What has become of the New Israel Fund? It started out as an anti-establishment effort, but has become quite an establishment of its own.
The New Israel Fund was founded out of frustration with the central funding agency of Diaspora Jewry for Israel — the federation system. Federations, NIF charged, were not supporting certain groups in Israel. These included civil rights groups, leftist non-profits and human rights groups, particularly those that backed Palestinians and efforts to undo the official Israeli rabbinate. The truth is, the federation system was not supporting these groups, and NIF filled a legitimate spot in the very wide spectrum of Jewish political opinion.
As things developed, NIF’s ideological stance hardened into an orthodoxy of its own. It is one thing to support human rights and minorities; quite something else to stick to one’s ideological guns to the point of absurdity. NIF now funds those who would put an end to Israel as a Jewish state by peaceful means.
There’s a lot of bitter tit-for-tat in Israel today over the exact percentage of NIF grantees who would put an end to Israel as a Jewish state or otherwise harm Israel. Read the related news coverage
The issue is not percentages. It is undeniable that many of the groups that NIF supports do good things, such as help women’s shelters and Ethiopian immigrants. This, however, is simply not relevant to the total NIF picture, when some of the organization’s grantees collect information harmful to Israel and hand it over to the Goldstone reporters at the UN — a sworn enemy of Israel — or when NIF grantees work to de-Judaize Israel.
NIF’s funding of these groups, while saying it “disagrees” with them, is a unique form of mind bending. It cannot hide the major role this kind of funding plays in NIF’s self-image, regardless of the percentages. In reading the arguments of some of NIF’s defenders we are reminded of Ward Churchill. All that wonderful scholarship of his, he tells us, cannot be undermined by a “few” plagiarized paragraphs. CU didn’t buy that. The courts didn’t buy that. A lack of integrity is a lack of integrity. An organization that funds — at whatever large or small amount — those who would de-Judaize Israel, or who would help the UN harm Israel, lacks integrity.
When the NIF says that some of its grantees merely provide information to the UN on Israel’s alleged war crimes during the Gaza War, but pass no judgment on the information, that is disingenuous. Did these grantees transmit to the UN information that would seemingly exonerate Israel from the charge of war crimes in Gaza? Not to our knowledge; they transmitted only what seemed to be detrimental. Their intent was clear.
Because of the address: the UN.
Let the NIF pass on all the seemingly damning information it can find to the Israeli authorities and to the Israeli press. The Israeli press hides nothing. There is no fear of any information, however damning, being shoved under the rug — not in Israel, anyway. There is ample opportunity for those NIF grantees who believe that Israel committed war crimes in Gaza to make themselves heard. But going to Goldstone — going to the UN? That really is beyond the pale. Read the latest news coverage of the Goldstone Report
The UN has proven itself time and again to be unfair, prejudiced, indeed malicious in Israel-Arab issues. How a Jewish organization, such as NIF, could directly or indirectly aid and abet the UN in a report on alleged Israeli war crimes is beyond us.
Has the NIF forgotten the “Zionist = Racism” resolution at the UN, which stood for 16 years? Does the NIF really believe that the UN, despite this resolution’s repeal, has changed? Has the NIF forgotten that more anti-Israel resolutions have been passed by the UN Security Council than resolutions against all other countries in world combined?
Has the NIF forgotten that when the Goldstone effort was commissioned, the UN mandate was to look for war crimes only by Israel, not by Hamas?
Only 14% of all the sources for the Goldstone report are NIF-affiliated groups, but that 14% managed to provide some 92% of all Israel-based negative reporting in the Goldstone report. Again, the point is not the percentages per se, but the depth of the anti-Israel focus within the NIF orbit. And to those who would say that to provide this information to the UN is a mitzvah, because, after all, it seeks to enhance human rights, we would simply say: If human rights, and not an anti-Israel animus, is the motivation, then why did not the NIF-affiliated groups seek out and hand over information to the UN about the war crimes committed by Hamas?
Not to mention, why didn’t these NIF-affiliated groups focus on the years of Hamas violation of human decency in firing on civilians in southern Israel? It is a unique form of hypocrisy to focus on alleged war crimes in a war that lasted less than one month, without focusing on the years of death and damage that brought the war.
Israeli democracy has shown itself to be more open, more resilient and more raucous than any other democracy in the world. If that is true, in part, due to the activism of groups such as NIF, let them thrive. There is, however, one proviso, a rather obvious, tautological one: Israel must exist, and must exist as a Jewish state, for its democracy to thrive. Nothing must be done to undermine either sina qua non. Israeli democracy cannot thrive without Israel. Seems like a very simple point. NIF, however, seems to have lost some of its original raison d’etre, hardening into an ideology that proves Emerson’s dictum that consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.
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