David Bedein
Special to the Jewish Week
This week, the battle in Jerusalem over the credibility of the New Israel Fund moved to the Knesset, where Israel’s elected officials will conduct what will likely be a spirited debate as to whether NIF poses a security risk to Israel. The debate follows the publication of the full text of the Goldstone commission, where NIF grantees such as the Rabbis for Human Rights, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, the Israel Committee Against Torture, Adalah, Physicians for Human Rights and at least a dozen more NIF-funded groups collectively accused the government and the Israeli army of crimes against humanity during the Gaza war.
This “war crime” accusation has become the trigger for a host of European countries that have threatened to prosecute Israeli politicians and Israeli reserve army officers for war crimes, if they were to step foot on their soil.
The New Israel Fund, in its defense, says it does not support those who demonize Israel or call for divestment or boycott of Israel, and that it will not assist those who advocate the “right of return” for Palestinians to reclaim land lost to them in 1948.
What the Knesset will examine, however, are a host of NIF grantees that violate these stated NIF policies, independent of the Goldstone controversy.
NIF funds the Coalition of Women for Peace, which recently hosted a conference in Jaffa, whose keynote speaker, Naomi Klein, issued a call for BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions). CWP promoted the results of the event, declaring that “Klein’s public meetings, in Ramallah, East Jerusalem, Haifa, and Jaffa drew hundreds of people to hear her clear-eyed analysis of why it is time for a full boycott of Israel until the occupation ends, [until] Arab Palestinian citizens of Israel have full and equal rights, and [until] the right of return for Palestinian refugees is fully realized under international law.”
CWP went a step further, calling on Norway to become the first Western government to divest from Israel as did NIF grantees Mossawa and Machsom [Checkpoint] Watch.
NIF grantee I’lam, the media hub of the Israeli-Arab community, consistently demonizes Israel and the Jewish people. Its Web site continues to promote the questionable claims of a “massacre” in Jenin in 2002 with the following report:
“The soldiers are the grandchildren of the Nazis’ victims, the Nazis’ survivors. They have come here to consume food quickly and consume life quickly. This is the true image of Israel. The real Israel is not in the clean, lofty suburbs of Northern Tel Aviv.... It is not in the literary cafes and journalists’ clubs.... It is not its High Court. I saw the real Israel, its ugliness in the Jenin Refugee Camp on Monday, April 15, 2002. The rest remains decor for murder.”
I’lam’s claims of the Jenin massacre are still hosted on the NIF Web site.
Adalah, a key NIF grantee in the Israeli-Arab sector, expresses support for Sheik Raed Salah, the leader of the northern branch of Israel’s Islamic movement, whose incitement against Israel is legendary. Salah claims that there was never a Jewish presence on the Temple Mount and has called for an intifada to protect Al-Aqsa from a Jewish plot. Salah remains a member of the board of trustees of the “Union of Good,” an umbrella group that openly funnels seemingly charitable funds to Hamas-affiliated organizations. When Salah’s offices were shut down by the Israeli government in 2008, Adalah filed claims on behalf of Salah.
NIF grantee New Profile openly works to convince young Israeli citizens not to serve in the Israeli army.
NIF grantee Breaking the Silence distributes questionable and anonymous testimony regarding Israeli “war crimes” in Gaza.
NIF grantee B’tselem spreads the false notion to the media and, most recently, to the U.S. Congress that Israel has created a siege of Gaza that has caused a severe humanitarian crisis there, ignoring the 640 convoys of trucks that Israel dispatched into Gaza during 2009 alone. It is one thing to oppose the Israeli policy of blocking building materials and potentially lethal substances into Gaza. It is quite another matter to fabricate a humanitarian crisis and to claim that there is a lack of food and medical supplies in Gaza.
NIF grantee Zochrot openly supports the right of Palestinian refugees to return and “reclaim” the 531 Arab villages and neighborhoods that they lost in 1948, organizing tours to enable for Palestinian refugees and their descendants to reclaim former Arab properties where Israelis now live. Zochrot has gone so far as to issue a new map of the Tel Aviv area that depicts former Arab neighborhoods that can be reclaimed by Palestinians, even if that would mean displacing Israeli citizens.
In the Israeli Arab sector, NIF embarked on a five-year program, beginning in 2001, to help transform the identity of Israeli Arabs into a Palestinian national minority in Israel.
In that context, the NIF grantee Adalah, the Israeli-Arab legal group that played a pivotal role in the anti-Israel gathering in Durban, South Africa, in August 2001 and in Durban II conference in April 2009, promotes the so-called Haifa declaration. Adalah openly declares that its goal is to replace Zionism as the basis of the state of Israel. The principal means of achieving that goal, according to the constitution proposed by Adalah, involves the implementation of the “right of return,” which Adalah would facilitate in the form of “family reunification.”
In the 1990s alone, Israel allowed 140,000 Palestinians to enter the country as a result of marriage. Yet the proposed Adalah amendment to the Israel Citizenship Law would allow for the flow of return en masse. Israel would no longer be a Jewish and democratic state, but a state that will disguise itself as being either “binational” or a “state of all its citizens,” but which, in practice, would become a Palestinian state.
According to Maariv journalist Ben Dror Yemini, “The New Israel Fund is part of the global deception campaign. [It] thinks it is OK to take part in the demonization campaign being staged by organizations whose goal is the elimination of Israel. It thinks it is OK to cooperate with the Goldstone commission, even though it was formed by an automatic majority of the benighted countries that control the UN Human Rights Council.... It does not deal with human rights but with denying one people’s right to self-determination.”
See this article at: www.IsraelBehindTheNews.com
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Friday, February 12, 2010
The New Israel Fund and the Threat from the Left to Israel's Democratic System
by Dr. Joel Fishman for Makor Rishon
Two weeks ago, the disclosures of the Zionist student group, Im Tirtsu, shocked the Israeli public when they revealed that sixteen organizations supported by the New Israel Fund contributed most of the information upon which the Goldstone Report was based. These disclosures were part of another unpleasant revelation, the Goldstone Report, which delivered a harsh political blow to the legitimacy of the State. Israel's leaders failed to anticipate the political consequences of last winter's Operation Cast Lead: that Israel would be accused of perpetrating war crimes and that its respectable position in the world would be endangered. The resulting damage to Israel’s image has been unprecedented.
This grave misperception by Israel's leadership is the result of their viewing the conflict primarily in military terms and intentionally disregarding the political dimension. In an interview with Israel Television's Ayala Hasson on 21 January 2009, Defense Minister Ehud Barak confidently declared that Israel had delivered an unprecedented blow to the Hamas, and if necessary, Israel would not hesitate to send the army back to Gaza to deliver more such blows.
Slowly but surely, the game has changed. Because Israel's enemies have failed to win militarily, they have begun waging a war by indirect means. Their main political goal is to destroy Israel's legitimacy and convey it to the Palestinian Authority. Their tactics include undermining Israel's political structure, eroding its traditional values of family and religion, crippling its legal system and law enforcement agencies, weakening the armed forces, paralyzing the government's ability to use its military force and thus limit her options for self defense. In the wake of the Goldstone Report, the government has publicly acknowledged the challenge this political warfare poses. Prime Minister Netanyahu declared his determination to counter what he termed the "Goldstone Effect."
Accordingly, the NIF must be viewed as an important link and conduit in a cultural and political network whose real purpose is to undermine the Jewish State and replace it with another entity. The NIF is neither democratically elected nor does it represent a constituency. Although its professed goal is to "strengthen democracy" in Israel, the nature of its activities does not support this claim. An organization such as the NIF receives donations from private donors, foundations abroad and foreign governments. In turn, it distributes funds to smaller organizations that are active among Jews and Arabs, who cultivate discontentment to create political capital of their grievances.
The New Israel Fund is much more than a charitable foundation. It wages political warfare and operates as a front organization "that serves as a cover for aims and activities other than its professed ones." During the thirties, Willi Muenzenberg, the propaganda genius of the Comintern devised this type of organizational form (New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought). Although the Comintern has disappeared, front organizations in Israel and elsewhere continue to operate and use these traditional methods, in line with the ideology of Marxism-Leninism.
Like other front organizations that avow one goal, but seek another, the New Israel Fund claims it strives for social justice and progressive change in Israeli society. Yet they conceal the ultimate goal, namely, The New Israel, which can only be achieved by destroying Israel as we know it. The logical outcome of this program is a coup d'Etat through a process of discrediting the Zionist ideal, gutting its political and social institutions, and disfranchising the current middle-class holders of power in Israeli society. The front organizations of our time obscure their true objectives and intentionally operate in a decentralized manner in order to escape the attention of law enforcement agencies. They may be recognized, nonetheless, by the uniformity of the message they project.
The problem of the New Israel Fund is that by providing information to the Goldstone Report in cooperation with its allied organizations, it succeeded in drawing attention to its formidable strength and its successful penetration within Israeli society. If any good is to come from this unhappy and dangerous experience, it is that we should grasp the true objectives of these groups and the real threat they represent to the stability of Israel's society, to its legally constituted democracy and to our future as a Jewish state. For years it has been almost axiomatic that the "extreme right" is a lethal danger to the state. The lesson which we should learn from the recent and dramatic disclosures of the Im Tirtsu report is that the well-organized and affluent radical left may represent an even more perilous threat to the State of Israel.
See this article at Israel Behind the News
Two weeks ago, the disclosures of the Zionist student group, Im Tirtsu, shocked the Israeli public when they revealed that sixteen organizations supported by the New Israel Fund contributed most of the information upon which the Goldstone Report was based. These disclosures were part of another unpleasant revelation, the Goldstone Report, which delivered a harsh political blow to the legitimacy of the State. Israel's leaders failed to anticipate the political consequences of last winter's Operation Cast Lead: that Israel would be accused of perpetrating war crimes and that its respectable position in the world would be endangered. The resulting damage to Israel’s image has been unprecedented.
This grave misperception by Israel's leadership is the result of their viewing the conflict primarily in military terms and intentionally disregarding the political dimension. In an interview with Israel Television's Ayala Hasson on 21 January 2009, Defense Minister Ehud Barak confidently declared that Israel had delivered an unprecedented blow to the Hamas, and if necessary, Israel would not hesitate to send the army back to Gaza to deliver more such blows.
Slowly but surely, the game has changed. Because Israel's enemies have failed to win militarily, they have begun waging a war by indirect means. Their main political goal is to destroy Israel's legitimacy and convey it to the Palestinian Authority. Their tactics include undermining Israel's political structure, eroding its traditional values of family and religion, crippling its legal system and law enforcement agencies, weakening the armed forces, paralyzing the government's ability to use its military force and thus limit her options for self defense. In the wake of the Goldstone Report, the government has publicly acknowledged the challenge this political warfare poses. Prime Minister Netanyahu declared his determination to counter what he termed the "Goldstone Effect."
Accordingly, the NIF must be viewed as an important link and conduit in a cultural and political network whose real purpose is to undermine the Jewish State and replace it with another entity. The NIF is neither democratically elected nor does it represent a constituency. Although its professed goal is to "strengthen democracy" in Israel, the nature of its activities does not support this claim. An organization such as the NIF receives donations from private donors, foundations abroad and foreign governments. In turn, it distributes funds to smaller organizations that are active among Jews and Arabs, who cultivate discontentment to create political capital of their grievances.
The New Israel Fund is much more than a charitable foundation. It wages political warfare and operates as a front organization "that serves as a cover for aims and activities other than its professed ones." During the thirties, Willi Muenzenberg, the propaganda genius of the Comintern devised this type of organizational form (New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought). Although the Comintern has disappeared, front organizations in Israel and elsewhere continue to operate and use these traditional methods, in line with the ideology of Marxism-Leninism.
Like other front organizations that avow one goal, but seek another, the New Israel Fund claims it strives for social justice and progressive change in Israeli society. Yet they conceal the ultimate goal, namely, The New Israel, which can only be achieved by destroying Israel as we know it. The logical outcome of this program is a coup d'Etat through a process of discrediting the Zionist ideal, gutting its political and social institutions, and disfranchising the current middle-class holders of power in Israeli society. The front organizations of our time obscure their true objectives and intentionally operate in a decentralized manner in order to escape the attention of law enforcement agencies. They may be recognized, nonetheless, by the uniformity of the message they project.
The problem of the New Israel Fund is that by providing information to the Goldstone Report in cooperation with its allied organizations, it succeeded in drawing attention to its formidable strength and its successful penetration within Israeli society. If any good is to come from this unhappy and dangerous experience, it is that we should grasp the true objectives of these groups and the real threat they represent to the stability of Israel's society, to its legally constituted democracy and to our future as a Jewish state. For years it has been almost axiomatic that the "extreme right" is a lethal danger to the state. The lesson which we should learn from the recent and dramatic disclosures of the Im Tirtsu report is that the well-organized and affluent radical left may represent an even more perilous threat to the State of Israel.
See this article at Israel Behind the News
Silence, music and mysticism: Zvi Mark’s book is a significant contribution to our understanding of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav’s world.
by Rabbi Zvi Leshem
REVIEW OF
Mysticism and Madness
By Zvi Mark | Translated by Ya’acov David Schulman | Continuum Books | 306 pages | $44.95
Thirty-five years ago, as a college freshman in New York City, I wandered one evening into a small room at a Jewish home on campus, and discovered a small group of young people engaged in intense study of Lekutei Mohoran, the major work of the hassidic master Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav, whose 200th yahrzeit will fall later this year. I was immediately mesmerized by his dazzling spiritual ideas and exegetical theories, and over the years the influence of “Reb Nahman” on me and countless others has only continued to grow.
Rabbi Nahman is, however, not only a significant spiritual inspiration for his thousands of followers worldwide, he has also been, for many decades, a figure of major interest to academic researchers dealing with Jewish and hassidic spirituality and mysticism. It is against this background that the English version of Dr. Zvi Mark’s first book on Nahman, Mysticism and Madness, makes its welcome appearance. Mark, senior lecturer at Bar-Ilan University and senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, made headlines when he recently published for the first time, with the encouragement of the elders of the Bratslav community, Megillat Setarim, Nahman’s secret messianic treatise, in a critical edition.
Mysticism and Madness, which analyzes several key issues in Nahman’s thinking, is largely a rejoinder to several scholarly works that have, until now, been considered definitive in describing R. Nahman’s religious world. Mark, who is very much at home in the vast corpus of both Nahman’s own writing and that of subsequent generations of Bratslav literature, presents a radically different understanding of Nahman, one that moves him closer to the kabbalistic-hassidic milieu in which he was raised (he was the great-grandson of the Ba’al Shem Tov, who was the first hassidic leader), and returns him from the radical existentialist mode into which some of his earlier interpreters had thrust him.
The late Joseph Weiss, in his pioneering Hebrew studies of Nahman, emphasized his personal life (of which we are blessed with abundant material from internal Bratslav sources) and existentialist crises, downplaying the mystical elements in his life and teachings. Weiss was followed by Prof. Arthur Green, who, in his classic work Tormented Master, portrayed Nahman as a deeply conflicted individual who was blessed not only with a powerful self-awareness of his status as a tzaddik, but also with tremendous self-doubt and conflicts regarding his own faith and religious tensions. Green presented this existential portrait of Nahman as largely overriding the more mystical aspirations of the more typical hassidic rebbe, which may be subsumed under the general rubric of seeking a more intense personal and spiritual experience of God.
