In Britain, around 450 cultural organisations are currently partnered with Bloomberg Philanthropies. The information below should make those organisations think again.

As well as being a major funder of arts projects across the world, Bloomberg Philanthropies funds the Bloomberg-Sagol Center for City Leadership at Israel’s Tel Aviv University. The Center provides leadership training to municipal officials, including those governing settlements in the Palestinian West Bank, which Israel occupies illegally.

The establishment of settlements in the West Bank is deemed illegal by the UK and other governments and has been found to be in violation of international humanitarian law by the International Court of Justice. It has been identified as a war crime by the UN Human Rights Commissioner and Amnesty International among others, and acts relating to settlement establishment are being investigated as potential war crimes and crimes against humanity by the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. Bloomberg Philanthropies is directly implicated in these internationally unlawful acts, which are likely to constitute international crimes.^[1]

The Bloomberg-Sagol Center, its students, staff and funders are committed to a project of Palestinian dispossession that entails crimes against humanity. As evidenced below, graduates use their position as state officials to champion and uphold policies of occupation, annexation and violence against Palestinians, in the West Bank, in Israel and in Gaza^[2]. Teaching staff have close links to Israel’s military intelligence. One of its founders provides funding for an annexationist political party; the other has publicly supported Israel’s military violence against Palestinians and used his platform and financial influence to strengthen the Israeli state, whose system of domination Amnesty International says amounts to the crime of apartheid.

The Bloomberg-Sagol Center perpetuates war crimes through its training of Israeli settler leaders and officials in the Palestinian West Bank. It also empowers officials who incite crimes against humanity.

Armed with this knowledge, British and other international cultural organisations should not partner with Bloomberg Philanthropies for as long as it is implicated in grave violations of the fundamental rights of the Palestinian people. 

The evidence

1.   Trainees

Yisrael Ganz (Bloomberg-Sagol class of 2022) is leader of the Mateh Benjamin Regional Council, which governs 47 settlements and outposts in the illegally occupied West Bank. He is also leader of the Yesha Council of settlers in the whole of the West Bank. He speaks in plainly annexationist terms, here, in a February 2025 briefing: 

“In order to … assert the Jewish people’s historical and biblical claim, Israel must assert its sovereignty over the West Bank … We have to say, ‘This is our state. We will stay here forever, and this is part of the State of Israel.’ And the only way to do this is to apply Israeli sovereignty over these areas.”^[3]

In May 2025, Ganz welcomed the Israeli government’s announcement of 22 new settlements in the West Bank: “This historic decision sends a clear message – we are here not only to stay but to establish the State of Israel.”^[4]

Yakov Gutterman (Bloomberg-Sagol class of 2023) is Mayor of Modiin Illit, an illegal West Bank settlement. In August 2025, Guterman was one of the West Bank mayors who called on Netanyahu to declare Israeli sovereignty over Palestinian land illegally occupied by Israel. He is particularly active in attempts to persuade Haredi (Orthodox Jewish) communities in the West Bank to vote for annexation^[5].

Oshrat Gani Gonen (Bloomberg-Sagol class of 2022) leads Drom-Hasharon Regional Council in the Central District of Israel. In 2024 and 2025, as council leader, she visited units of Israel’s occupying forces in the West Bank. In the months leading up to her first visit in February 2024, the Israeli military had killed 362 West Bank Palestinians, including 96 children^[6]. For Gonen, this was a “bold and determined operation”^[7].

On March 2025, Gonen again visited occupation forces, posting on Facebook:

“We toured the Jenin area this week with the Commander of the Central Command Avi Bluth, the Menashe Brigade, as well as the commanders of spatial defence and the Nishon battalion. The commanders presented to us, the heads of the councils in the area, the activity of the IDF in the refugee camps and Palestinian cities in Samaria. We were impressed by the scope of activity …Thank you to the general, and all the commanders and soldiers who spend nights like this protecting our safety.”^[8]

Oshrat Gani Gonen was applauding war crimes. A report by Human Rights Watch in November 2025 described how the Israeli forces she had been to visit “emptied the camps in Jenin, Tulkarem, and Nur Shams of virtually all [their] residents … the largest displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank in one operation since the 1967 war.”^[9] The soldiers had moved systematically through the camps, storming homes, ransacking properties, interrogating residents, and eventually forcing families out.

Human Rights Watch concluded that: “The Israeli government carried out war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing during its operations in the West Bank (Operation Iron Wall) starting January 2025.”

