Who Is Davidi Gilo? And Why you should care…

Daniel Greenfield

Who is Davidi Gilo? That’s the question the San Jose Mercury News asked ten years ago. The question wasn’t an unreasonable one. Davidi Gilo had seemingly appeared out of nowhere (like Obama) to flutter to the top of the contributors list for the Democratic Party. At 1.2 million dollars, not only was he the single biggest Silicon Valley donor, but he was also the third largest donor to the Democratic Party in the country.

There was no reason for Gilo to be throwing that much money around. That same year Forbes had placed him at the very bottom of its list of tech industry high rollers. But though Gilo was 99th on the Forbes list, he managed to be at the top of the liberal donors list, tossing something like 1 percent of his net worth to the party.

Davidi Gilo was a member of Soros’ Democracy Alliance, which was set up to direct large amounts of money into the causes of the Left. A number of other board members of the Democracy Alliance also ended up closely involved in J Street, including Patricia Bauman, Gail Furman, Deborah Sagner, as well as Herb and Marion Sandler .

Glance today at the J Street bio page and you’ll see that Gilo’s name is one of the rare few that doesn’t come with any supplementary information (just like Obama). No titles or background. No “Former President of X” or “Board Member of Y” or anything at all despite the fact that Davidi Gilo is not just another name at J Street. He’s the chairman of the board of J Street.

Besides being the chairman of the board of J Street; he’s also a major donor. And before J Street, he was on the executive committee of the Israel Policy Forum. The IPF was a J Street predecessor with enough overlap that J Street could be considered a rebranding of it.