February 11, 2010
Many donors upset
[I should point out that Haaretz choose this title and printed this article which is not supportive of the NIF in any way.]The New Israel Fund for Deepening the Jewish-Arab Rift
The Im Tirtzu organization accuses the New Israel Fund of financing Israeli organizations which Judge Richard Goldstone used for information to accuse the Israel Defense Forces of “war crimes.”
The fund’s response, as is the wont of radical leftist organizations under fire, was to smear its critics as “fascists”. Granted, the NIF’s president, Naomi Chazan, signed a petition that defined the IDF’s operations in Gaza as “terror against civilians” and demanded that Israel abide by “all UN resolutions relating to the conflict” (including 194, which Palestinians interpret as granting them a “right of return”). Nevertheless, the personal campaign against her is a mistake.
The NIF’s many supporters in the media and among political organizations (which benefit from the fund, both directly and indirectly) have used this personal campaign to divert the debate from the fund’s subversive goal (a “new Israel,” not Jewish or Zionist), which it has furthered by donating more than $200 million thus far to hundreds of anti-Zionist organizations (I have a list, if anyone is interested).
Adalah - The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel - has used its NIF funding to submit dozens of petitions to the High Court of Justice that seek to reduce and even abolish Israel’s identity as a Jewish state.
“Israel must recognize the [Palestinian] refugees’ right of return, on the basis of UN Resolution 194,” declares the introduction to a proposed constitution that Adalah authored. And this proposal would also abolish the Law of Return for Jews.
The NIF also finances Jewish-led groups that seek to undermine Israel’s Jewish identity, such as the Association for Civil Rights in Israel.
“The proposal to define Israel as a Jewish state,” ACRI declared (in response to a draft constitution prepared by the Israel Democracy Institute, not, heaven forbid, the one presented by the Institute for Zionist Strategies), “is problematic both in principle and in practice.”
Mada al Carmel, another group funded by the NIF, authored the “Haifa Declaration.” Here are a few gems from that document: “Towards the end of the 19th century, the Zionist movement initiated its colonial-settler project in Palestine. Subsequently, in concert with world imperialism … it succeeded in carrying out its project, which aimed at occupying our homeland … The Zionist movement committed massacres against our people … the State of Israel enacted racist land, immigration, and citizenship laws [a reference to the Law of Return] … Israel carried out policies of subjugation and oppression in excess of those of the apartheid regime in South Africa.”
The document subsequently demands the repeal of the Law of Return and of Israel’s definition as a Jewish state.
The Haifa Declaration, and other similar “vision documents,” were signed by prominent members of Israel’s Arab community, including the leaders of dozens of other organizations that are also funded by the NIF.
Similar statements, for instance, appear in the “Future Vision” produced by the Higher Arab Monitoring Committee, another NIF grantee.
Thus in funding organizations that work to deepen the rift between Jews and Arabs in Israel, the NIF has racked up noteworthy successes. Astonishingly, however, these successes are not proudly displayed to the fund’s philanthropists.
These donors, most of them Jews who support Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, are asked to contribute to the fund’s praiseworthy - but as it turns out, not primary - activities: improving welfare, education and human rights in Israel.
Many NIF donors do not know that their money is being used to fund dozens of organizations committed to inflaming the Arab street, intensifying its nationalist tendencies and deepening the rift between Jews and Arabs.
These philanthropists would almost certainly object to their money being used to undermine Israel’s Jewish identity and to lay a theoretical, legal and political framework for establishing another Arab state, on top of the proposed Palestinian state, in place of the State of Israel.
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Gil Ronen calls it The No Israel Fund
- [..] The groups which denounced the IDF to the Goldstone Committee were not looking for justice, or for improving the IDF’s morals. Had they wanted that, they could have contented themselves with demonstrating in Israel, lecturing to soldiers, writing opinion pieces in Israel’s media or petitioning Israel’s ultra-liberal High Court. These groups wanted something else.
Nor was the collaboration with Goldstone a one-time aberration. Look at some of these groups’ activities and stated aims and you will see that they are anything but Zionist. Journalist Ben-Dror Yemini noted in a recent article that the New Israel Fund supports the Zochrot non-profit association, “which openly aspires to eliminate the State of Israel via the realization of the ‘right of return.’”
Zochrot’s activity consists of organizing tours and events at the sites of Arab villages that were abandoned by their residents in 1948, when the Arabs lost their bid to commit genocide against the Jews, launched just two or three years after the chimneys at Auschwitz stopped smoking.
According to Prof. Gerald Steinberg’s NGO Monitor, Coalition of Women for Peace (also funded by the EU) – which includes Machsom Watch, New Profile, and WILPF – along with Mossawa (also funded by the EU and Sweden) wrote to the Norwegian Government Pension Fund and called “upon the Norwegian people to join us in our efforts and to stop investing in the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.” This divestment letter accused a number of Israeli and international corporations of “provid[ing] specifically designed equipment for the surveillance and repression of Palestinian population through restrictions of movement and collective punishments.”
The Coalition of Women for Peace is also responsible for the “Who Profits?” divestment website, a project that tracks Israeli and international corporations that allegedly “are directly involved in the occupation”.
European governments, however, don’t limit themselves to “occupied territories’ once they are given the green light by Israeli NGO’s. On September 3, 2009, Norway’s finance ministry announced that it “has excluded the Israeli company Elbit Systems Ltd. from the Government Pension Fund – Global.” Elbit Systems is a defense company, with expertise in “unmanned aerial vehicles, electro-optic technology and communication and surveillance equipment.”
Another group which the NIF supports (to the tune of over $500,000 in 2008) is Adalah – an Arab NGO that in 2007, published a proposed “Democratic Constitution” for Israel, which calls for an end to Israel as a state with a specifically Jewish character. “Under their plan,” wrote NGO-Monitor Communications Director Dan Kosky in the Jewish Chronicle, “Jewish immigration to Israel would only be permitted for ‘humanitarian reasons’ and Israel’s Jewish cultural framework would be replaced by an amorphous ‘democratic, bilingual and multicultural’ state. Adalah shamelessly exploits human rights discourse to promote a plan that, if adopted, would spell the end of the Jewish state”.
Over the years, these groups’ activities weaken Israel’s identity and sap its will and ability to fight for it, while strengthening its enemies’ nationalistic yearnings.
This is what the anger is about. This is not about right vs. left politics, or about social liberalism vs. conservatism. It is about survival in the face of a fund that assists enemy hard-liners in spreading their poison, inside Israel and outside it, even as it does some commendable deeds. The good Dr. Cherny, who does so much to fight cancer in his professional life, should know better than to hamper Israeli society’s belated effort to defend itself from a potentially terminal ailment.