“Major-General Bluth should be investigated for individual criminal responsibility, for war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

Oshrat Gonen posted this photograph of herself in Jenin with the unit accused by Human Rights Watch of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Israel Parosh (Bloomberg-Sagol class of 2022) was Mayor of Elad in the Central District of Israel until 2024. In 2015, he visited the Hebron Hills in the West Bank to show solidarity with the settlers. Parosh said:

“It is important to strengthen these settlements, which absorb daily terror, and continue to settle the Land of Israel with a true devotion. Therefore, it was important for me to come and speak to the residents instead. I’m glad that my friend, head of the council, invited me on a tour, and I’m sure we’ll continue to help the settlements as per the tradition.”^[10]

In 2015, the year of Parosh’s visit, a UN report found that:

“the treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank … was a situation of oppression and humiliation of an occupied people …. [there are] frequent reports of excessive use of force by the occupying power in the West Bank, continued settlement construction, and [mal]treatment of Palestinians, including children in Israeli detention.”^[11]

Yair Revivo (Bloomberg-Sagol Class of 2023) has been Mayor of Lod since 2013. Revivo is a supporter of the Garin Torani movement, devoted to the displacement of Palestinians from neighbourhoods they have lived in for decades. He has appointed the head of Lod’s Garin Torani as the city’s CEO and stormed a mosque during Eid Al-Adha prayers.^[12] According to Human Rights Watch, the city authorities have provided accommodation to ultra-nationalist groups which violently target the Palestinian population.^[13]

Incitement to genocide by Bloomberg-Sagol trainees

The ICJ has ordered Israel to “take all measures to prevent public incitement to genocide” – but  Bloomberg-Sagol trainees are making significant contributions to a discourse that dehumanises Palestinians, legitmates violence against them on a mass scale and establishes conditions for genocide.

David Azoulay, Mayor of Metulla and part of the Bloomberg-Sagol Centre’s Growth programme^[14] said that “the whole Gaza strip should be empty just like Auschwitz, flattened, just like Auschwitz is today”^[15]. In February 2025, Azoulay’s words were cited by South Africa in its ‘Public dossier of openly available evidence on the State of Israel’s acts of genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza.’

Israel Gal (Bloomberg-Sagol class of 2022), Mayor of Kiryat Ono, said in a podcast, “We don’t have anything to do there (in Gaza) except move the population from side to side, to say to them go from here to there, from there to there, through your sewage and through the winter  and through the hot summer and move them from the side like a herd of cattle.”^[16]

Nissan Ben Hamo (Bloomberg-Sagol class of 2022), Mayor of Arad, wrote than an Israeli soldier killed in Gaza had “fought bravely against human animals”^[17].

Alon Davidi Mayor of Sderot told the TV channel ‘Now 14’: “we [are] surrounded by enemies and we need to teach them a lesson, destroy them. These are animals, monsters.”^[18] 
In a 2023 statement to Israel National News, he said, “Every inhabitant of Gaza is ISIS. They must all be hit. … I have no pity for them.  Those who live there, two million people, are Nazis…”^[19]
In January 2026, Davidi was welcomed on to the Third Cohort of trainees on the Bloomberg-Sagol Leadership Programme.

2.   Teachers

In Israel’s universities, academic activity is entangled with military and security interests^[20]. Tel Aviv University, home to the Bloomberg-Sagol Center, exemplifies this entanglement^[21] – as do teachers on its City Leadership Programme.

Nimrod Kozlovski, course lecturer, is a veteran of the Israeli military’s ‘Electronic Warfare Unit’ and according to his biography an ‘expert in cyber warfare and cybersecurity’^[22]. He co-founded the company CyTactic with another veteran from the Special Operations Division of Israel’s Military Intelligence.

Moty Cristal, course lecturer, is a reserve lieutenant colonel in the Israeli military, a former negotiator for the Israeli government^[23], and according to his X/ profile, a ‘political activist’. He has reposted the anti-Muslim racist Tommy Robinson and other far-right figures on X. Cristal is an advisory member of the Cytactic Board.^[24]
 

3.   Funders

The Center was founded and is funded by Yossi Sagol and Michael Bloomberg. Each is explicit that their philanthropic work is tied to the strengthening of the state of Israel which in 2024 was found by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to violate the international prohibition on apartheid^[25]. Each has been willing to support policies that breach international law.