Mark argues forcefully that Weiss, Green and those who followed them misinterpreted key passages in Nahman’s writings, consistently overlooking their obviously mystical meaning and reinterpreting them through the prism of the existentialist lens through which they wrote. While not denying Nahman’s existential struggle, his theological radicalism or his sometimes bizarre behavior, Mark uses close philological analysis to convincingly demonstrate that despite his uniqueness in the world of hassidic thought, in the last analysis, Nahman’s major concern remains that of his other hassidic colleagues, finding a path to God for himself and for his followers.
Mark achieves his goals through analysis of issues such as Nahman’s approach to imagination, prophecy, faith, silence, music and the Land of Israel, to which he traveled at the beginning of the 19th century.
He also discusses some of Nahman’s mystical and devotional techniques, such as the meditative practice of hitbodedut (conversing with God) and hand clapping during prayer. He argues that the goal of these practices is to lead the devotee to a state of bitul (self-annulment) and deveikut (cleaving to God). Mark shows us to what extent Nahman was in fact continuing trends, both in thought and deed, found in earlier mystical literature, although he often infused the earlier texts with a creative new meaning.
While the medium of the hassidic tale is well known, Nahman was the only rebbe to teach via original stories, Sipurei Ma’asiot, which read like fairy tales. Mark’s last two chapters, on not knowing as the ultimate purpose of knowledge and his analysis of Nahman’s story “The Humble King” form an important unit. Together they serve to cement one of Mark’s foremost theses, that Nahman, well aware of the impending attack of the Haskala movement upon traditional Jewish belief, promoted a radical project of faith, buttressed by silence, music and mystical experience, as the only viable alternative to a world in which intellectual achievement and doubt would ultimately reign supreme.
“The Humble King,” according to Mark’s persuasive reading, addresses an issue that may trouble many thinking religious persons: How can it be that our service of God, limited as it is by our very physicality, is of significance to Him? This question, addressed throughout the ages by philosophers and mystics alike, receives its most startling treatment in Nahman’s hands. In his opinion, our service of God is understood as a kind of comic theater of the absurd, in which we serve the role of court jesters for the sake of entertaining the king.
This radical description of the life of the pious Jew dovetails, of course, with the notion developed in the previous chapter, that we aren’t really capable of knowing anything about the divine; our service consists largely in our ability to accept this premise and continue to serve in a state of “not knowing.” While many will no doubt bristle at such an irrational definition of religious service, for others it may in fact be very liberating. In a certain sense it surprisingly seems to bear some resemblance to the late Prof. Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s superrationalistic doctrines regarding halachic observance, although this point certainly requires further elucidation.
In the last analysis, although it could certainly be enhanced by a detailed conclusion summing up all of its findings, Mark’s book constitutes a very significant contribution to our understanding of Nahman’s world. It not only goes a long way in balancing the rather one-sided picture painted by earlier scholars, but also provides a very penetrating analysis of the major foundations of Nahman’s faith and practice.
The writer is the spiritual leader of Congregation Shirat Shlomo in Efrat. He holds a PhD in Jewish philosophy and is the author of Redemptions: Contemporary Hassidic Essays on the Parsha and the Festivals. This review ran in the Jerusalem Post on Feb. 7, 2010
See this story at Israel Behind the News
REVIEW OF
Mysticism and Madness
By Zvi Mark | Translated by Ya’acov David Schulman | Continuum Books | 306 pages | $44.95
Thirty-five years ago, as a college freshman in New York City, I wandered one evening into a small room at a Jewish home on campus, and discovered a small group of young people engaged in intense study of Lekutei Mohoran, the major work of the hassidic master Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav, whose 200th yahrzeit will fall later this year. I was immediately mesmerized by his dazzling spiritual ideas and exegetical theories, and over the years the influence of “Reb Nahman” on me and countless others has only continued to grow.
Rabbi Nahman is, however, not only a significant spiritual inspiration for his thousands of followers worldwide, he has also been, for many decades, a figure of major interest to academic researchers dealing with Jewish and hassidic spirituality and mysticism. It is against this background that the English version of Dr. Zvi Mark’s first book on Nahman, Mysticism and Madness, makes its welcome appearance. Mark, senior lecturer at Bar-Ilan University and senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, made headlines when he recently published for the first time, with the encouragement of the elders of the Bratslav community, Megillat Setarim, Nahman’s secret messianic treatise, in a critical edition.
Mysticism and Madness, which analyzes several key issues in Nahman’s thinking, is largely a rejoinder to several scholarly works that have, until now, been considered definitive in describing R. Nahman’s religious world. Mark, who is very much at home in the vast corpus of both Nahman’s own writing and that of subsequent generations of Bratslav literature, presents a radically different understanding of Nahman, one that moves him closer to the kabbalistic-hassidic milieu in which he was raised (he was the great-grandson of the Ba’al Shem Tov, who was the first hassidic leader), and returns him from the radical existentialist mode into which some of his earlier interpreters had thrust him.
The late Joseph Weiss, in his pioneering Hebrew studies of Nahman, emphasized his personal life (of which we are blessed with abundant material from internal Bratslav sources) and existentialist crises, downplaying the mystical elements in his life and teachings. Weiss was followed by Prof. Arthur Green, who, in his classic work Tormented Master, portrayed Nahman as a deeply conflicted individual who was blessed not only with a powerful self-awareness of his status as a tzaddik, but also with tremendous self-doubt and conflicts regarding his own faith and religious tensions. Green presented this existential portrait of Nahman as largely overriding the more mystical aspirations of the more typical hassidic rebbe, which may be subsumed under the general rubric of seeking a more intense personal and spiritual experience of God.
Mark argues forcefully that Weiss, Green and those who followed them misinterpreted key passages in Nahman’s writings, consistently overlooking their obviously mystical meaning and reinterpreting them through the prism of the existentialist lens through which they wrote. While not denying Nahman’s existential struggle, his theological radicalism or his sometimes bizarre behavior, Mark uses close philological analysis to convincingly demonstrate that despite his uniqueness in the world of hassidic thought, in the last analysis, Nahman’s major concern remains that of his other hassidic colleagues, finding a path to God for himself and for his followers.
Mark achieves his goals through analysis of issues such as Nahman’s approach to imagination, prophecy, faith, silence, music and the Land of Israel, to which he traveled at the beginning of the 19th century.
He also discusses some of Nahman’s mystical and devotional techniques, such as the meditative practice of hitbodedut (conversing with God) and hand clapping during prayer. He argues that the goal of these practices is to lead the devotee to a state of bitul (self-annulment) and deveikut (cleaving to God). Mark shows us to what extent Nahman was in fact continuing trends, both in thought and deed, found in earlier mystical literature, although he often infused the earlier texts with a creative new meaning.
While the medium of the hassidic tale is well known, Nahman was the only rebbe to teach via original stories, Sipurei Ma’asiot, which read like fairy tales. Mark’s last two chapters, on not knowing as the ultimate purpose of knowledge and his analysis of Nahman’s story “The Humble King” form an important unit. Together they serve to cement one of Mark’s foremost theses, that Nahman, well aware of the impending attack of the Haskala movement upon traditional Jewish belief, promoted a radical project of faith, buttressed by silence, music and mystical experience, as the only viable alternative to a world in which intellectual achievement and doubt would ultimately reign supreme.
“The Humble King,” according to Mark’s persuasive reading, addresses an issue that may trouble many thinking religious persons: How can it be that our service of God, limited as it is by our very physicality, is of significance to Him? This question, addressed throughout the ages by philosophers and mystics alike, receives its most startling treatment in Nahman’s hands. In his opinion, our service of God is understood as a kind of comic theater of the absurd, in which we serve the role of court jesters for the sake of entertaining the king.
This radical description of the life of the pious Jew dovetails, of course, with the notion developed in the previous chapter, that we aren’t really capable of knowing anything about the divine; our service consists largely in our ability to accept this premise and continue to serve in a state of “not knowing.” While many will no doubt bristle at such an irrational definition of religious service, for others it may in fact be very liberating. In a certain sense it surprisingly seems to bear some resemblance to the late Prof. Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s superrationalistic doctrines regarding halachic observance, although this point certainly requires further elucidation.
In the last analysis, although it could certainly be enhanced by a detailed conclusion summing up all of its findings, Mark’s book constitutes a very significant contribution to our understanding of Nahman’s world. It not only goes a long way in balancing the rather one-sided picture painted by earlier scholars, but also provides a very penetrating analysis of the major foundations of Nahman’s faith and practice.
The writer is the spiritual leader of Congregation Shirat Shlomo in Efrat. He holds a PhD in Jewish philosophy and is the author of Redemptions: Contemporary Hassidic Essays on the Parsha and the Festivals. This review ran in the Jerusalem Post on Feb. 7, 2010
See this story at Israel Behind the News
Responses to University Student Anti-Semitism
by Sherwin Pomerantz
Just in this past week we have seen a number of instances of anti-Israel (read: anti-semitic) outbursts aimed at speakers who have been scheduled to appear at various universities around the world.
For example, the appearance of Israel’s Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren at the University of California/Irvine was met by numerous verbal outbursts against him and against the “apartheid” State of Israel during his presentation sponsored by the school’s Political Science Department.
Israel’s Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Danny Ayalon, who is also a former Ambassador to the U.S., was verbally assaulted at a speech he tried to give at Oxford University earlier this week.
BenGurion University of the Negev’s Professor of History and prolific writer, Benny Morris, was recently dis-invited by the Israel Society at Cambridge University after protestors accused him of being guilty of “Islamaphobia” and “racism.”
While universities have never been a source of significant support for Israel, of late the chances of any Israeli speaker appearing at a university forum anywhere in the west without being harassed or verbally assaulted are almost nil.
And yet, what is our response as Jews and as Israelis? In articles that appeared in this morning’s papers here the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has taken the position that this kind of verbal haranguing and protest is standard on university campuses and that the media is blowing the importance of such actions way out of proportion. I disagree.
For our government to take an official position that this is just more of the same and for the organized Jewish community in these locations to remain virtually silent gives the impression to the rest of the good citizens of each community that we, as Jews, do not care what the protestors say or what the heckler’s do. Frankly, we cannot afford that kind of passivity as we know, from our history, that passive response to these kinds of anti-semitic acts (even though they may be couched in anti-Israel terms....there is no difference any longer) generally leads to more serious infringements on our rights as members of the human race.
So what should our response be? At a minimum, every time one of these events occurs anywhere in the world, the local Jewish community, along with its real friends and supporters, should immediately mount a massive protest march denouncing the disrespect being shown to visiting dignitaries while underscoring the ultimate danger to all of the community’s citizens should this type of activity be allowed to continue.
16 years ago in Billings, Montana, the (really) small Jewish community there was traumatized when a rock was thrown through the window of the bedroom of a Jewish youngster whose parents had the audacity to exhibit a Chanukah Menorah in the window of the home. At that time the Jewish community stood up and with the incredible support of the majority of the citizens of that city, made the public statement: “Not in Our Town.” The result was an outpouring of support from the local citizenry which sent a message to the bigots that this type of behavior is not acceptable and a national movement began which spread throughout the country.
Today, we must also say, in every location where such anti-semitic events occur, “Not in Our Town” and that message must be loud and clear and supported, as well, by the Government of Israel that has, as its obligation, to be the Government of the Jewish People. Else we abandon our responsibility to our brethren worldwide and to the promise that gave rise to the birth of this country in the first place.
Sherwin Pomerantz is a 26 year resident of Israel and is the President of Atid EDI Ltd., a Jerusalem-based economic development consulting firm. His blog can be seen at www.israelstreet.blogspot.com.
Just in this past week we have seen a number of instances of anti-Israel (read: anti-semitic) outbursts aimed at speakers who have been scheduled to appear at various universities around the world.
For example, the appearance of Israel’s Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren at the University of California/Irvine was met by numerous verbal outbursts against him and against the “apartheid” State of Israel during his presentation sponsored by the school’s Political Science Department.
Israel’s Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Danny Ayalon, who is also a former Ambassador to the U.S., was verbally assaulted at a speech he tried to give at Oxford University earlier this week.
BenGurion University of the Negev’s Professor of History and prolific writer, Benny Morris, was recently dis-invited by the Israel Society at Cambridge University after protestors accused him of being guilty of “Islamaphobia” and “racism.”
While universities have never been a source of significant support for Israel, of late the chances of any Israeli speaker appearing at a university forum anywhere in the west without being harassed or verbally assaulted are almost nil.
And yet, what is our response as Jews and as Israelis? In articles that appeared in this morning’s papers here the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has taken the position that this kind of verbal haranguing and protest is standard on university campuses and that the media is blowing the importance of such actions way out of proportion. I disagree.
For our government to take an official position that this is just more of the same and for the organized Jewish community in these locations to remain virtually silent gives the impression to the rest of the good citizens of each community that we, as Jews, do not care what the protestors say or what the heckler’s do. Frankly, we cannot afford that kind of passivity as we know, from our history, that passive response to these kinds of anti-semitic acts (even though they may be couched in anti-Israel terms....there is no difference any longer) generally leads to more serious infringements on our rights as members of the human race.
So what should our response be? At a minimum, every time one of these events occurs anywhere in the world, the local Jewish community, along with its real friends and supporters, should immediately mount a massive protest march denouncing the disrespect being shown to visiting dignitaries while underscoring the ultimate danger to all of the community’s citizens should this type of activity be allowed to continue.
16 years ago in Billings, Montana, the (really) small Jewish community there was traumatized when a rock was thrown through the window of the bedroom of a Jewish youngster whose parents had the audacity to exhibit a Chanukah Menorah in the window of the home. At that time the Jewish community stood up and with the incredible support of the majority of the citizens of that city, made the public statement: “Not in Our Town.” The result was an outpouring of support from the local citizenry which sent a message to the bigots that this type of behavior is not acceptable and a national movement began which spread throughout the country.
Today, we must also say, in every location where such anti-semitic events occur, “Not in Our Town” and that message must be loud and clear and supported, as well, by the Government of Israel that has, as its obligation, to be the Government of the Jewish People. Else we abandon our responsibility to our brethren worldwide and to the promise that gave rise to the birth of this country in the first place.
Sherwin Pomerantz is a 26 year resident of Israel and is the President of Atid EDI Ltd., a Jerusalem-based economic development consulting firm. His blog can be seen at www.israelstreet.blogspot.com.
Remembering One Victim of Arab Terror
by David Bedein for the Jerusalem Post
Six years ago, Yehuda Haim got on a bus to work one sunny February morning in Jerusalem, and paid with his life.
Friday marks six years to the day, according to the Hebrew calendar, since a Jerusalem grocer, Yehuda Haim, was murdered on a bus that Arab terrorists blew up in Jerusalem.
Ever since the restaurant at the Beit Agron Press Center in Jerusalem closed in 2001 because of declining tourism, Haim’s sandwich business at the corner grocery store had been booming for reporters.
Yehuda would make each reporter a pre-prepared sandwich with fresh bread and any condiments the customer would ask for.
For me, he knew exactly how many pickles I liked with my tuna fish, and just how I liked my egg salad. And he carefully cut each fresh vegetable to order.
