HE SOLD GENERICS FOR $1.75B — THEN FUNDED THE ICC

Tony Tabatznik, the South African-born British Jewish billionaire behind the Bertha Foundation, has spent fifteen years quietly underwriting the legal infrastructure of Israel’s prosecution at The Hague.

A Jewish billionaire helped pay for the case against Israel at the International Criminal Court. His name is Tony Tabatznik.

Tabatznik built his fortune in generic pharmaceuticals — twice. He sold his first business to German giant Merck in the 1990s. He sold Arrow Generics, his second, to U.S.-based Watson Pharmaceuticals in 2009 for $1.75 billion. Born in South Africa, he emigrated to Britain four decades ago. He lives in St John’s Wood in north London. The Bertha Foundation, the vehicle for his philanthropy, is registered in Geneva.

In 2010, using proceeds from the Arrow sale, Tabatznik founded Bertha alongside his daughter Lara. The framing — straight from the foundation’s own website — is that his “political consciousness was borne out of witnessing the evils of apartheid in his home country of South Africa.” That framing has done a great deal of work over fifteen years. It maps, cleanly, from anti-apartheid activism in the 1980s onto the contemporary case that Israel is itself an apartheid state.

The Bertha Foundation funds three pillars: documentary film, social-justice law, and activist training. Its Bertha Justice Network spans more than twenty countries. Among its named partner law centers: the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights in Berlin, the Michael Sfard Law Office in Tel Aviv, and — the one that matters — the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in Gaza.

The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights is one of three Palestinian NGOs the U.S. Department of the Treasury sanctioned in September 2025 under Executive Order 14203, “Imposing Sanctions on the International Criminal Court.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio designated PCHR, Al-Haq, and Al-Mezan for “having directly engaged in efforts by the International Criminal Court to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute Israeli nationals, without Israel’s consent.” All three provided evidence to the ICC underpinning the arrest warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant.

PCHR confirms on its own website what Bertha has funded: “preparing lawyers in the field of documentation and prosecution of Israeli war criminals on the international level.” Bertha’s own published reporting confirms its 2022 Impact Opportunity grant supported PCHR’s collaboration with lawyers across multiple countries to develop an ICC submission for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and apartheid. The Bertha Foundation has displayed this on its public website. It has been there for years.

The Center for Constitutional Rights, also in the Bertha Justice Network, is the U.S. law center most central to BDS-aligned litigation. Its former president Michael Ratner — eulogized on the Bertha Foundation’s own website as a “Jewish anti-Zionist who passionately supported the rights of Palestinians” — built the network’s legal strategy in its early years. Bertha states this openly.

Tabatznik has signed the statement of Jews for Justice for Palestinians. He has signed similar petitions circulated among South African Jews. He is a director of the Oxford Institute for Yiddish Studies and a patron of the London Jewish Cultural Centre. The contradiction is not hidden. By his own framing, it is the point.

Bertha’s grant disclosure is partial — it is a Swiss-registered private foundation, not a U.S. 501(c)(3), and it does not file a Form 990. Most of what is publicly knowable comes from grantee disclosures and Bertha’s own narrative reports. Several of those grantees — PCHR most prominently — are now subject to U.S. Treasury sanctions. Downstream compliance exposure for U.S.-based donors, donor-advised funds, and intermediary 501(c)(3)s that have moved capital through the Bertha network is a question worth asking in 2026.

The larger question is one the global Jewish business community will eventually answer. Generations of Jewish South African capital — built in apartheid-era Johannesburg, exported to London after the transition, parked in Geneva — are now flowing, via a foundation that explicitly frames itself in anti-apartheid terms, into the legal apparatus arguing that the Jewish state is an apartheid regime. The same generation. The same money. Two opposite endings.

Tabatznik has not commented publicly on his Israel-related grantmaking for more than a decade. The Bertha Foundation did not respond to a request for comment.