Have you comprehensively rejected the Gandel Foundation?
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Written in collaboration with Muhib Nabulsi.
You’ve probably seen the name Gandel attached to numerous Australian cultural and educational institutions. Even if you’re unfamiliar with the Gandel Foundation, it’s likely you’ve worked with an organisation that receives their funding and is hence influenced by their politics.
On 13 October, 2023, just 6 days into Israel’s genocidal campaign, John Gandel told the Financial Review1 that Israel had ‘no choice’ but to go ‘all out’ and ‘hammer’ Gaza. Palestinians were already pulling the bodies of their loved ones from the rubble of their bombed homes by the thousands.
John and Pauline Gandel are long-time associates of genocidal coloniser Benjamin Netanyahu, contributing to his rise through Israeli politics from the beginning of his career.
In 1988, after serving as Israeli ambassador to the UN, Netanyahu moved back to Tel Aviv occupied Jaffa. There, the Gandels provided him and his then-wife with a seaside apartment, in which they lived rent free.
Netanyahu has been leader of the zionist regime for the vast majority of the last 15 years, during which time he has overseen innumerable atrocities, including the regular bombardment of Gaza, violent colonial expansion and the brutal oppression of Palestinians across occupied Palestine.
With the world watching, you’d think Netanyahu and his colonising state would at least attempt to conceal their intentions, yet the zionist regime has shown no such discretion.
Echoing his friend John Gandel – and in a dog-whistle to both Christian and Jewish zionists – Netanyahu quoted the Old Testament and Torah’s Book of Deuteronomy/Devarim, encouraging his fellow colonisers to:
Utterly destroy all that they have. Do not spare them but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.2
Scholars have described such rhetoric as calls for a ‘divinely mandated genocide’.3
In 2021, John Gandel was ranked fourteenth richest person in Australia with a net worth of AU$5.8 billion. Like his brother-in-law Marc Besen, Gandel funnels capital into the zionist project, thereby funding colonial expansion on stolen Palestinian land. A white Polish Australian, Gandel nonetheless refers to occupied Palestine as his ‘homeland’, stating:
When it comes to supporting the state of Israel, we always saw it as our duty and obligation to strengthen the homeland.4
In Australia, John and Pauline Gandel fund and collaborate with occupation lobbyists and propagandists the ‘Zionist Federation of Australia’ and the ‘United Israel Appeal’.
The Gandels also fund organisations dedicated to the zionist indoctrination of young people in Australia.
The Gandel Foundation is the ‘Principal Australian Supporter’5 of ‘Birthright’, the zionist propaganda tour organisation for Jewish youth established in 1999.
‘Birthright’ trips perpetuate the occupation of Palestine by erasing Palestinian history and Indigeneity in order to manufacture a sense of ownership and entitlement over stolen land.6
Before program participants even leave their countries of citizenship, these free trips are pitched as a visit to the ‘homeland’; a ‘return’ to their ‘birthright’.
On the trips, they are inculcated with falsehoods at every turn.
Since October 7th, the tide of public opinion has continued its turn towards Palestinian liberation. In recent weeks, the Gandel Foundation took down their website stating that it is ‘currently being updated’7, a process that apparently will take until ‘late January 2024’.
Prior to this, the Foundation’s website proudly listed the zionist organisations dedicated to colonial expansion and propagandising to which the Gandels have contributed funding.
You’ll also find Gandel money behind:
Naomi Milgrom Foundation and MPavilion Project (Milgrom also sits on the board of the Besen Family Foundation), Monash University, The University of Melbourne, Deakin University, Arts Centre Melbourne, National Gallery Australia, National Museum Australia, State Library Victoria and many other organisations.
Like the Besen family Foundation, the Gandel Foundation also funds ACMI which recently lit itself up in blue and white to support the genocidal zionist state.
Gandel funded institutions must, as a matter of urgency, be compelled to divest.
The Gandel Foundation must be comprehensively rejected.