I had a special need, since I would wash my hands at Beit Agron and make the blessing over the bread only when I got to the store. I became used to hearing Yehuda’s “amen” to the first bite in my sandwich, before he would fill it with his goodies for me yet again.
One Sunday morning, on the bus to work, passing the old Jerusalem train station, the bus in front of ours blew to bits. The first instinct was to run to the bus, don the proverbial press badge and grab a camera to report the event, snapping shots and getting them to the wires in real time. Not knowing at the time that one of the bodies flung from the bus window was Yehuda Haim, who was on his way to work.
The names of the victims were solemnly announced on the radio news, including that of Yehuda Haim.
All I could think about was Yehuda’s smiling face on Friday, when he said “amen” to my blessing on a tuna bagel, when he wished a good Shabbat to three reporters who came by his store.
His smiling face was turned by an Arab terrorist into lifeless body parts on Derech Hebron. That day at lunch, I had lost my lunch partner. Maybe Yehuda would say amen to my blessing from heaven for that day’s bagel, I thought.
The reality of media reporting continued, as Yehuda was being buried.
And the name Yehuda Haim became one of the 1,478 people murdered by Arab terrorists during what has been termed a “peace process.”
ON THE day of the funeral, Fanny Haim, Yehuda’s widow, had the presence of mind to write an open letter to the judges in The Hague, which she asked our agency to translate for her, where a European court held hearings on the legality of a fence designed to keep murderers from killing people like Yehuda.
In the hours before she buried her husband, she wrote the following letter:
“Today, in The Hague, you will sit in judgment. Today, I will bury my husband, my heart has been cut in two. I am not a politician. I am appealing to you as someone who has lost her husband, a woman whose heart has been silenced - and a woman whose tragedy the separation fence could have prevented. I was married to Yehuda for 21 years. He was the love of my youth, since I was 15. Yehuda’s sister is the wife of Israel’s economic attache in The Hague and works in the embassy there. For months, she, her husband and the embassy staff have been trying to open the world’s eyes. For months, they have been fighting for the rights of the State of Israel.
As for me, what could I have asked for? Only for my small right, my husband’s right, the right to see our children grow and prosper, go to school and serve in the army. I will no longer receive this right. But today, you can see to it that other Israeli families will merit this basic thing - to raise a happy family, to get up in the morning without bereavement, without gravestones, and without cemeteries.
Today, as you begin your deliberations with open eyes, think, just for a moment, about the ordinary people behind this bloody conflict. Think for a moment about the golden heart of my husband, Yehuda, and about our young son, Avner. Maybe you can explain to him - he’s only 10 years old - why in God’s name he doesn’t have a father any more? People will enter your hall today, who will speak, who will accuse. Mourners will enter my home and I will be unable to understand and I will certainly not be consoled. This evening, you will go home, kiss your spouses, hug your children - and I will be alone.
True, the politics are far from me, but now as the pain is far too close to me. I think that I have acquired, with integrity and with tears, the right to appeal to you and say: If there had been a fence all along the length of the state, then maybe I, just like you, could kiss my husband this evening. Do not judge my country; do not restrain it from preventing additional people from becoming victims. Today, I am burying my husband; don’t you bury justice."
Each day, we take the bus to work, and we remember people like Yehuda Haim who paid with their lives, only because they took the bus to work on one sunny February morning in Jerusalem.
The writer acts as the Middle East correspondent for the Philadelphia Bulletin and as the director of the Israel Resource News Agency and the Center for Near East Policy Research, both of which are based at the Beit Agron Press Center in Jerusalem, and on the Net at www.IsraelBehindTheNews.com.
View this article at Israel Behind the News
Six years ago, Yehuda Haim got on a bus to work one sunny February morning in Jerusalem, and paid with his life.
Friday marks six years to the day, according to the Hebrew calendar, since a Jerusalem grocer, Yehuda Haim, was murdered on a bus that Arab terrorists blew up in Jerusalem.
Ever since the restaurant at the Beit Agron Press Center in Jerusalem closed in 2001 because of declining tourism, Haim’s sandwich business at the corner grocery store had been booming for reporters.
Yehuda would make each reporter a pre-prepared sandwich with fresh bread and any condiments the customer would ask for.
For me, he knew exactly how many pickles I liked with my tuna fish, and just how I liked my egg salad. And he carefully cut each fresh vegetable to order.
I had a special need, since I would wash my hands at Beit Agron and make the blessing over the bread only when I got to the store. I became used to hearing Yehuda’s “amen” to the first bite in my sandwich, before he would fill it with his goodies for me yet again.
One Sunday morning, on the bus to work, passing the old Jerusalem train station, the bus in front of ours blew to bits. The first instinct was to run to the bus, don the proverbial press badge and grab a camera to report the event, snapping shots and getting them to the wires in real time. Not knowing at the time that one of the bodies flung from the bus window was Yehuda Haim, who was on his way to work.
The names of the victims were solemnly announced on the radio news, including that of Yehuda Haim.
All I could think about was Yehuda’s smiling face on Friday, when he said “amen” to my blessing on a tuna bagel, when he wished a good Shabbat to three reporters who came by his store.
His smiling face was turned by an Arab terrorist into lifeless body parts on Derech Hebron. That day at lunch, I had lost my lunch partner. Maybe Yehuda would say amen to my blessing from heaven for that day’s bagel, I thought.
The reality of media reporting continued, as Yehuda was being buried.
And the name Yehuda Haim became one of the 1,478 people murdered by Arab terrorists during what has been termed a “peace process.”
ON THE day of the funeral, Fanny Haim, Yehuda’s widow, had the presence of mind to write an open letter to the judges in The Hague, which she asked our agency to translate for her, where a European court held hearings on the legality of a fence designed to keep murderers from killing people like Yehuda.
In the hours before she buried her husband, she wrote the following letter:
“Today, in The Hague, you will sit in judgment. Today, I will bury my husband, my heart has been cut in two. I am not a politician. I am appealing to you as someone who has lost her husband, a woman whose heart has been silenced - and a woman whose tragedy the separation fence could have prevented. I was married to Yehuda for 21 years. He was the love of my youth, since I was 15. Yehuda’s sister is the wife of Israel’s economic attache in The Hague and works in the embassy there. For months, she, her husband and the embassy staff have been trying to open the world’s eyes. For months, they have been fighting for the rights of the State of Israel.
As for me, what could I have asked for? Only for my small right, my husband’s right, the right to see our children grow and prosper, go to school and serve in the army. I will no longer receive this right. But today, you can see to it that other Israeli families will merit this basic thing - to raise a happy family, to get up in the morning without bereavement, without gravestones, and without cemeteries.
Today, as you begin your deliberations with open eyes, think, just for a moment, about the ordinary people behind this bloody conflict. Think for a moment about the golden heart of my husband, Yehuda, and about our young son, Avner. Maybe you can explain to him - he’s only 10 years old - why in God’s name he doesn’t have a father any more? People will enter your hall today, who will speak, who will accuse. Mourners will enter my home and I will be unable to understand and I will certainly not be consoled. This evening, you will go home, kiss your spouses, hug your children - and I will be alone.
True, the politics are far from me, but now as the pain is far too close to me. I think that I have acquired, with integrity and with tears, the right to appeal to you and say: If there had been a fence all along the length of the state, then maybe I, just like you, could kiss my husband this evening. Do not judge my country; do not restrain it from preventing additional people from becoming victims. Today, I am burying my husband; don’t you bury justice."
Each day, we take the bus to work, and we remember people like Yehuda Haim who paid with their lives, only because they took the bus to work on one sunny February morning in Jerusalem.
The writer acts as the Middle East correspondent for the Philadelphia Bulletin and as the director of the Israel Resource News Agency and the Center for Near East Policy Research, both of which are based at the Beit Agron Press Center in Jerusalem, and on the Net at www.IsraelBehindTheNews.com.
View this article at Israel Behind the News
NIF-Funded NGOs: Goldstone’s Building Blocks
From NGO Monitor
NIF-funded groups and their publications were featured centrally in the Goldstone report, which focused on alleged Israeli “war crimes” in the 2009 Gaza war. The report referenced B’Tselem more than 56 times; Adalah, 38; and Breaking the Silence, 27.
Many of these citations referred to speculative issues unrelated to the conflict in Gaza, seeking to brand Israeli democracy as “repressive” and to widen the scope of the condemnations.
Since the initial publication of the Goldstone report on September 15, 2009, these NIF-supported NGOs - including B’Tselem, ACRI, Gisha, PHR-I, and Yesh Din - have continued supporting Goldstone and lobbying the governments of the United States, the European Union, and others to legitimize the report’s extreme biases and endorse its recommendations.
In response to the controversy over their support for Goldstone, these organizations and the NIF launched an offensive against critics. NIF supporters accused NGO Monitor of “silenc[ing] expression,” and being “extremist,” “incendiary,” the “rotten fruit of Israeli democracy,” and “McCarthyite.”
In addition to involvement with Goldstone, several organizations funded by NIF, including Adalah, campaign against the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish democratic state. Others such as Mossawa and Coalition of Women for Peace are active in worldwide boycotts, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaigns targeting Israel.
The political impact of NIF-supported NGOs, based on NIF’s annual budget of $32 million, is bolstered by additional funds from European governments and church groups that allocate funds to the same recipient organizations.
Contents:
1) NIF-grantees and the delegitimization of Israel
2) NIF-funded NGOs and the Goldstone indictment
3) Summary of activities by 20 major NIF grantees active in the Arab-Israeli conflict
Introduction:
The New Israel Fund (NIF) supports more than 100 organizations involved in a wide range of areas in Israel, including political activism related to the Arab-Israeli conflict.
As highlighted recently, NIF-funded groups and their publications were featured centrally in the Goldstone report, which focused on alleged Israeli “war crimes” in the 2009 Gaza war. During the fighting, as shown in NGO Monitor analyses, these NGOs issued daily reports claiming to document Israeli “human rights” violations. NGO officials, widely quoted in the media, lobbied intensively for an international inquiry.
After the Goldstone commission was established, three major and long-time NIF grantees (Public Committee against Torture in Israel, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, and Adalah) participated in a May 2009 NGO “town hall meeting” in Geneva that helped shape the course of Goldstone’s ”investigation”. In addition, seven NIF-funded NGOs (including the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, Gisha, HaMoked, and Yesh Din) submitted a joint statement to Goldstone, and a representative from PCATI “testified” at the July 2009 Goldstone hearings, referring to “collective punishment” and “[Palestinian] martyrs.”
The resulting Goldstone report referenced B’Tselem more than 56 times; Adalah, 38; and Breaking the Silence, 27. Significantly, many of these citations referred to speculative issues unrelated to the conflict in Gaza, seeking to brand Israeli democracy as “repressive,” and to widen the scope of the condemnations and the resulting political campaigns.
In turn, B’Tselem, Adalah, and PHR-I, among others, have lobbied Israeli and foreign governments to support Goldstone’s report and its recommendations. Adalah, for example, joined the Palestinian NGOs Al Mezan, Al-Haq, and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) in a press release urging countries to “re-evaluate their relationship with Israel.”
In response to the controversy over their support for Goldstone, these organizations and the NIF launched an offensive against critics, including NGO Monitor, that brought the relationship to light. Through coarse smears, NIF supporters accuse NGO Monitor of “silenc[ing] expression,” and being “extremist,” “incendiary,” and the “rotten fruit of Israeli democracy,” and “McCarthyite.”
NGO Monitor’s many calls for debates with NIF officials and grantees have been rebuffed. In July 2009, an NIF employee posted a vulgar cartoon on his blog directed at NGO Monitor President Gerald Steinberg in July 2009, and in 2008 another NIF grantee frivolously sued NGO Monitor for libel - apparently, to quash reporting and public debate on its activities.
1. NIF-grantees and the delegitimization of Israel
In addition to involvement with Goldstone, several organizations funded by NIF campaign against the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish democratic state, and are active in worldwide boycotts, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) and similar campaigns targeting Israel.
NIF has justified its funding decisions, claiming to promote pluralism and dialogue, and to support free expression of differing views in Israel. In contrast, NGO Monitor’s research demonstrates the damage to democracy resulting from these NIF-supported NGO activities, and the lack of effective guidelines in NIF’s funding processes. From correspondence, it is clear that many NIF donors, both individuals and via Jewish federations, are unaware of these political campaigns.
The political impact of NIF-supported NGOs, based on an annual budget of $32 million, is increased via additional funds from European governments and church groups that allocate funds to the same recipient organizations. Through the media, via legal processes, and elsewhere, NIF grantees are therefore in a position to manipulate the marketplace of ideas to a degree that is entirely disproportionate to the general level of support for their agendas.
This preliminary report presents an overview of how NIF-funded NGOs contributed to the Goldstone Report and promoted it after publication. Also included are brief summaries of the activities of 20 NGOs funded by NIF.
2. NIF-funded NGOs and the Goldstone indictment
Written submission
A group of Israeli NGOs -ACRI, Adalah, Bimkom, Gisha, HaMoked, PHR-I, PCATI, and Yesh Din - submitted a one-sided written statement to the Goldstone Commission (June 30, 2009) that does not address alleged Hamas war crimes, “but rather offers our own distinct perspective - human rights violations for which Israel must be held accountable.”[1 ] This NGO document makes entirely speculative assertions about the motivation for the IDF operation against Hamas, claiming that “[t]o the extent that this was planned as a punitive operation which main purpose was not the achievement of actual military objectives, but the inflicting of deliberate damage as a deterrent and punitive measure” - despite their lacking requisite information to make such an assertion.[2 ]
The submission accuses the IDF of having “deliberately and knowingly shelled civilian institutions,” supporting the coalition’s incorrect legal claim that “Israel deviated from the principle that allows harm only to military objectives, and carried out strikes against civilian sites in an effort to achieve political ends.”[3 ] References and evidence are missing for many accusations, such as the allegation that “[m]any prisoners... were held in pits in the ground... apparently dug by the army”[4 ]; details are sourced to “information in our possession.”[5 ]
NGO support for Goldstone
Since April 2009, when Judge Richard Goldstone was appointed to lead the UN Human Rights Council’s fact-finding mission into the Gaza war, NIF-funded NGOs were among those that led the campaign demanding that the Israeli government cooperate with the investigation, supporting misleading claims that the mandate was “balanced” and the panel was fair.
In turn, Goldstone bolstered the credibility of these groups by relying heavily on their publications, uncritically repeating claims, calling NGO activists to “testify,” praising their “high professional standard” while working in “extremely difficult circumstances,” and defending them against alleged “repression” from the Israeli government.
Since the initial publication of the Goldstone report on September 15, 2009, and throughout the proceedings at the UN, these NIF-supported NGOs have continued supporting Goldstone and lobbying the governments of the United States, the European Union, and others to legitimize the report’s extreme biases and endorse its recommendations.
B’Tselem, which receives a substantial percentage of its budget from NIF, the EU, and European governments, has been campaigning against the IDF and demanding an “independent and credible investigation ” of the Gaza war since January 2009, urged Israel to cooperate with Goldstone, and “provided assistance to the investigative staff of the Goldstone mission from the beginning to the end of its research.”
Disingenuously, and erasing her own role in the process, B’Tselem Executive Director Jessica Montell claimed that “Israel has only itself to blame ” for the report’s conclusions and recommendations. She also stated that Israel was “shoot[ing] the messenger and bury[ing] its head in the sand.”
