While OVI's work is “concentrated in Israel and Palestine,” the organization
also has branches titled One Voice United States (OVUS) and One Voice Europe (OVE), which engage policymakers, legislators, think tanks, and advocacy organizations in their respective locales. OVUS staff, for instance, maintain regular
contact with the White House, the State Department, and Congress.
OVI is
funded by a host of individuals, foundations, corporations, and governments—Israeli, Palestinian, and international.
Among these
funders—or “
partners,” as One Voice calls them—are the Association of British Muslims, British Muslims for a Secular Democracy, the Christian Muslim Forum, the
Ford Foundation, Google, the
Nathan Cummings Foundation, the
New Israel Fund, the
Righteous Persons Foundation, the
Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the
U.S. State Department, and the
William & Flora Hewlett Foundation. For a more comprehensive listing of OVI's funding partners,
click here.
The
CEO of the One Voice Movement Foundation is
Marc Ginsburg, who has served in various political and diplomatic capacities for such prominent
Democrats as
Jimmy Carter,
Bill Clinton,
Al Gore, and
John Kerry.
A key
board member of OVI is
Faisal Abdul Rauf, the Muslim cleric who sought to build the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” in New York. And the Movement's “
Entertainment Council”
includes such luminaries as Jason Alexander, Danny Devito, Joel Fields, Ed Norton, and Brad Pitt.
In 2011, OVI paid
$96,000 to
Howard Sumka, who, while serving as the West Bank and Gaza mission director for US Aid, was
instrumental in providing $1 million in American funding to a Hamas-run university in the Gaza Strip. OVI also has made a
number of annual
donations to the
American Task Force on Palestine, which demands a Palestinian
right-of-return as a precondition for any peace agreement with Israel.
One Voice holds Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in extreme contempt, as evidenced by OVI founder Daniel Lubetzky's
assertion that
Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy—who has
defended Hamas and called for a
boycott against Israel—was “precisely right” in describing Netanyahu as an “extremist” peddler of “fear and hate.
” In early 2015, OVI bankrolled the Israeli group V-2015 and its effort to defeat Netanyahu’s bid for reelection. Toward that end, OVI flew a team of five former campaign operatives of Barack Obama—including Jeremy Bird, who served as a national field director for Obama's 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns—to help run V-2015's activities out of a Tel Aviv office building. As part of this anti-Netanyahu effort, OVI paid for hundreds of people to go door-to-door and try to influence voters throughout Israel.
