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In a report released by NGO Monitor earlier this month, it has been exposed that the EU, along with several other European governments, is paying for the waging of what has come to be known as “lawfare” against Israel. The large body of evidence here really does have to be seen to be believed. Yet there is no denying it: European countries are indeed financing “lawfare” against two nations that they purport to consider friends.

The Palestinian NGO in question is the cryptically named Norwegian Refugee Council, a title that offers few clues as to the group’s actual activities. Quite simply, the primary function of this organization appears to be to wage “lawfare” against Israel’s judicial system in an effort to sabotage its legal process and subvert the democratic structures for determining Israeli policy. NGO Monitor reports that NRC has financed at least 677 cases that received full legal representation in court and other administrative bodies in Israel. According to an eyewitness report, the strategy here is to “try every possible legal measure to disrupt the Israeli judicial system… as many cases as possible are registered and that as many cases as possible are appealed to increase the workload of the courts and the Supreme Court to such an extent that there will be a blockage.”

In addition, NGO Monitor details how NRC pursues “public interest cases” concerning some of the most sensitive aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute in an effort to circumvent the democratic process for determining Israeli policy on these matters, instead seeking to alter policy by obtaining legal precedents at the court level. Some of the most outrageous cases taken up by the NRC involve attempts to abrogate Jewish property rights in Jerusalem by bringing private cases seeking to nullify Jewish claims to property owned prior to 1948 and the Jordanian expulsion of all Jews from north, east, and south Jerusalem.

Most remarkable of all has to be the NRC’s activities against Canada. In 2008 another Palestinian campaign group masquerading as an NGO called Al Haq brought a civil case to court in Quebec that accused three Canadian companies of having operated illegally by being involved in the construction of West Bank settlements on privately owned Palestinian land. This was despite the fact that six lawsuits on this matter had already been filed in Israel itself. Primarily it appears that bringing the case to Canada was part of an orchestrated publicity stunt.

The primary donors for the NRC are Norway, Sweden, the UK, and the EU. Given that both Sweden and the UK already pay into the EU budget, tax payers in these countries are funding this organization twice over. Between 2011 and 2013 alone, the NRC spent $20 million on its lawfare campaigns. With the considerable deficits that most EU countries are currently running up, how might European publics react to discovering that this is how their tax euros are being spent?

If nothing else, as long as this funding continues to flow, the Europeans cannot expect to play any role as fair brokers in the peace process, and they must be allowed absolutely no say in that matter.