When the report was released, B’Tselem mildly criticized Goldstone for “framing of Israel’s military operation as part of ‘an overall policy aimed at punishing the Gaza population for its resilience’” and “the very careful phrasing regarding Hamas abuses.” However, this NIF-funded political NGO continues to “advocate[] for... its principal recommendation: that Israel investigate suspicions that its forces breached international humanitarian law.”
Other NIF grantees - Adalah, ACRI, B’Tselem, Gisha, HaMoked, PHR-I, PCATI, and Yesh Din - issued a joint statement calling on Israel to “take the report seriously” and “cooperate with an international monitoring mechanism that would guarantee both the independence of that investigation and the implementation of its conclusions.”
3. Summary of activities by 20 major NIF grantees active in the Arab-Israeli conflict
•Adala h (NIF grants authorized in 2006-2008: $1,045,292) advances “war crimes” charges against Israel at the UN Human Rights Council, in reports cited in the media, in Israeli courts, and in campaigns conducted with other political NGOs. Adalah officials promote the false claim that “the Israeli legal and judicial systems have consistently failed in providing any legal remedies to the Palestinian people.” Adalah, itself, has prevailed several times in cases filed in Israeli courts.
In 2007, Adalah proposed a constitution for Israel that calls for replacing the Jewish framework of the state with a “democratic, bilingual and multicultural” framework. This “Democratic Constitution ” - based on the concept of “a one-state solution” - would permit Jewish immigration for “humanitarian reasons” only.
Adalah campaigns against national community service for Arabs in Israel, even within the Arab sector, although such service is widely supported by Israeli Arabs. In a 2005 publication, for instance, Adalah claimed “national/military service in Israel... constitutes the Jewish Zionist identity” and forces Arabs to “to submit to a rationale that further grounds discrimination and oppression.”
Adalah officials, in conjunction with radical Palestinian NGO Al-Haq, wrote and edited large portions of a May 2009 publication, initiated by anti-Israel ideologue John Dugard, entitled “Occupation, Colonialism, Apartheid?: A re-assessment of Israel´s practices in the occupied Palestinian territories under international law.” The document refers to Israeli occupation as a “colonial enterprise which implements a system of apartheid.”
Goldstone excerpt: “Not allowing prisoners to use the telephone “violates detainees’ right to dignity and their right to family life, and ‘transforms their imprisonment to a humiliating and degrading experience that contradicts international norms and conventions.” (para. 1458)
• Coalition of Women for Peace (CWP) (grants authorized in 2006-2008: $285,509) is a highly politicized umbrella organization that systematically condemns Israeli policies. CWP projects include Machsom Watch (grants authorized in 2006-2008: $165,198) and others that use “apartheid” and “Naqba” rhetoric to delegitimize Israel.
CWP is responsible for the “Who Profits? ” divestment project tracking Israeli and international corporations that allegedly “are directly involved in the occupation.” Who Profits? influenced the anti-Israel divestment campaign in Norway and a similar project in the UK.
In 2009, CWP published an article asking: “How is it that our consolation is that we hurt, we demolished, we killed?.... The truth is that we really do like wars, that's our language, that's our culture... we will find all the explanations in the world to justify any war. Even this one, the spare one, in Gaza.” During the war, CWP joined the “Remove the Siege-Stop the War ” coalition, and organized protests against Israeli policy. It also participated in public commemorations of the “59th anniversary of the Naqba” on Israel’s Independence Day in 2007.
Goldstone excerpt (Machsom Watch): “The restriction on the ability to move freely, without obstacle or delay, or without another person’s authorization, is often perceived as a humiliating experience.” (para. 1509)
• Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (PHR-I) (grants authorized in 2006-2008: $503,537) supports often violent protests at the security barrier near Bil’in as an “act of solidarity with the people who fight against the occupation and the building of the wall.” PHR-I campaigned in international forums against Israel’s actions during the Gaza War, appearing before the UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People andlobbying the European Union to support condemnations of Israel. This NGO was a major source of accusations contained in the Goldstone report.
Goldstone excerpt: “The Mission also investigated and confirmed allegations about the use of weapons whose potential long-term impact on individual victims’ health raises concern. They include allegations of the use of weapons containing chemical pollutants such as tungsten and white phosphorus.” (para. 1258)[6 ]
• Breaking the Silence (BtS) (grants authorized in 2006-2008: $200,855) says it “voices the experiences ” of Israeli soldiers “in order to force Israeli society to address the reality which it created.” Although claiming to target “Israeli society,” this NGO’s lobbying and media advocacy focus on international audiences. Amos Harel wrote in Haaretz: “Breaking the Silence... has a clear political agenda, and can no longer be classed as a ‘human rights organization.’”
In addition to collecting anonymous testimony from soldiers some of it based on hearsay and widely cited as evidence of “war crimes” in Gaza by publications including the Goldstone report BtS conducts tours to Hebron and the South Hebron Hills to support its claim that in Hebron there is “a reality of Apartheid and a kind of ‘ethnic cleansing.’”
Goldstone excerpt: “Breaking the Silence issued a statement in which it accused the Foreign Ministry of a ‘witch-hunt’, saying that it testified to the erosion of the ‘democratic culture’ in Israel.” (para. 1731)
•B’Tselem (grants authorized in 2006-1008: $785,285) “acts primarily to change Israeli policy in the Occupied Territories,” a political objective bolstered by B’Tselem’s office in Washington, DC, which brings its agenda directly to U.S. officials. While widely considered Israel’s premier human-rights organization, B’Tselem has faced serious criticism for its misrepresentations of international law, inaccurate research, skewed statistics (includingcasualty lists ), and selective coverage of violations against Israelis. These problematic methodologies reinforce the Palestinian narrative of victimization and portray Israel as the sole impediment to peace.
Goldstone excerpt: “In the face of the recently increase in violence by the Israeli security forces in the West Bank, B’Tselem stated that condemnations by Ministers and other officials “remain solely declarative. Security forces, meanwhile, misusing their power, continue to abuse and beat Palestinians, among them, minors.... If a message is sent to security forces, it is that even if the establishment does not accept acts of violence, it will not take measures against those who commit them. The effect of such a message is that the lives and dignity of Palestinians are meaningless and that security forces can continue, pursuant to the function they serve, to abuse, humiliate, and beat Palestinians with whom they come into contact.” (para. 1405)
• Bimkom (grants authorized in 2006-2008: $923,221)aims “to achieve the right to equality and social justice in matters of planning, development, and the allocation of land resources” and to “[assist] communities and minorities affected by social and economic disadvantage.” In reality, Bimkom promotes the Palestinian narrative. Activities include acampaign against the security barrier ; petitions against “collective punishment ” in Gaza; and input to press releases, reports, and a website detailing allegations of Israeli “violations” during the fighting in Gaza - most of which involved issues outside Bimkom’s remit and stated mandate.
Goldstone excerpt: “In a recent report reviewed by the Mission, Bimkom concluded that the Israeli Civil Administration applied ‘a deliberate and consistent policy in Area C with the goal of restricting Palestinian construction and development and limiting its spatial dispersion.’” (para. 1539)
• Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI) (grants authorized in 2006-2008: $48,888) claims to campaign against torture and for prisoner rights. PCATI’s reports condemn alleged Israeli abuses, and its officials appear before international frameworks to promote anti-Israel agendas. In 2009, a PCATI official testified in Geneva before the UN’s Goldstone inquiry on the Gaza war, referring to Israel’s “unacceptable collective punishment” and to Palestinian “martyrs.” In a 2009 report submitted to the UN Committee Against Torture, PCATI accused Israel of attacks on “civilians and civilian objects” during the Gaza fighting. The group appears to have participated in only one statement in support of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier kidnapped by Hamas in June 2006 and consistently denied his rights under the Geneva Conventions.
Goldstone excerpt: “A PCATI lawyer representing detainees, Mr. Bader, who spoke at the Mission’s public hearings in Geneva, interviewed a number of the detainees in Israeli prisons and relayed their testimonies. These include stories from prisoners who said they were used as human shields or held in sandpits.” (para. 1110)
•Gisha (grants authorized in 2006-2008: $35,625) promotes the false claim that Gaza remains “occupied” under international law, and that Israel has a legal obligation to grant unfettered “freedom of movement” to Gaza residents. Gisha’s claims were quoted in the Goldstone report in order to accuse Israel of enacting policies “in the pursuance by Israel of political goals at the expense of the civilian population, in blatant violation of international humanitarian law.”
Gisha’s highly publicized 2008 campaign condemning Israel for barring Palestinian students’ travel from Gaza to Israel and to the United States under the Fulbright program erased Israel’s legitimated security concerns. Indeed, most of these “students” were refused entry by the American government on security grounds. In addition, in frequent condemnations of Israeli policy on Gaza, Gisha has largely ignored the tons of humanitarian aid provided by Israel despite massive rocket barrages from Gaza.
Goldstone excerpt: “Gisha call[s] this regulation an additional measure in a deliberate Israeli policy to deepen the separation between the West Bank and Gaza ‘in the pursuance by Israel of political goals at the expense of the civilian population, in blatant violation of international humanitarian law.’” (para. 1527)
•HaMoked (grants authorized in 2006-2008: $499,765) accuses Israel of “war crimes,” with only a token reference to Hamas’ “sporadic” rocket fire against Israeli civilians. HaMokedcalled the Gaza war a “punitive operation,” and promoted the unverified claim that “[m]any prisoners... were held in pits in the ground... apparently dug by the army.” During the Gaza war, HaMoked distorted international law to criminalize Israeli actions, falsely claiming that “phosphorous and cluster bombs” are “illegal weapons prohibited by International Humanitarian Law.”
•Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) (grants authorized in 2006-2008: $2,671,443) has a wide agenda in Israel, but frequently employs rhetoric that contributes to demonization and delegitimization. For example, its 2008 annual report labeled Israel’s policies in the West Bank “Apartheid,” and ACRI representatives have referred to “institutional racism” in Palestinian forums. Many legal claims in its reports are distortions or selective interpretations of international humanitarian law.
Goldstone excerpt: “In a report reviewed by the Mission, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel stated that, in Jerusalem “discrimination in planning and building, expropriation of lands, and minimal investment in physical infrastructure and government and municipal services - these are concrete expressions of an Israeli policy designed to secure a Jewish majority in Jerusalem and push Palestinian residents outside the city's borders.” (para. 1536)
• Ir Amim (grants authorized in 2006-2008: $958,237) focuses on “legal advocacy aimed at halting or mitigating unilateral actions that harm the fabric of life in Jerusalem, and create obstacles to reaching an agreed-upon future for the city and the region.” In reality, Ir Amimadvocates and campaigns exclusively for the Palestinian narrative on Jerusalem, adopting the offensive PLO rhetoric of “Judaization ”, and directing these efforts at influencing foreign journalists, diplomats, and opinion-makers.
View the report at Israel Behind the News.
NIF-funded groups and their publications were featured centrally in the Goldstone report, which focused on alleged Israeli “war crimes” in the 2009 Gaza war. The report referenced B’Tselem more than 56 times; Adalah, 38; and Breaking the Silence, 27.
Many of these citations referred to speculative issues unrelated to the conflict in Gaza, seeking to brand Israeli democracy as “repressive” and to widen the scope of the condemnations.
Since the initial publication of the Goldstone report on September 15, 2009, these NIF-supported NGOs - including B’Tselem, ACRI, Gisha, PHR-I, and Yesh Din - have continued supporting Goldstone and lobbying the governments of the United States, the European Union, and others to legitimize the report’s extreme biases and endorse its recommendations.
In response to the controversy over their support for Goldstone, these organizations and the NIF launched an offensive against critics. NIF supporters accused NGO Monitor of “silenc[ing] expression,” and being “extremist,” “incendiary,” the “rotten fruit of Israeli democracy,” and “McCarthyite.”
In addition to involvement with Goldstone, several organizations funded by NIF, including Adalah, campaign against the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish democratic state. Others such as Mossawa and Coalition of Women for Peace are active in worldwide boycotts, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaigns targeting Israel.
The political impact of NIF-supported NGOs, based on NIF’s annual budget of $32 million, is bolstered by additional funds from European governments and church groups that allocate funds to the same recipient organizations.
Contents:
1) NIF-grantees and the delegitimization of Israel
2) NIF-funded NGOs and the Goldstone indictment
3) Summary of activities by 20 major NIF grantees active in the Arab-Israeli conflict
Introduction:
The New Israel Fund (NIF) supports more than 100 organizations involved in a wide range of areas in Israel, including political activism related to the Arab-Israeli conflict.
As highlighted recently, NIF-funded groups and their publications were featured centrally in the Goldstone report, which focused on alleged Israeli “war crimes” in the 2009 Gaza war. During the fighting, as shown in NGO Monitor analyses, these NGOs issued daily reports claiming to document Israeli “human rights” violations. NGO officials, widely quoted in the media, lobbied intensively for an international inquiry.
After the Goldstone commission was established, three major and long-time NIF grantees (Public Committee against Torture in Israel, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, and Adalah) participated in a May 2009 NGO “town hall meeting” in Geneva that helped shape the course of Goldstone’s ”investigation”. In addition, seven NIF-funded NGOs (including the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, Gisha, HaMoked, and Yesh Din) submitted a joint statement to Goldstone, and a representative from PCATI “testified” at the July 2009 Goldstone hearings, referring to “collective punishment” and “[Palestinian] martyrs.”
The resulting Goldstone report referenced B’Tselem more than 56 times; Adalah, 38; and Breaking the Silence, 27. Significantly, many of these citations referred to speculative issues unrelated to the conflict in Gaza, seeking to brand Israeli democracy as “repressive,” and to widen the scope of the condemnations and the resulting political campaigns.
In turn, B’Tselem, Adalah, and PHR-I, among others, have lobbied Israeli and foreign governments to support Goldstone’s report and its recommendations. Adalah, for example, joined the Palestinian NGOs Al Mezan, Al-Haq, and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) in a press release urging countries to “re-evaluate their relationship with Israel.”
In response to the controversy over their support for Goldstone, these organizations and the NIF launched an offensive against critics, including NGO Monitor, that brought the relationship to light. Through coarse smears, NIF supporters accuse NGO Monitor of “silenc[ing] expression,” and being “extremist,” “incendiary,” and the “rotten fruit of Israeli democracy,” and “McCarthyite.”
NGO Monitor’s many calls for debates with NIF officials and grantees have been rebuffed. In July 2009, an NIF employee posted a vulgar cartoon on his blog directed at NGO Monitor President Gerald Steinberg in July 2009, and in 2008 another NIF grantee frivolously sued NGO Monitor for libel - apparently, to quash reporting and public debate on its activities.
1. NIF-grantees and the delegitimization of Israel
In addition to involvement with Goldstone, several organizations funded by NIF campaign against the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish democratic state, and are active in worldwide boycotts, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) and similar campaigns targeting Israel.
NIF has justified its funding decisions, claiming to promote pluralism and dialogue, and to support free expression of differing views in Israel. In contrast, NGO Monitor’s research demonstrates the damage to democracy resulting from these NIF-supported NGO activities, and the lack of effective guidelines in NIF’s funding processes. From correspondence, it is clear that many NIF donors, both individuals and via Jewish federations, are unaware of these political campaigns.
