takes place…” (Report on file with NGO Monitor.)
  • The report also details a CCFD study tour to Israel and the West Bank, where participants stated that “We are a little dumbstruck to discover the presence of settlers within Israel” (emphasis added).
• In 2013, CCFD hosted a conference that justified Palestinian violence against Israelis, referring to how Palestinians “resist, […] also taking up arms, driven by despair to their hopeless situation.”
  • The book was published by CCFD, le Secours catholique, Pax Christi, and Justice and Peace.

BDS Activities

• According to French law, it is illegal to support boycotts against Israel.¹ In contrast, CCFD calls for “defending the right to boycott the products from Israeli settlements, and for stopping the criminalization of the BDS movement.”
• In February 2024, CCFD published a statement “demand[ing] the suspension of the EU-Israel association agreement, an agreement which gives privileged access to the EU market…European states must align their words and actions and not participate in a war economy.” 
• In November 2022, CCFD called on French and European authorities to “make more use of the negotiation tools at their disposal, in particular the economic association agreement which binds the European Union to Israel,” as well as to “reduce their growing exports of arms and military technology to Israel.”
• In February 2022, CCFD participated in a campaign titled “#StopTradeWithSettlements” calling “for an EU law that will end trade with illegal settlements once and for all.”
• In 2019, CCFD lobbied in support of the discriminatory UN database of businesses operating across the 1949 Armistice line, aimed at bolstering BDS campaigns against Israel.
• In May 2018, during the violence on the Gaza border, CCFD called for people to write to the President of France asking for the “European institutions to exclude Israeli military companies from European framework programs such as Horizon 2020 and FP9. Indeed, Israel’s participation in the European Union Framework Program for Research and Technological Development allows the provision of European financial support to military industries such as Elbit and Israel Aerospace Industries, the two main suppliers of drones to the Israeli army complicit in Israeli war crimes.”
• In March 2017, along with groups including International Federation of Human Rights (FIDH),  Association France Palestine Solidarité (AFPS), Al-Haq, and the French League of Human Rights (LDH) published a document ‘The dangerous ties between French banks and insurances companies with the Israeli occupation‘, which recommends that the French government pressure French financial institutions to “disengage without delay from any financial link with the Israeli banking system,” and create “a legislative proposal prohibiting enterprises from all sectors to invest in the settlements.”
  • The report only points to very minor and indirect connections, if at all, to settlements, and French courts have repeatedly found that such business activity is not illegal.The report was funded by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA).
• In 2015, CCFD and politicized NGOs including Al-Haq, Association France Palestine Solidarité (AFPS), and International Federation of Human Right (FIDH) published “Orange’s Dangerous Liaisons in the Occupies Palestinian Territory,” calling for a boycott of the Israeli mobile phone network Partner Communications (which then operated under the Orange brand). The NGOs targeted the French corporation Orange Group and “the French State as Orange’s principal majority shareholder.”
  • Efforts to pressure Orange included attending the Orange annual shareholders meeting and lobbying of the French government.
• Supports the “Made it Illegality” campaign, which supports BDS aims. The campaign’s goals are “prohibiting the import of settlement products,” “excluding the settlements from their bilateral agreements and cooperation with Israel,” and “excluding companies which are active or located in the settlements from public markets and public procurement procedures…”
• In August 2014, CCFD published an appeal for the EU and their member states to divest from all settlements activities. In July 2014, CCFD and FIDH published a document titled “European Measures against Israeli Occupation,” calling for settlement product labeling and divestment from business and other activities with Israeli entities beyond the 1949 Armistice Line. The document also urges the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs to endorse calls for divestment from settlement activities.