Yossi Sagol is Chairman of Sagol Holdings, his family’s global investment company. He is a long-time supporter of annexation. In 2020, he donated 35,000 shekels to the political party of  Gideon Saar, currently Israeli Foreign Minister^[26]. Then as now, Saar advocated for the incorporation of Palestinian territory into Israel^[27]. In 2022, Saar was a guest at the dinner held to inaugurate the Bloomberg-Sagol Center^[28].

Michael Bloomberg (former Mayor of New York and principal funder) has justified  Israel’s military actions against Palestinians, even when these have amounted to war crimes: in 2014 he defended Israel’s shelling of three UN schools in Gaza, which killed 17 children^[29]. In the 2020 race for nomination as the Democrats’ Presidential candidate, Bloomberg declared that he would “never impose conditions on our military aid for Israel” .^[30]

In April 2024, while Israel was turning West Bank refugee camps into what UNRWA called ‘ghost towns’^[31], he announced the $27.8 million Bloomberg Philanthropies Regional Initiative, intended not to resuscitate Palestinian life but to ‘rehabilitate and improve the areas of Israel hit hardest by war’^[32].  Moshe Davidovich, mayor in one such area, hailed the programme: “Thanks to Michael Bloomberg and other amazing Zionists, who are opening their hearts and their wallets, I am convinced that we will not only restore the north [of Israel], but we will lead it to a prosperity that it has never seen before”^[33].

Conclusion

In July 2025, a UN Report concluded that the private sector and its executives should be held accountable for the corporate machinery that sustains the “displacement and replacement of the Palestinians” from their homes and lands.^[34]

In September 2025, Amnesty International published a report that called on public institutions, as well as states, to live up to “their obligations and responsibilities under international law and standards” with regards to Israel’s military occupation, system of apartheid, and genocide against Palestinians.

Amnesty said: “The actions and commitments of everyone – states, public institutions, companies and the public – must match the gravity of the situation amidst a staggering loss of Palestinian lives, [and] the irreparable damage caused to Palestinians”.^[35]

Strengthening the infrastructure of illegal settlements is not philanthropy; it is an act that facilitates the commission of international crimes.  Likewise, training officials who incite genocide and implement apartheid is not advancing ‘city leadership’; it is complicity in grave crimes against the Palestinian people.

British institutions should pressure Bloomberg Philanthropies to abide by international law and should not accept its funding until it does. They should instate consistent ethical policies to prevent such complicit funding being accepted in future.

*Photo: Armed settlers stand on a cliff overlooking the Palestinian village below (AFP)

---

^[1] ICRC (accessed 01.2026) International humanitarian law: Settlements https://casebook.icrc.org/a_to_z/glossary/settlements

^[2] West Bank: Israel Emptying Refugee Camps a Crime Against Humanity https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/11/20/west-bank-israel-emptying-refugee-camps-a-crime-against-humanity

^[3] The Jerusalem Post (2025) Israel Ganz: PA seeks Israel’s destruction, West Bank sovereignty a must https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-843607

^[4] Reuters (205) Israel announces new West Bank settlements despite sanctions threat https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israel-announces-new-west-bank-settlements-despite-sanctions-threat-2025-05-29

^[5] Israel national News Arutz Sheva (2025) Internal pressure on haredi parties to vote for sovereignty in Judea and Samaria https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/412121

^[6] United Nations (2024) Hostilities in the Gaza Strip and Israel https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-flash-update-112

^[7] Gonen (2024) Facebook post https://www.facebook.com/oshratganigonen/posts/pfbid0H4nuZBYx4XmuMn6KPo2Ci1dEXZdeuL64nxyvGdY8ZtJwF9iDVEA6BF43ytXMSqG5l

^[8] Gonen (2025) Facebook post https://www.facebook.com/oshratganigonen/posts/pfbid036u48bruSKnwXagKTM442oGPr9UuVCzeLsjkgmyNvJdadEA74UkK6RcTSkC7rFsoAl

^[9] Human Rights Watch (2025)  All my dreams have been erased: ​​Israel’s Forced Displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank https://www.hrw.org/report/2025/11/20/all-my-dreams-have-been-erased/israels-forced-displacement-of-palestinians-in-the

^[10] Israel National News Arutz Sheva (2015)  https://www.inn.co.il/news/293908

^[11] United Nations (2015) Human Rights Council discusses human rights situation in the Occupied Palestinian and Arab Territories https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2015/03/human-rights-council-discusses-human-rights-situation-occupied-palestinian