The political impact of NIF-supported NGOs, based on an annual budget of $32 million, is increased via additional funds from European governments and church groups that allocate funds to the same recipient organizations. Through the media, via legal processes, and elsewhere, NIF grantees are therefore in a position to manipulate the marketplace of ideas to a degree that is entirely disproportionate to the general level of support for their agendas.
This preliminary report presents an overview of how NIF-funded NGOs contributed to the Goldstone Report and promoted it after publication. Also included are brief summaries of the activities of 20 NGOs funded by NIF.
2. NIF-funded NGOs and the Goldstone indictment
Written submission
A group of Israeli NGOs -ACRI, Adalah, Bimkom, Gisha, HaMoked, PHR-I, PCATI, and Yesh Din - submitted a one-sided written statement to the Goldstone Commission (June 30, 2009) that does not address alleged Hamas war crimes, “but rather offers our own distinct perspective - human rights violations for which Israel must be held accountable.”[1 ] This NGO document makes entirely speculative assertions about the motivation for the IDF operation against Hamas, claiming that “[t]o the extent that this was planned as a punitive operation which main purpose was not the achievement of actual military objectives, but the inflicting of deliberate damage as a deterrent and punitive measure” - despite their lacking requisite information to make such an assertion.[2 ]
The submission accuses the IDF of having “deliberately and knowingly shelled civilian institutions,” supporting the coalition’s incorrect legal claim that “Israel deviated from the principle that allows harm only to military objectives, and carried out strikes against civilian sites in an effort to achieve political ends.”[3 ] References and evidence are missing for many accusations, such as the allegation that “[m]any prisoners... were held in pits in the ground... apparently dug by the army”[4 ]; details are sourced to “information in our possession.”[5 ]
NGO support for Goldstone
Since April 2009, when Judge Richard Goldstone was appointed to lead the UN Human Rights Council’s fact-finding mission into the Gaza war, NIF-funded NGOs were among those that led the campaign demanding that the Israeli government cooperate with the investigation, supporting misleading claims that the mandate was “balanced” and the panel was fair.
In turn, Goldstone bolstered the credibility of these groups by relying heavily on their publications, uncritically repeating claims, calling NGO activists to “testify,” praising their “high professional standard” while working in “extremely difficult circumstances,” and defending them against alleged “repression” from the Israeli government.
Since the initial publication of the Goldstone report on September 15, 2009, and throughout the proceedings at the UN, these NIF-supported NGOs have continued supporting Goldstone and lobbying the governments of the United States, the European Union, and others to legitimize the report’s extreme biases and endorse its recommendations.
B’Tselem, which receives a substantial percentage of its budget from NIF, the EU, and European governments, has been campaigning against the IDF and demanding an “independent and credible investigation ” of the Gaza war since January 2009, urged Israel to cooperate with Goldstone, and “provided assistance to the investigative staff of the Goldstone mission from the beginning to the end of its research.”
Disingenuously, and erasing her own role in the process, B’Tselem Executive Director Jessica Montell claimed that “Israel has only itself to blame ” for the report’s conclusions and recommendations. She also stated that Israel was “shoot[ing] the messenger and bury[ing] its head in the sand.”
When the report was released, B’Tselem mildly criticized Goldstone for “framing of Israel’s military operation as part of ‘an overall policy aimed at punishing the Gaza population for its resilience’” and “the very careful phrasing regarding Hamas abuses.” However, this NIF-funded political NGO continues to “advocate[] for... its principal recommendation: that Israel investigate suspicions that its forces breached international humanitarian law.”
Other NIF grantees - Adalah, ACRI, B’Tselem, Gisha, HaMoked, PHR-I, PCATI, and Yesh Din - issued a joint statement calling on Israel to “take the report seriously” and “cooperate with an international monitoring mechanism that would guarantee both the independence of that investigation and the implementation of its conclusions.”
3. Summary of activities by 20 major NIF grantees active in the Arab-Israeli conflict
•Adala h (NIF grants authorized in 2006-2008: $1,045,292) advances “war crimes” charges against Israel at the UN Human Rights Council, in reports cited in the media, in Israeli courts, and in campaigns conducted with other political NGOs. Adalah officials promote the false claim that “the Israeli legal and judicial systems have consistently failed in providing any legal remedies to the Palestinian people.” Adalah, itself, has prevailed several times in cases filed in Israeli courts.
In 2007, Adalah proposed a constitution for Israel that calls for replacing the Jewish framework of the state with a “democratic, bilingual and multicultural” framework. This “Democratic Constitution ” - based on the concept of “a one-state solution” - would permit Jewish immigration for “humanitarian reasons” only.
Adalah campaigns against national community service for Arabs in Israel, even within the Arab sector, although such service is widely supported by Israeli Arabs. In a 2005 publication, for instance, Adalah claimed “national/military service in Israel... constitutes the Jewish Zionist identity” and forces Arabs to “to submit to a rationale that further grounds discrimination and oppression.”
Adalah officials, in conjunction with radical Palestinian NGO Al-Haq, wrote and edited large portions of a May 2009 publication, initiated by anti-Israel ideologue John Dugard, entitled “Occupation, Colonialism, Apartheid?: A re-assessment of Israel´s practices in the occupied Palestinian territories under international law.” The document refers to Israeli occupation as a “colonial enterprise which implements a system of apartheid.”
Goldstone excerpt: “Not allowing prisoners to use the telephone “violates detainees’ right to dignity and their right to family life, and ‘transforms their imprisonment to a humiliating and degrading experience that contradicts international norms and conventions.” (para. 1458)
• Coalition of Women for Peace (CWP) (grants authorized in 2006-2008: $285,509) is a highly politicized umbrella organization that systematically condemns Israeli policies. CWP projects include Machsom Watch (grants authorized in 2006-2008: $165,198) and others that use “apartheid” and “Naqba” rhetoric to delegitimize Israel.
CWP is responsible for the “Who Profits? ” divestment project tracking Israeli and international corporations that allegedly “are directly involved in the occupation.” Who Profits? influenced the anti-Israel divestment campaign in Norway and a similar project in the UK.
In 2009, CWP published an article asking: “How is it that our consolation is that we hurt, we demolished, we killed?.... The truth is that we really do like wars, that's our language, that's our culture... we will find all the explanations in the world to justify any war. Even this one, the spare one, in Gaza.” During the war, CWP joined the “Remove the Siege-Stop the War ” coalition, and organized protests against Israeli policy. It also participated in public commemorations of the “59th anniversary of the Naqba” on Israel’s Independence Day in 2007.
Goldstone excerpt (Machsom Watch): “The restriction on the ability to move freely, without obstacle or delay, or without another person’s authorization, is often perceived as a humiliating experience.” (para. 1509)
• Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (PHR-I) (grants authorized in 2006-2008: $503,537) supports often violent protests at the security barrier near Bil’in as an “act of solidarity with the people who fight against the occupation and the building of the wall.” PHR-I campaigned in international forums against Israel’s actions during the Gaza War, appearing before the UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People andlobbying the European Union to support condemnations of Israel. This NGO was a major source of accusations contained in the Goldstone report.
Goldstone excerpt: “The Mission also investigated and confirmed allegations about the use of weapons whose potential long-term impact on individual victims’ health raises concern. They include allegations of the use of weapons containing chemical pollutants such as tungsten and white phosphorus.” (para. 1258)[6 ]
• Breaking the Silence (BtS) (grants authorized in 2006-2008: $200,855) says it “voices the experiences ” of Israeli soldiers “in order to force Israeli society to address the reality which it created.” Although claiming to target “Israeli society,” this NGO’s lobbying and media advocacy focus on international audiences. Amos Harel wrote in Haaretz: “Breaking the Silence... has a clear political agenda, and can no longer be classed as a ‘human rights organization.’”
In addition to collecting anonymous testimony from soldiers some of it based on hearsay and widely cited as evidence of “war crimes” in Gaza by publications including the Goldstone report BtS conducts tours to Hebron and the South Hebron Hills to support its claim that in Hebron there is “a reality of Apartheid and a kind of ‘ethnic cleansing.’”
Goldstone excerpt: “Breaking the Silence issued a statement in which it accused the Foreign Ministry of a ‘witch-hunt’, saying that it testified to the erosion of the ‘democratic culture’ in Israel.” (para. 1731)
•B’Tselem (grants authorized in 2006-1008: $785,285) “acts primarily to change Israeli policy in the Occupied Territories,” a political objective bolstered by B’Tselem’s office in Washington, DC, which brings its agenda directly to U.S. officials. While widely considered Israel’s premier human-rights organization, B’Tselem has faced serious criticism for its misrepresentations of international law, inaccurate research, skewed statistics (includingcasualty lists ), and selective coverage of violations against Israelis. These problematic methodologies reinforce the Palestinian narrative of victimization and portray Israel as the sole impediment to peace.
Goldstone excerpt: “In the face of the recently increase in violence by the Israeli security forces in the West Bank, B’Tselem stated that condemnations by Ministers and other officials “remain solely declarative. Security forces, meanwhile, misusing their power, continue to abuse and beat Palestinians, among them, minors.... If a message is sent to security forces, it is that even if the establishment does not accept acts of violence, it will not take measures against those who commit them. The effect of such a message is that the lives and dignity of Palestinians are meaningless and that security forces can continue, pursuant to the function they serve, to abuse, humiliate, and beat Palestinians with whom they come into contact.” (para. 1405)
• Bimkom (grants authorized in 2006-2008: $923,221)aims “to achieve the right to equality and social justice in matters of planning, development, and the allocation of land resources” and to “[assist] communities and minorities affected by social and economic disadvantage.” In reality, Bimkom promotes the Palestinian narrative. Activities include acampaign against the security barrier ; petitions against “collective punishment ” in Gaza; and input to press releases, reports, and a website detailing allegations of Israeli “violations” during the fighting in Gaza - most of which involved issues outside Bimkom’s remit and stated mandate.
Goldstone excerpt: “In a recent report reviewed by the Mission, Bimkom concluded that the Israeli Civil Administration applied ‘a deliberate and consistent policy in Area C with the goal of restricting Palestinian construction and development and limiting its spatial dispersion.’” (para. 1539)
• Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI) (grants authorized in 2006-2008: $48,888) claims to campaign against torture and for prisoner rights. PCATI’s reports condemn alleged Israeli abuses, and its officials appear before international frameworks to promote anti-Israel agendas. In 2009, a PCATI official testified in Geneva before the UN’s Goldstone inquiry on the Gaza war, referring to Israel’s “unacceptable collective punishment” and to Palestinian “martyrs.” In a 2009 report submitted to the UN Committee Against Torture, PCATI accused Israel of attacks on “civilians and civilian objects” during the Gaza fighting. The group appears to have participated in only one statement in support of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier kidnapped by Hamas in June 2006 and consistently denied his rights under the Geneva Conventions.
Goldstone excerpt: “A PCATI lawyer representing detainees, Mr. Bader, who spoke at the Mission’s public hearings in Geneva, interviewed a number of the detainees in Israeli prisons and relayed their testimonies. These include stories from prisoners who said they were used as human shields or held in sandpits.” (para. 1110)
•Gisha (grants authorized in 2006-2008: $35,625) promotes the false claim that Gaza remains “occupied” under international law, and that Israel has a legal obligation to grant unfettered “freedom of movement” to Gaza residents. Gisha’s claims were quoted in the Goldstone report in order to accuse Israel of enacting policies “in the pursuance by Israel of political goals at the expense of the civilian population, in blatant violation of international humanitarian law.”
Gisha’s highly publicized 2008 campaign condemning Israel for barring Palestinian students’ travel from Gaza to Israel and to the United States under the Fulbright program erased Israel’s legitimated security concerns. Indeed, most of these “students” were refused entry by the American government on security grounds. In addition, in frequent condemnations of Israeli policy on Gaza, Gisha has largely ignored the tons of humanitarian aid provided by Israel despite massive rocket barrages from Gaza.
Goldstone excerpt: “Gisha call[s] this regulation an additional measure in a deliberate Israeli policy to deepen the separation between the West Bank and Gaza ‘in the pursuance by Israel of political goals at the expense of the civilian population, in blatant violation of international humanitarian law.’” (para. 1527)
•HaMoked (grants authorized in 2006-2008: $499,765) accuses Israel of “war crimes,” with only a token reference to Hamas’ “sporadic” rocket fire against Israeli civilians. HaMokedcalled the Gaza war a “punitive operation,” and promoted the unverified claim that “[m]any prisoners... were held in pits in the ground... apparently dug by the army.” During the Gaza war, HaMoked distorted international law to criminalize Israeli actions, falsely claiming that “phosphorous and cluster bombs” are “illegal weapons prohibited by International Humanitarian Law.”
•Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) (grants authorized in 2006-2008: $2,671,443) has a wide agenda in Israel, but frequently employs rhetoric that contributes to demonization and delegitimization. For example, its 2008 annual report labeled Israel’s policies in the West Bank “Apartheid,” and ACRI representatives have referred to “institutional racism” in Palestinian forums. Many legal claims in its reports are distortions or selective interpretations of international humanitarian law.
Goldstone excerpt: “In a report reviewed by the Mission, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel stated that, in Jerusalem “discrimination in planning and building, expropriation of lands, and minimal investment in physical infrastructure and government and municipal services - these are concrete expressions of an Israeli policy designed to secure a Jewish majority in Jerusalem and push Palestinian residents outside the city's borders.” (para. 1536)
• Ir Amim (grants authorized in 2006-2008: $958,237) focuses on “legal advocacy aimed at halting or mitigating unilateral actions that harm the fabric of life in Jerusalem, and create obstacles to reaching an agreed-upon future for the city and the region.” In reality, Ir Amimadvocates and campaigns exclusively for the Palestinian narrative on Jerusalem, adopting the offensive PLO rhetoric of “Judaization ”, and directing these efforts at influencing foreign journalists, diplomats, and opinion-makers.
View the report at Israel Behind the News.
New Revelations About the UN Goldstone Report that Seriously Undermine its Credibility
Col. (ret.) Desmond Travers was one of the four members of the UN Fact Finding Mission that produced what is widely called the Goldstone Report. The Mission investigated Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip between December 27, 2008 and January 18, 2009. Travers joined the Irish Defense Forces in 1961 and retired after forty years. As the only former officer who belonged to Justice Richard Goldstone's team, he was the senior figure responsible for the military analysis that provided the basis for condemning Israel for war crimes.
After following his repeated public appearances with the other mission members in July 2009, and especially in light of his most recent interviews, serious flaws have now become evident in the methodology he followed, in his collection and processing of data, and in the conclusions he draws. In the past, the flaws in the Goldstone report, and especially its lack of balance, have been criticized by the London Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the Economist, but the fundamental problems of its military analysis have not been fully addressed. In the material presented here, this becomes evident in four specific ways:
1. A Fundamental Bias against the Israel Defense Forces
During the Mission's collection of testimonies from Palestinian psychologists in the Gaza Strip, Travers asked them straight out to explain how Israeli soldiers could kill Palestinian children in front of their parents. In an interview with Middle East Monitor, on February 2, 2010, he asserted that in the past Israeli soldiers had "taken out and deliberately shot" Irish peacekeeping forces in Southern Lebanon. Both of these statements by Travers are completely false. It should be stressed that one of the most vicious and unsubstantiated conclusions in the Goldstone Report is the suggestion that Israel deliberately killed Palestinian civilians.
