Though they insist no laws were actually broken, a new report from the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations has found that the State Department provided resources within Israel which were diverted during the 2015 vote there to campaign against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The incident was related to State Department funding for the OneVoice Movement, a group which is meant to bolster the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians. The report notes that in 2013, OneVoice was given $349,000 by the State Department to support peace talks that ended in failure in April of 2014.
With no peace talks to support, OneVoice diverted the resources from the State Department funded project to V15, an activist group founded to oust Netanyahu from office. OneVoice did inform a State Department official of it, but that diplomat insisted he never read the email.
The project funding allowed OneVoice to do what they did, but the report said that the State Department diplomats had been negligent in setting up the project in that way, noting that OneVoice had been politically active before, and the possibility of them doing so again should’ve been foreseen.