^[12] +972 Magazine (2024) A Lyd without the Nakba https://www.972mag.com/lyd-nakba-film/

^[13] Human Rights Watch (2021) Abusive Policing in Lod During May Hostilities https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/12/14/israel-abusive-policing-lod-during-may-hostilities

^[14]  Wayback machine web-archive, Bloomberg-Sagol Growth Program page listing Metualla mayor, David Azulay https://web.archive.org/web/20251214170944/https://bloombergsagol.tau.ac.il/en/the-growth-program

^[15]Haaretz (2023). ‘Israeli Local Council Head Calls to ‘Flatten Gaza Like Auschwitz Today’ in Radio Interview’ https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-12-18/ty-article/israeli-local-council-head-calls-to-flatten-gaza-like-auschwitz-today-in-radio-interview/0000018c-7bf9-de44-a9be-7ffd05e90000

^[16] Youtube (2024) Israel Gal Did Not Surrender to Populism #6 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7MA-7fGrN8&t=31660s

^[17] Ben Hamo (2023) Facebook post https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1107326583802698&set=a.647774469757914

^[18] Now 14, broadcast  https://special.now14.co.il/article/שבים-לה/

^[19]  Israel National News Arutz Sheva (2023) https://www.inn.co.il/news/617925

^[20] Verso Books (accessed 01.2026) Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/3009-towers-of-ivory-and-steel?srsltid=AfmBOorMEbm71v9SRP76GrUDC4yGC7Z5QI3o9Ee4Q3zZiPSjrAibB_5E

^[21]Tel Aviv University Annual Report 2024 https://www.freunde-tau.org/wp-content/uploads/TAU-2024-Annual-Report.pdf

^[22] The Jerusalem Post (2024) Nimrod Kozlovski: Israeli cyber frontlines: Inside the digital warfare of the war with Hamas https://www.jpost.com/israel-hamas-war/article-781682

^[23] Nest Negotiation Strategies website, founder Moty Cristal (accessed 1.2026) https://www.crisis.company/about-moty-cristal

^[24] Moty Crystal cited in the Financial TImes (2025) The Other Israel-Iran War https://www.ft.com/content/37f21221-a2c3-47c5-b337-7cd168becaf4

^[25] Human Rights Watch (2024) World Court Findings on Israeli Apartheid a Wake-Up Call https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/09/19/world-court-findings-israeli-apartheid-wake-call

^[26] Ynet news (accessed 01.2026) Gideon Saar is counting on 7.2 million shekels from Derech Eretz and the Ya’alon merger https://www.ynet.co.il/economy/article/H1PDGVknD

^[27] The Jerusalem Post (2018) Gideon Saar: Oslo is obsolete: Time for a victory mindset https://www.jpost.com/opinion/oslo-is-obsolete-time-for-a-victory-mindset-561808

^[28] eJewish Philanthropy (2022) Your Daily Phil. 4th April. https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/your-daily-phil-mike-bloomberg-visits-israel-to-launch-new-mayors-center-another-view-on-huc/

^[29] Mondoweiss (2020) Remember when Bloomberg defended shelling a school? https://mondoweiss.net/2020/02/remember-when-bloomberg-defended-shelling-a-school/

^[30]Jewish Currents (2020)Time and again, Michael Bloomberg’s unquestioning devotion to Israel has led him to defend immoral and disastrous policies. https://jewishcurrents.org/the-one-issue-that-matters

^[31] UNRWA on Facebook (2025)
https://www.facebook.com/unrwa/posts/more-than-ten-months-into-operation-iron-wall-destruction-has-been-relentless-je/1331664908993838/

^[32] The Jerusalem Post (2024) Michael Bloomberg launches regional innovation hubs in war-stricken Israeli cities https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-797770

^[33] The Jerusalem Post (2024) Bloomberg’s $27.8 million project to boost Israeli cities hit hardest by war is ‘up and running’https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-797770

^[34]  UN Report (2025)  From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide https://www.un.org/unispal/document/a-hrc-59-23-from-economy-of-occupation-to-economy-of-genocide-report-special-rapporteur-francesca-albanese-palestine-2025/

^[35] Amnesty International (2025) Pull The Plug on the Political Economy Enabling Israel’s War Crimes – briefing https://www.amnesty.org.uk/resources/pull-plug-political-economy-enabling-israels-crimes-briefing