While Travers assumes the worst of intentions on the part of the Israel Defense Forces, he praises Hamas for their cooperation with the Mission. When he was asked about Hamas intimidation that affected the Mission's inquiries, he replied that that there was "none
whatsoever." Yet the Goldstone Report itself noted in Paragraph 440 that those interviewed in Gaza appeared reluctant to speak about the presence of Palestinian armed groups because of a "fear of reprisals." He rejects the notion that Hamas shielded its forces in the civilian population and does not accept the idea that Israel faced asymmetric warfare.
2. False Information Reported About Weapons Systems
Travers comes up with a story that the IDF had unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV's) that could obtain a "thermal signature" on a Gaza house and detect that there were large numbers of people inside. Incredibly, he then suggests that with this information that certain houses were "packed with people," the Israeli military would then deliberately order a missile strike on these populated homes. The primary technical problem with his theory is that Israel does not have UAV's that can see though houses and pick up a thermal signature. More importantly, Israel used UAV's to monitor that Palestinian civilians left houses that had received multiple warnings, precisely because Israel sought to minimize civilian casualties, a fact that Travers could not fathom, because of his own clear biases.
3. Completely Inaccurate Data
Travers rejects that Israel began military operations against the Gaza Strip on December 27, 2008 as an act of self-defense in response to Hamas rockets. He bases this idea on a "fact" that he presents that in the month prior to start of the war, there were only "something like two" rockets that fell on Israel. Israeli military sources found that there were in fact 32 rockets fired from Gaza at Israel over three days alone--between December 16 and 18, 2008. He adds to his analysis that at this time Hamas sought to extend the tahdiya, or lull arrangement--which he called a cease-fire. Yet the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades of Hamas announced on December 17 that the lull would come to an end two days later and would not be renewed. The head of the Hamas political bureau in Damascus, Khaled Mashaal, announced the end of the lull on December 14. To say that Hamas wanted to continue the lull is a complete distortion of events.
In his Middle East Monitor interview, Travers states that he "only came across two incidents of where there was an actual combat situation" - the exchange of fire between Israel and Hamas. Because he minimizes the possibility that Israel was engaged in real combat in the Gaza Strip, it follows that he naturally conclude that Israel was essentially attacking non-combatants during Operation Cast Lead.
4. Lack of Professionalism in Conducting Thorough Investigations
Travers relies on his own prejudices when he looks into the question of whether Gazan Mosques had been militarized by Hamas and turned into weapons depots. In an interview with Harpers, published on October 29, 2009, Travers makes a sweeping generalization: "We found no evidence that mosques were used to store munitions." He then dismissed those who suggested that was the case by saying: "Those charges reflect Western perceptions in some quarters that Islam is a violent religion." How many mosques did Travers investigate? He admits that the Mission only checked two mosques.
Of course, srael produced photographic proof that large amounts of weapons were stored in mosques, like the Zaytun Mosque. In a subsequent interview, Travers rejected the Israeli proof: "I do not believe the photographs." He described the photographs as "spurious." Travers appears to be bothered by proof that contradicts the conclusions he reaches on the basis of a very limited investigation. In early 2010, Colonel Tim Collins, a British veteran of the Iraq War, visited Gaza for BBC Newsnight and inspected the ruins of a mosque that Israel had destroyed because it had been a weapons depot. He found that there was evidence of secondary explosions cause by explosives stored in the mosque cellar. Travers clearly did not make the effort that Collins made.
In his questioning of Palestinian witnesses in the Gaza Strip, Travers does not ask the questions that a military advisor should raise. He did not ask those giving testimony if they were member of the Izz al-Din al-Qassam units of Hamas and were combatants. He also failed to ask them straight out if their homes had been used to store munitions, like Grad rockets. Instead, his questions reflected his ideological bias.
Travers most recent interview also had a disturbing additional element. When addressing the role of British officers in defending Israel's claims, Travers suddenly adds: "Britain's foreign policy interests in the Middle East seem to be influenced strongly by Jewish lobbyists." Travers implies that British Jews have interests that differ from Britain's own national interests and that Prime Minister Gordon Brown's government is influenced by these considerations. This statement, unless corrected, places Travers is a position in which his views are suspect of being motivated by anti-Semitic prejudices. Even without this last statement, he clearly emerges as an individual who is not qualified to take part in any serious fact-finding mission and the U.N. should not seek his services in the future. Given his statements, Justice Richard Goldstone should repudiate Col. Travers and completely reject the conclusions that he reached as a result of his work.
For an expanded version of this report in Hebrew, see Unprofessional Conduct of the Goldstone Commission's Military Expert - Jonathan D. Halevi.
Dr. Dore Gold
Ambassador Dore Gold is President of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. He was the eleventh Permanent Representative of Israel to the United Nations (1997-1999). Previously he served as Foreign Policy Advisor to the former Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu. He has served as an advisor to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who asked him to accompany his entourage to Washington and the 2003 Aqaba Summit with President George W. Bush.
Ambassador Gold was a member of the Israeli delegation at the 1998 Wye River negotiations between Israel and the PLO, outside of Washington. He negotiated the Note for the Record, which supplemented the 1997 Hebron Protocol, and in 1996 concluded the negotiations with the U.S., Lebanon, Syria, and France for the creation of the Monitoring Group for Southern Lebanon.
Dore Gold speaks at the UK Parliament on October 12, 2009
Lt. Col. (ret.) Jonathan D. Halevi
Lt. Col. (res.) Jonathan Dahoah-Halevi is a senior researcher of the Middle East and radical Islam at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. He is a co-founder of the Orient Research Group Ltd. and is a former advisor to the Policy Planning Division of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
View this article at Israel Behind the News
After following his repeated public appearances with the other mission members in July 2009, and especially in light of his most recent interviews, serious flaws have now become evident in the methodology he followed, in his collection and processing of data, and in the conclusions he draws. In the past, the flaws in the Goldstone report, and especially its lack of balance, have been criticized by the London Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the Economist, but the fundamental problems of its military analysis have not been fully addressed. In the material presented here, this becomes evident in four specific ways:
1. A Fundamental Bias against the Israel Defense Forces
During the Mission's collection of testimonies from Palestinian psychologists in the Gaza Strip, Travers asked them straight out to explain how Israeli soldiers could kill Palestinian children in front of their parents. In an interview with Middle East Monitor, on February 2, 2010, he asserted that in the past Israeli soldiers had "taken out and deliberately shot" Irish peacekeeping forces in Southern Lebanon. Both of these statements by Travers are completely false. It should be stressed that one of the most vicious and unsubstantiated conclusions in the Goldstone Report is the suggestion that Israel deliberately killed Palestinian civilians.
While Travers assumes the worst of intentions on the part of the Israel Defense Forces, he praises Hamas for their cooperation with the Mission. When he was asked about Hamas intimidation that affected the Mission's inquiries, he replied that that there was "none
whatsoever." Yet the Goldstone Report itself noted in Paragraph 440 that those interviewed in Gaza appeared reluctant to speak about the presence of Palestinian armed groups because of a "fear of reprisals." He rejects the notion that Hamas shielded its forces in the civilian population and does not accept the idea that Israel faced asymmetric warfare.
2. False Information Reported About Weapons Systems
Travers comes up with a story that the IDF had unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV's) that could obtain a "thermal signature" on a Gaza house and detect that there were large numbers of people inside. Incredibly, he then suggests that with this information that certain houses were "packed with people," the Israeli military would then deliberately order a missile strike on these populated homes. The primary technical problem with his theory is that Israel does not have UAV's that can see though houses and pick up a thermal signature. More importantly, Israel used UAV's to monitor that Palestinian civilians left houses that had received multiple warnings, precisely because Israel sought to minimize civilian casualties, a fact that Travers could not fathom, because of his own clear biases.
3. Completely Inaccurate Data
Travers rejects that Israel began military operations against the Gaza Strip on December 27, 2008 as an act of self-defense in response to Hamas rockets. He bases this idea on a "fact" that he presents that in the month prior to start of the war, there were only "something like two" rockets that fell on Israel. Israeli military sources found that there were in fact 32 rockets fired from Gaza at Israel over three days alone--between December 16 and 18, 2008. He adds to his analysis that at this time Hamas sought to extend the tahdiya, or lull arrangement--which he called a cease-fire. Yet the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades of Hamas announced on December 17 that the lull would come to an end two days later and would not be renewed. The head of the Hamas political bureau in Damascus, Khaled Mashaal, announced the end of the lull on December 14. To say that Hamas wanted to continue the lull is a complete distortion of events.
In his Middle East Monitor interview, Travers states that he "only came across two incidents of where there was an actual combat situation" - the exchange of fire between Israel and Hamas. Because he minimizes the possibility that Israel was engaged in real combat in the Gaza Strip, it follows that he naturally conclude that Israel was essentially attacking non-combatants during Operation Cast Lead.
4. Lack of Professionalism in Conducting Thorough Investigations
Travers relies on his own prejudices when he looks into the question of whether Gazan Mosques had been militarized by Hamas and turned into weapons depots. In an interview with Harpers, published on October 29, 2009, Travers makes a sweeping generalization: "We found no evidence that mosques were used to store munitions." He then dismissed those who suggested that was the case by saying: "Those charges reflect Western perceptions in some quarters that Islam is a violent religion." How many mosques did Travers investigate? He admits that the Mission only checked two mosques.
Of course, srael produced photographic proof that large amounts of weapons were stored in mosques, like the Zaytun Mosque. In a subsequent interview, Travers rejected the Israeli proof: "I do not believe the photographs." He described the photographs as "spurious." Travers appears to be bothered by proof that contradicts the conclusions he reaches on the basis of a very limited investigation. In early 2010, Colonel Tim Collins, a British veteran of the Iraq War, visited Gaza for BBC Newsnight and inspected the ruins of a mosque that Israel had destroyed because it had been a weapons depot. He found that there was evidence of secondary explosions cause by explosives stored in the mosque cellar. Travers clearly did not make the effort that Collins made.
In his questioning of Palestinian witnesses in the Gaza Strip, Travers does not ask the questions that a military advisor should raise. He did not ask those giving testimony if they were member of the Izz al-Din al-Qassam units of Hamas and were combatants. He also failed to ask them straight out if their homes had been used to store munitions, like Grad rockets. Instead, his questions reflected his ideological bias.
Travers most recent interview also had a disturbing additional element. When addressing the role of British officers in defending Israel's claims, Travers suddenly adds: "Britain's foreign policy interests in the Middle East seem to be influenced strongly by Jewish lobbyists." Travers implies that British Jews have interests that differ from Britain's own national interests and that Prime Minister Gordon Brown's government is influenced by these considerations. This statement, unless corrected, places Travers is a position in which his views are suspect of being motivated by anti-Semitic prejudices. Even without this last statement, he clearly emerges as an individual who is not qualified to take part in any serious fact-finding mission and the U.N. should not seek his services in the future. Given his statements, Justice Richard Goldstone should repudiate Col. Travers and completely reject the conclusions that he reached as a result of his work.
For an expanded version of this report in Hebrew, see Unprofessional Conduct of the Goldstone Commission's Military Expert - Jonathan D. Halevi.
Dr. Dore Gold
Ambassador Dore Gold is President of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. He was the eleventh Permanent Representative of Israel to the United Nations (1997-1999). Previously he served as Foreign Policy Advisor to the former Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu. He has served as an advisor to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who asked him to accompany his entourage to Washington and the 2003 Aqaba Summit with President George W. Bush.
Ambassador Gold was a member of the Israeli delegation at the 1998 Wye River negotiations between Israel and the PLO, outside of Washington. He negotiated the Note for the Record, which supplemented the 1997 Hebron Protocol, and in 1996 concluded the negotiations with the U.S., Lebanon, Syria, and France for the creation of the Monitoring Group for Southern Lebanon.
Dore Gold speaks at the UK Parliament on October 12, 2009
Lt. Col. (ret.) Jonathan D. Halevi
Lt. Col. (res.) Jonathan Dahoah-Halevi is a senior researcher of the Middle East and radical Islam at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. He is a co-founder of the Orient Research Group Ltd. and is a former advisor to the Policy Planning Division of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
View this article at Israel Behind the News
Israel's Bogus Demographic Threat
Theodore Herzl (in 1900) and David Ben Gurion (in 1947) did not subordinate
their vision and long-term strategy to tenuous demographic constraints: A
Jewish minority of 8% and 33% respectively between the Jordan River and the
Mediterranean. Their defiance of odds was responsible for the 1948
establishment of the Jewish State.
In 2010, there is a solid 67% Jewish majority in the combined area of
pre-1967 Israel and Judea and Samaria. However, some Israeli politicians
employ toxic demographic assets. They inflate the number of Arabs in Judea
and Samaria in order to scare the Jewish State into a retreat from a most
critical area, historically and security-wise.
The following OpEd, by Haim Rozenberg, former Head of Long-Term Planning at
RAFAEL (Israel Defense Ministry's Armament Development Authority), addresses
the issue of toxic demographic assets.
Shabbat Shalom,
Yoram Ettinger
Toxic Demographic Assets
News First Class, February 8, 2010
Haim Rozenberg, former Head Long-Term Planning, RAFAEL (Israel Defense
Ministry's Armament Development Authority)
Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, said on February 4, 2010 that there are 12
million persons between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean: 6 million
Jews and 6 million Arabs. Therefore, he concluded, a two state solution
would spare Israel the wrath of Apartheid. Really?!
Barak's conclusion is based on a dramatic error of a two million person gap.
In fact, the total population west of the Jordan River is 10 million.
According to Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics (ICBS), Israel's
population includes 6 million Jews and 1.5 million Arabs. The ICBS has not
dealt with Judea, Samaria and Gaza Arabs since 1997.
Recent studies, which were published by the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic
Studies ( http://www.biu.ac.il/SOC/besa/MSPS65.pdf ) and by the Institute
for Zionist Strategies ( http://izsvideo.org/papers/faitelson2009.pdf ) have
documented about 4 million - and not 6 million - Arabs between the Jordan
River and the Mediterranean: 1.5 million in pre-1967 Israel, 1.5 in Judea
and Samaria and 1.2 in Gaza.
Barak has been off by two million Arabs!
A solid 67% Jewish majority - without Gaza - has existed west of the Jordan
River since 1967. The 10 million persons west of the Jordan River consist of
some 6 million Jews, 3 million Arabs in the combined area of "pre-1967
Israel" and Judea and Samaria and 1.2 million Arabs in Gaza.
Current demographic bode well for the Jewish majority, which is expected to
grow during the next 20 years due to a substantial rise in fertility since
1995, while Arab/Muslim fertility throughout the Middle East has declined
sharply. In addition, the Arab minority has experienced an accelerated
net-emigration from Judea and Samaria: 580,000 since 1967.
Barak's position that demography is "more threatening than Iran" is detached
from reality. Apparently, scrutinizing facts is not a Barak trait, as was
also evident during his May 2000 disorderly withdrawal from Lebanon and his
July 2000 Camp David negotiation with Arafat and Clinton.
