Steven Schneier
[[[Steven Schneier]], a former key fund-raiser for and top advisor to Netanyahu, is the director of the neoconservative Policy Forum. He served as the director of the Israel Development Fund (IDF), a “charity” through which he funnelled campaign contributions from Likud’s supporters in the US. A source told the Jewish Week: ’Steve Schneier would tell people to write checks to IDF to enable them to get a tax deduction’. The money money thus raised went to fund Likud's electoral campaign and to rebuilding the party. “[O]nly about half of the more than [$]1.7 million IDF raised over six years of activity went to any charity groups in Israel at all.” Schneier was IDF's only paid member.
He also went on to work for the Shalem Center and simultaneously for another Likud charity, Israel Research Foundation (IRF). Schneier also helped handle the “charitable contributions” of Manfred Lehmann, identified by the Week as “the late philanthropist who defended Dr. Baruch Goldstein’s murder of 29 Palestinians in Hebron in 1994.” After the dissolution in 1997 of both the IRF and the IDF Schneier went to work for Ronald Lauder, who was also the chief funder of both the Shalem Center and the IRF at the time.[1]
Affiliations
- Policy Forum - director
- Israel Development Fund - Schneier was the sole staffer of this Likud front.
- Shalem Center
- Israel Research Foundation (IRF)
- Ronald Lauder
- Democracy & Security International Conference - participant
