For the winning punters chancing their luck at Hawaiian Gardens' charity bingo hall in the heart of one of California's poorest towns, the big prize is $500. The losers walk away with little more than an assurance that their dollars are destined for a good cause.

But the real winners and losers live many thousands of miles away, where the profits from the nightly ritual of numbers-calling fund what critics describe as a form of ethnic cleansing by extremist organisations.

Each dollar spent on bingo by the mostly Latino residents of Hawaiian Gardens, on the outskirts of Los Angeles, helps fund Jewish settlements on Palestinian land in some of the most sensitive areas of occupied East Jerusalem, particularly the Muslim quarter of the old city, and West Bank towns such as Hebron where the Israeli military has forced Arabs out of their properties in their thousands.

Over the past 20 years, the bingo hall has funnelled tens of millions of dollars in to what its opponents — including rabbis serving the Hawaiian Gardens area — describe as an ideologically-driven strategy to grab land for Israel, as well as contributing to influential American groups and thinktanks backing Israel's more hawkish governments.

... "Moskowitz is taking millions from the poorest town in California and sending it to the settlements," said Haim Dov Beliak, a rabbi serving Hawaiian Gardens and one of the Jewish religious leaders in California who have campaigned to block the flow of funds to the settlers.

"The money Moskowitz puts in to the settlements has changed the game. Moskowitz has helped build a hardcore of the settler movement that may number 50-70,000.

...

Beliak helped launch the Coalition for Justice in Hawaiian Gardens & Jerusalem to stop the flow of money from the bingo hall to the settlements. Its investigations of tax records show that the Moskowitz Foundation's donations include grants to Beit Hadassah, a militant Jewish settlement in the heart of the West Bank city of Hebron.

Thousands of Arabs have been forced from their homes and businesses around Beit Hadassah ostensibly for their own security after an American-born settler Baruch Goldstein murdered 29 Palestinians nearby in 1994. Goldstein was himself shot dead and his grave is regarded as a shrine by some settlers. Moskowitz has made excuses for Goldstein's actions by blaming Palestinians for pushing him too far.

The foundation has also given more than £3.5m to Ateret Cohanim, a right wing group that houses Jews in the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem's old city. In other parts of East Jerusalem, Moskowitz has funded Jewish colonies situated to box in or cut off Palestinian neighbourhoods that fits in with a broader government strategy to ensure total Israeli control over the city.

"What Moskowitz pioneered was trying to break up the continuity of the Arab population centres in Jerusalem," said Beliak. "The consequences are radically different from just mom and pop buying a little piece of land. These are political statements and facts on the ground, and every [US] administration has allowed him to do this." ..