Demographic trends are not deterministic. The current Jewish demographic
tailwind can be bolstered and leveraged, provided that Israeli leaders study
the facts and implement a sound demographic policy.
The options available to Jerusalem are not limited to the establishment of a
Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria on one hand or an Apartheid state on
the other hand. Au contraire, a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria would
severely destabilize the Middle East and deteriorate the region toward
chaos.
Demography is a serious subject. It cannot be handled through off-the-cuff
statements and must be presented accurately, avoiding toxic demographic
assets.
View this article at Israel Behind the News
their vision and long-term strategy to tenuous demographic constraints: A
Jewish minority of 8% and 33% respectively between the Jordan River and the
Mediterranean. Their defiance of odds was responsible for the 1948
establishment of the Jewish State.
In 2010, there is a solid 67% Jewish majority in the combined area of
pre-1967 Israel and Judea and Samaria. However, some Israeli politicians
employ toxic demographic assets. They inflate the number of Arabs in Judea
and Samaria in order to scare the Jewish State into a retreat from a most
critical area, historically and security-wise.
The following OpEd, by Haim Rozenberg, former Head of Long-Term Planning at
RAFAEL (Israel Defense Ministry's Armament Development Authority), addresses
the issue of toxic demographic assets.
Shabbat Shalom,
Yoram Ettinger
Toxic Demographic Assets
News First Class, February 8, 2010
Haim Rozenberg, former Head Long-Term Planning, RAFAEL (Israel Defense
Ministry's Armament Development Authority)
Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, said on February 4, 2010 that there are 12
million persons between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean: 6 million
Jews and 6 million Arabs. Therefore, he concluded, a two state solution
would spare Israel the wrath of Apartheid. Really?!
Barak's conclusion is based on a dramatic error of a two million person gap.
In fact, the total population west of the Jordan River is 10 million.
According to Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics (ICBS), Israel's
population includes 6 million Jews and 1.5 million Arabs. The ICBS has not
dealt with Judea, Samaria and Gaza Arabs since 1997.
Recent studies, which were published by the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic
Studies ( http://www.biu.ac.il/SOC/besa/MSPS65.pdf ) and by the Institute
for Zionist Strategies ( http://izsvideo.org/papers/faitelson2009.pdf ) have
documented about 4 million - and not 6 million - Arabs between the Jordan
River and the Mediterranean: 1.5 million in pre-1967 Israel, 1.5 in Judea
and Samaria and 1.2 in Gaza.
Barak has been off by two million Arabs!
A solid 67% Jewish majority - without Gaza - has existed west of the Jordan
River since 1967. The 10 million persons west of the Jordan River consist of
some 6 million Jews, 3 million Arabs in the combined area of "pre-1967
Israel" and Judea and Samaria and 1.2 million Arabs in Gaza.
Current demographic bode well for the Jewish majority, which is expected to
grow during the next 20 years due to a substantial rise in fertility since
1995, while Arab/Muslim fertility throughout the Middle East has declined
sharply. In addition, the Arab minority has experienced an accelerated
net-emigration from Judea and Samaria: 580,000 since 1967.
Barak's position that demography is "more threatening than Iran" is detached
from reality. Apparently, scrutinizing facts is not a Barak trait, as was
also evident during his May 2000 disorderly withdrawal from Lebanon and his
July 2000 Camp David negotiation with Arafat and Clinton.
Demographic trends are not deterministic. The current Jewish demographic
tailwind can be bolstered and leveraged, provided that Israeli leaders study
the facts and implement a sound demographic policy.
The options available to Jerusalem are not limited to the establishment of a
Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria on one hand or an Apartheid state on
the other hand. Au contraire, a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria would
severely destabilize the Middle East and deteriorate the region toward
chaos.
Demography is a serious subject. It cannot be handled through off-the-cuff
statements and must be presented accurately, avoiding toxic demographic
assets.
View this article at Israel Behind the News
Hey New Israel Fund, Criticism is a Democratic Right
by Anne Herzberg for the Jerusalem Post
It’s strange that groups claiming to be well-versed in human rights seem so unfamiliar with the concept of free speech.
Talkbacks (1)
Those who make a full-time pursuit of criticizing others probably should grow thicker skin. Yet the New Israel Fund (NIF) and its NGO grantees have launched a thin-skinned offensive against an Israeli student group that criticized them. And they have dragged NGO Monitor into the fray.
As soon as Im Tirtzu released its report detailing how Israeli human rights organizations contributed to the Goldstone Report, NIF backers unleashed ad hominem attacks against the student group and against NGO Monitor (though we were not involved in the report). NIF has threatened to sue Im Tirtzu and any newspaper that repeats its findings. It also sent a letter to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu calling NGO Monitor “the rotten fruit of Israeli democracy.”
The record needs to be set straight regarding many troubling aspects of NIF’s combative reaction. To avert criticism of their activities, many of the non-governmental organizations highlighted in Im Tirtzu’s report - such as B’Tselem, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel - are promoting the canard that if only Israel had cooperated with Richard Goldstone and his UN fact-finding mission on the Gaza war, his report would not have been as outrageously one-sided as it turned out to be.
In truth, there is no evidence that Israeli participation in the Goldstone mission would have changed the outcome of the widely panned report.
Goldstone’s mission was the product of a political war conducted against Israel in the UN Human Rights Council. Led by some of the world’s most abusive regimes - including China, Cuba and Saudi Arabia - this corrupt body has ignored mass atrocities such as the genocide in Darfur, the slaughter of more than 25,000 Sri Lankans and the forced starvation and enslavement of North Koreans. Indeed, the Goldstone mission was created by the Organization of the Islamic Conference to deflect attention from the horrific abuses of its member states and their supporters. In fact, according to the International Criminal Court prosecutor, Goldstone’s mission was financed by the Arab League.
FOR HIS part, Goldstone went along with the farce. Where facts exonerating the IDF existed - whether from the UN, the Israeli Foreign Ministry or independent sources - Goldstone apparently ignored or twisted such evidence, choosing instead to credit Hamas sources.
Israeli NGOs played a central role in laying the foundation for Goldstone’s untenable report. During the fighting in Gaza, these groups issued nonstop allegations of “war crimes,” “collective punishment” and intentional murder of civilians. They delivered countless publications containing speculative and unconfirmed claims used to bolster the HRC’s predetermined conclusions. Much of the Goldstone Report was based directly on these inflammatory charges.
Rather than admit their role, these organizations now seek to absolve themselves of responsibility. While NGO assertions of Goldstone’s fairness are perhaps rooted in naiveté, the attempts by the NIF and its grantees to muzzle critics are far more pernicious. Since NGO Monitor first raised the issue of European government funding for supposedly “nongovernmental” organizations (many of which also receive financial and other support from the NIF), these groups have resorted to childish attacks. They have bizarrely characterized NGO Monitor as “extremist” and “right-wing” (whatever those terms mean), and complained that simply reporting on their funding and activities amounts to “repression of dissent.”
But the right of expression always comes with the potential for disapproval. It is strange that groups claiming to be so well-versed in human rights seem so unfamiliar with the concept of free speech.
These attacks must not divert attention from the massive power that NIF and its beneficiaries wield. NIF has an annual budget of $32 million. Its Israeli grantees also receive tens of millions annually from the EU, European governments, the US-based Ford Foundation and George Soros’s Open Society Institute.
NIF-funded NGOs regularly engage in public relations blitzes, often facilitated by professional media consultants. They hold press conferences, issue glossy publications in multiple languages, and contribute regular op-eds and articles to high-profile media outlets such as Ma’ariv, Haaretz, The New York Times, and Huffington Post. They regularly submit reports at the UN and send representatives to conferences in Europe and America. B’Tselem has a growing lobbying office in Washington and a representative in the UK.
NGO Monitor researchers have analyzed NIF funding practices for years. While the organization does some positive work in Israel that should be applauded, it refuses to engage in debate regarding several of its grantees that demonize Israel at the UN, support boycott and divestment campaigns, promote “lawfare” cases against Israeli officials, and even advocate erasing the Jewish character of the state. Significantly, many NIF donors are unaware of these activities. NIF has rebuffed all of NGO Monitor’s attempts to discuss appropriate “red lines” for the groups they fund.
Perhaps if NIF would stop name-calling and threatening lawsuits, the path would be open for a constructive debate about the role several NIF-supported NGOs have played in the demonization of Israel, and their exploitation by reactionary and totalitarian forces at the UN. Instead of blocking healthy discussion, NIF and its grantees should welcome this conversation - a conversation that would benefit NIF donors, the Israeli public and, ultimately, Israeli democracy.
The writer, Anne Herzberg, is the legal adviser of NGO Monitor.
View the article at Israel Behind the News
It’s strange that groups claiming to be well-versed in human rights seem so unfamiliar with the concept of free speech.
Talkbacks (1)
Those who make a full-time pursuit of criticizing others probably should grow thicker skin. Yet the New Israel Fund (NIF) and its NGO grantees have launched a thin-skinned offensive against an Israeli student group that criticized them. And they have dragged NGO Monitor into the fray.
As soon as Im Tirtzu released its report detailing how Israeli human rights organizations contributed to the Goldstone Report, NIF backers unleashed ad hominem attacks against the student group and against NGO Monitor (though we were not involved in the report). NIF has threatened to sue Im Tirtzu and any newspaper that repeats its findings. It also sent a letter to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu calling NGO Monitor “the rotten fruit of Israeli democracy.”
The record needs to be set straight regarding many troubling aspects of NIF’s combative reaction. To avert criticism of their activities, many of the non-governmental organizations highlighted in Im Tirtzu’s report - such as B’Tselem, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel - are promoting the canard that if only Israel had cooperated with Richard Goldstone and his UN fact-finding mission on the Gaza war, his report would not have been as outrageously one-sided as it turned out to be.
In truth, there is no evidence that Israeli participation in the Goldstone mission would have changed the outcome of the widely panned report.
Goldstone’s mission was the product of a political war conducted against Israel in the UN Human Rights Council. Led by some of the world’s most abusive regimes - including China, Cuba and Saudi Arabia - this corrupt body has ignored mass atrocities such as the genocide in Darfur, the slaughter of more than 25,000 Sri Lankans and the forced starvation and enslavement of North Koreans. Indeed, the Goldstone mission was created by the Organization of the Islamic Conference to deflect attention from the horrific abuses of its member states and their supporters. In fact, according to the International Criminal Court prosecutor, Goldstone’s mission was financed by the Arab League.
FOR HIS part, Goldstone went along with the farce. Where facts exonerating the IDF existed - whether from the UN, the Israeli Foreign Ministry or independent sources - Goldstone apparently ignored or twisted such evidence, choosing instead to credit Hamas sources.
Israeli NGOs played a central role in laying the foundation for Goldstone’s untenable report. During the fighting in Gaza, these groups issued nonstop allegations of “war crimes,” “collective punishment” and intentional murder of civilians. They delivered countless publications containing speculative and unconfirmed claims used to bolster the HRC’s predetermined conclusions. Much of the Goldstone Report was based directly on these inflammatory charges.
Rather than admit their role, these organizations now seek to absolve themselves of responsibility. While NGO assertions of Goldstone’s fairness are perhaps rooted in naiveté, the attempts by the NIF and its grantees to muzzle critics are far more pernicious. Since NGO Monitor first raised the issue of European government funding for supposedly “nongovernmental” organizations (many of which also receive financial and other support from the NIF), these groups have resorted to childish attacks. They have bizarrely characterized NGO Monitor as “extremist” and “right-wing” (whatever those terms mean), and complained that simply reporting on their funding and activities amounts to “repression of dissent.”
But the right of expression always comes with the potential for disapproval. It is strange that groups claiming to be so well-versed in human rights seem so unfamiliar with the concept of free speech.
These attacks must not divert attention from the massive power that NIF and its beneficiaries wield. NIF has an annual budget of $32 million. Its Israeli grantees also receive tens of millions annually from the EU, European governments, the US-based Ford Foundation and George Soros’s Open Society Institute.
NIF-funded NGOs regularly engage in public relations blitzes, often facilitated by professional media consultants. They hold press conferences, issue glossy publications in multiple languages, and contribute regular op-eds and articles to high-profile media outlets such as Ma’ariv, Haaretz, The New York Times, and Huffington Post. They regularly submit reports at the UN and send representatives to conferences in Europe and America. B’Tselem has a growing lobbying office in Washington and a representative in the UK.
NGO Monitor researchers have analyzed NIF funding practices for years. While the organization does some positive work in Israel that should be applauded, it refuses to engage in debate regarding several of its grantees that demonize Israel at the UN, support boycott and divestment campaigns, promote “lawfare” cases against Israeli officials, and even advocate erasing the Jewish character of the state. Significantly, many NIF donors are unaware of these activities. NIF has rebuffed all of NGO Monitor’s attempts to discuss appropriate “red lines” for the groups they fund.
Perhaps if NIF would stop name-calling and threatening lawsuits, the path would be open for a constructive debate about the role several NIF-supported NGOs have played in the demonization of Israel, and their exploitation by reactionary and totalitarian forces at the UN. Instead of blocking healthy discussion, NIF and its grantees should welcome this conversation - a conversation that would benefit NIF donors, the Israeli public and, ultimately, Israeli democracy.
The writer, Anne Herzberg, is the legal adviser of NGO Monitor.
View the article at Israel Behind the News
Endangering Lives to Sell Newspapers: Misrepresenting a Professional Critique of the Goldstone Report
by Professor Alan Dershowitz
Professor of Law, Harvard University
It all began with an innocent enough request for an interview about the Goldstone report and my 49 page response [1] to it. The Israeli Army radio station asked to interview me. The interview was conducted by an experienced host, Razi Barkai. Unbeknownst to me, Barkai had an agenda. He wanted to get me to say that I thought that Goldstone was a “moser.” He wanted me to use this Hebrew word, whose meaning I did not understand, because in Israel, this obscure theological term has taken on a meaning of its own. According to The Forward, “the term moser entered Israeli political discourse in 1995 in the wake of Rabin’s assassination by radical settler supporter Yigal Amir, when Amir cited some rabbis’ designation of Rabin as a moser as part of his justification for carrying out the murder.” The Forward quoted Michael Karpin, an Israeli journalist and the author of a book on Rabin’s assassination, as follows: “After the assassination, when Amir was interviewed by the police and he mentioned the term moser, people tried to find out what it is...Nobody used it here before the assassination.”
Unfortunately, I was totally unfamiliar with the “inside baseball”-or in this case “inside Israel”-use of this esoteric term.
Several times during the interview, Barkai tried to get me to agree that Goldstone was a moser, a word he pronounced with a thick accent. Since the interview was being conducted in English, I thought he was asking me to agree with him that Goldstone was a “monster.” I would never use the term “monster” since it suggests an inherent, even genetic, flaw in a person, without regard to what he has said or done. I was clear throughout my interview that I believed that Goldstone had exploited his Jewishness to lend illegitimate credibility to a false report [2]. In this respect, he had betrayed his people and deserved to be condemned in the marketplace of ideas. Accordingly, when Barkai asked me the following question, “Do you hint, Professor, that he is a moser, someone who betrays his own people?,” I focused on the part of the question I understood. Believing that he is someone who betrays his own people, I answered the question in the affirmative. Barkai had sprung the trap. Now he had me. He could send out press releases indicating that I had called Goldstone a moser, even though I never used the word and had no idea what it meant.
The story spread quickly around the world, and I was condemned, largely by the extreme left, for advocating Goldstone’s murder. As soon as I heard this, I immediately demanded a clarification from Barkai, which he ran on the air. I repeatedly emphasized, in subsequent interviews, that “I certainly did not mean to imply that any physical harm should come to Goldstone.” But this didn’t stop the incitement by those in the media more interested in sensationalism than truth.
M.J. Rosenberg, the former Director of Policy Analysis for Israel Policy Forum, wrote in his Palestine Note blog that I was “calling for Goldstone’s murder.” Even more insidiously, the Forward, a mainstream Jewish newspaper, ran a lengthy piece strongly implying that I must have known the theological (or “Halachic”) implications of “moser.” They went so far as to find an elementary school classmate at Etz Chayim Yeshiva in Boro Park who told them, quite erroneously, that I “must have heard it as a child.” (Another classmate wrote the Forward a letter confirming that he too had never heard it-and he was a good Yeshiva student!) The Forward then went on to quote another rabbi to the effect that “a moser can become a capital crime” under certain circumstances. At the very bottom of the article, so as not to detract from its sensationalism, the Forward included the following disclaimer:
“I do not want any harm to come to Richard Goldstone,” Dershowitz said. “I want him to be responded to in the marketplace of ideas.”
An article in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency by Ron Kampares was even more irresponsible. It “reported” the following:
“Most recently, Alan Dershowitz likened him to a “moser”, a Jewish traitor deemed in some interpretations as worthy of a death sentence.”
This was written days after I had made it clear that I wanted no harm to befall Goldstone. A response to the JTA article by Debra DeLee, President and CEO of Americans For Peace Now, accused me-also days after I made my position clear-of calling Goldstone a “moser,” which she said is “a term reserved in traditional Jewish law for a Jewish traitor who should be killed.”
She also showed her ignorance of the fact that I had written a 49 page substantive response to the Goldstone report, by saying that I “could have-and should have-aired substantive disagreements about the report that Judge Goldstone authored following the Gaza War.”
Finally, a columnist for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz (Bradley Burston) described me as “Kahane-sounding,” a reference for the radical rabbi who did in fact call for violence-as contrasted for my call for peace based on a two-state solution and the end of civilian settlements. But no matter, its sells newspapers.
It’s bad enough that there are some religious extremists on both sides who actually incite their followers to commit violence. But when elements of the mainstream Israeli and Jewish media twist the truth in the interest of sensationalism to imply-or state outright-that I am calling for the murder of Richard Goldstone, it is those irresponsible members of the media (and of Americans For Peace Now) who become the inciters.
See this article at Israel Behind the News
Professor of Law, Harvard University
It all began with an innocent enough request for an interview about the Goldstone report and my 49 page response [1] to it. The Israeli Army radio station asked to interview me. The interview was conducted by an experienced host, Razi Barkai. Unbeknownst to me, Barkai had an agenda. He wanted to get me to say that I thought that Goldstone was a “moser.” He wanted me to use this Hebrew word, whose meaning I did not understand, because in Israel, this obscure theological term has taken on a meaning of its own. According to The Forward, “the term moser entered Israeli political discourse in 1995 in the wake of Rabin’s assassination by radical settler supporter Yigal Amir, when Amir cited some rabbis’ designation of Rabin as a moser as part of his justification for carrying out the murder.” The Forward quoted Michael Karpin, an Israeli journalist and the author of a book on Rabin’s assassination, as follows: “After the assassination, when Amir was interviewed by the police and he mentioned the term moser, people tried to find out what it is...Nobody used it here before the assassination.”
Unfortunately, I was totally unfamiliar with the “inside baseball”-or in this case “inside Israel”-use of this esoteric term.
Several times during the interview, Barkai tried to get me to agree that Goldstone was a moser, a word he pronounced with a thick accent. Since the interview was being conducted in English, I thought he was asking me to agree with him that Goldstone was a “monster.” I would never use the term “monster” since it suggests an inherent, even genetic, flaw in a person, without regard to what he has said or done. I was clear throughout my interview that I believed that Goldstone had exploited his Jewishness to lend illegitimate credibility to a false report [2]. In this respect, he had betrayed his people and deserved to be condemned in the marketplace of ideas. Accordingly, when Barkai asked me the following question, “Do you hint, Professor, that he is a moser, someone who betrays his own people?,” I focused on the part of the question I understood. Believing that he is someone who betrays his own people, I answered the question in the affirmative. Barkai had sprung the trap. Now he had me. He could send out press releases indicating that I had called Goldstone a moser, even though I never used the word and had no idea what it meant.
The story spread quickly around the world, and I was condemned, largely by the extreme left, for advocating Goldstone’s murder. As soon as I heard this, I immediately demanded a clarification from Barkai, which he ran on the air. I repeatedly emphasized, in subsequent interviews, that “I certainly did not mean to imply that any physical harm should come to Goldstone.” But this didn’t stop the incitement by those in the media more interested in sensationalism than truth.
M.J. Rosenberg, the former Director of Policy Analysis for Israel Policy Forum, wrote in his Palestine Note blog that I was “calling for Goldstone’s murder.” Even more insidiously, the Forward, a mainstream Jewish newspaper, ran a lengthy piece strongly implying that I must have known the theological (or “Halachic”) implications of “moser.” They went so far as to find an elementary school classmate at Etz Chayim Yeshiva in Boro Park who told them, quite erroneously, that I “must have heard it as a child.” (Another classmate wrote the Forward a letter confirming that he too had never heard it-and he was a good Yeshiva student!) The Forward then went on to quote another rabbi to the effect that “a moser can become a capital crime” under certain circumstances. At the very bottom of the article, so as not to detract from its sensationalism, the Forward included the following disclaimer:
“I do not want any harm to come to Richard Goldstone,” Dershowitz said. “I want him to be responded to in the marketplace of ideas.”
An article in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency by Ron Kampares was even more irresponsible. It “reported” the following:
“Most recently, Alan Dershowitz likened him to a “moser”, a Jewish traitor deemed in some interpretations as worthy of a death sentence.”
This was written days after I had made it clear that I wanted no harm to befall Goldstone. A response to the JTA article by Debra DeLee, President and CEO of Americans For Peace Now, accused me-also days after I made my position clear-of calling Goldstone a “moser,” which she said is “a term reserved in traditional Jewish law for a Jewish traitor who should be killed.”
She also showed her ignorance of the fact that I had written a 49 page substantive response to the Goldstone report, by saying that I “could have-and should have-aired substantive disagreements about the report that Judge Goldstone authored following the Gaza War.”
Finally, a columnist for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz (Bradley Burston) described me as “Kahane-sounding,” a reference for the radical rabbi who did in fact call for violence-as contrasted for my call for peace based on a two-state solution and the end of civilian settlements. But no matter, its sells newspapers.
It’s bad enough that there are some religious extremists on both sides who actually incite their followers to commit violence. But when elements of the mainstream Israeli and Jewish media twist the truth in the interest of sensationalism to imply-or state outright-that I am calling for the murder of Richard Goldstone, it is those irresponsible members of the media (and of Americans For Peace Now) who become the inciters.
See this article at Israel Behind the News
Could US-Israel Ties Crumble over Iran
The strategic relationship between Israel and the United States could collapse amid their dispute over Iran.
In three simulations conducted in Israel and the United States, relations between the two countries declined rapidly amid a dispute over a response to Iran's nuclear weapons program. The simulations envisioned a diplomatic crisis as Washington sought to stop Israel from attacking Iran.
"The United States was unwilling to use military force or support Israeli military action even after other measures failed," a report on the three simulations said. "U.S.-Israeli relations deteriorated dramatically."
The report by the Washington Institute, titled "Serious Play: War Games Explore Options on Iran," reviewed the war games conducted by three leading Western strategic institutes.
In December 2009, Brookings Institution, Harvard University, and Israel's Institute for National Security Studies conducted separate simulations to analyze Iranian nuclear scenarios, with leading strategists playing the leadership of Iran, Israel and the United States.
"And three recent war games focused on the Iranian nuclear weapons issue suggest that the prospects for halting the regime's progress toward nuclear weapons are not good," the report, authored by defense fellow Jeffrey White, said. "The results, unfortunately, were uniformly negative." Both governments and militaries employ simulations to help form decisions and tactics. Usually, outside consultants draft the initial scenario and monitor the responses to ensure realism.
White, a former Defense Department analyst, reviewed all three simulations. He said all three war games, with a scenario that envisioned the emergence of Iranian nuclear weapons, ended with a bolstered Teheran and tattered Israeli-U.S. relations.
The Harvard simulation, organized by the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, concluded that President Barack Obama would fail to garner international support for sanctions against Iran. At the same time, Jerusalem and Washington would grow apart amid disagreement over a nuclear Iran.
"The U.S.-Israeli relationship deteriorated dramatically during the game, leading to a deep diplomatic crisis," the report said. "Indeed, most observers would probably characterize the outcome as a win for Iran and a defeat for the United States and Israel."
The Brookings simulation also ended with U.S. anger toward Israel as Washington attempted to avoid conflict with Iran. In this war game, Israel actually attacked Iran's nuclear facilities.
"The United States was unhappy with Israel over the attack." the report said. "The United States tried to talk tough with Iran but also sought direct negotiations."
In Tel Aviv, INSS envisioned an indecisive Israel and the United States amid Iran's advancement toward nuclear weapons. At the end of the simulation, Iran also emerged undeterred by either Jerusalem or Washington. "Israel and the United States lacked clear goals and strategies for dealing with Iran's program," the report said. "Israel was perceived as being unhelpful to the United States."
The war games suggested that Israel's military option against Iran would mark a leading challenge to U.S. strategy in the Middle East. The report said the simulations pointed to disputing assessments regarding the threat from Iran's nuclear program.
"The United States eschewed military action to avoid the attendant risks, while Israel was more willing to take the risks to avoid, or at least postpone, the nuclear threat," the report said. "Game play suggests that an eventual U.S.-Israeli crisis is likely."
White urged the Obama administration to revise its strategy and tactics toward a determined Iran. He cited a U.S. option for regime change in Teheran as well as plans for military action against Iran.
"The United States must plan for military action, either by itself, with others, or in the wake of unilateral Israeli strikes," the report said.
"Both the military and the public should be prepared for the consequences of these scenarios. These preparations must be carried out with the full understanding that the military option is practicable -- and, at the end of the day, may well be the required course of action."
Another recommendation was that Israel prepare both the military and civilian sector for what White termed an "extended war on multiple fronts and deep within the homeland." Such a war, he warned, could result in casualties and disruption of civilian life.
"Israel already appears to be moving in this direction, and that course seems wise given the outcome of the war games," White said. "Time is running out."
See this article at Israel Behind the News
In three simulations conducted in Israel and the United States, relations between the two countries declined rapidly amid a dispute over a response to Iran's nuclear weapons program. The simulations envisioned a diplomatic crisis as Washington sought to stop Israel from attacking Iran.
"The United States was unwilling to use military force or support Israeli military action even after other measures failed," a report on the three simulations said. "U.S.-Israeli relations deteriorated dramatically."
The report by the Washington Institute, titled "Serious Play: War Games Explore Options on Iran," reviewed the war games conducted by three leading Western strategic institutes.
In December 2009, Brookings Institution, Harvard University, and Israel's Institute for National Security Studies conducted separate simulations to analyze Iranian nuclear scenarios, with leading strategists playing the leadership of Iran, Israel and the United States.
"And three recent war games focused on the Iranian nuclear weapons issue suggest that the prospects for halting the regime's progress toward nuclear weapons are not good," the report, authored by defense fellow Jeffrey White, said. "The results, unfortunately, were uniformly negative." Both governments and militaries employ simulations to help form decisions and tactics. Usually, outside consultants draft the initial scenario and monitor the responses to ensure realism.
White, a former Defense Department analyst, reviewed all three simulations. He said all three war games, with a scenario that envisioned the emergence of Iranian nuclear weapons, ended with a bolstered Teheran and tattered Israeli-U.S. relations.
The Harvard simulation, organized by the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, concluded that President Barack Obama would fail to garner international support for sanctions against Iran. At the same time, Jerusalem and Washington would grow apart amid disagreement over a nuclear Iran.
"The U.S.-Israeli relationship deteriorated dramatically during the game, leading to a deep diplomatic crisis," the report said. "Indeed, most observers would probably characterize the outcome as a win for Iran and a defeat for the United States and Israel."
The Brookings simulation also ended with U.S. anger toward Israel as Washington attempted to avoid conflict with Iran. In this war game, Israel actually attacked Iran's nuclear facilities.
"The United States was unhappy with Israel over the attack." the report said. "The United States tried to talk tough with Iran but also sought direct negotiations."
In Tel Aviv, INSS envisioned an indecisive Israel and the United States amid Iran's advancement toward nuclear weapons. At the end of the simulation, Iran also emerged undeterred by either Jerusalem or Washington. "Israel and the United States lacked clear goals and strategies for dealing with Iran's program," the report said. "Israel was perceived as being unhelpful to the United States."
The war games suggested that Israel's military option against Iran would mark a leading challenge to U.S. strategy in the Middle East. The report said the simulations pointed to disputing assessments regarding the threat from Iran's nuclear program.
"The United States eschewed military action to avoid the attendant risks, while Israel was more willing to take the risks to avoid, or at least postpone, the nuclear threat," the report said. "Game play suggests that an eventual U.S.-Israeli crisis is likely."
White urged the Obama administration to revise its strategy and tactics toward a determined Iran. He cited a U.S. option for regime change in Teheran as well as plans for military action against Iran.
"The United States must plan for military action, either by itself, with others, or in the wake of unilateral Israeli strikes," the report said.
"Both the military and the public should be prepared for the consequences of these scenarios. These preparations must be carried out with the full understanding that the military option is practicable -- and, at the end of the day, may well be the required course of action."
Another recommendation was that Israel prepare both the military and civilian sector for what White termed an "extended war on multiple fronts and deep within the homeland." Such a war, he warned, could result in casualties and disruption of civilian life.
"Israel already appears to be moving in this direction, and that course seems wise given the outcome of the war games," White said. "Time is running out."
See this article at Israel Behind the News
Thursday, February 11, 2010
NGO Monitor Calls on New Israel Fund to Draw "Red Lines"
JERUSALEM - The research and watchdog group NGO Monitor (ngo-monitor.org) today called on the New Israel Fund (NIF) to implement clear "red lines" regarding the activities and rhetoric of the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that it funds. NIF has been widely criticized for supporting advocacy groups that contribute centrally to demonization through allegations of "war crimes" and intense lobbying on behalf of the Goldstone Report.
"Instead of using its relationship with NGOs to advance constructive agendas, NIF has been supporting and defending campaigns that demonize and delegitimize Israel," charged Prof. Gerald Steinberg, president of NGO Monitor. "In many cases, it appears that NIF donors are unaware of the activities of these groups and their damaging impact. It is essential that powerful organizations like NIF establish clear guidelines and implement them in a unequivocal and transparent manner."
NGO Monitor proposes that NIF adopt "red lines" that prevent funding for organizations that support activities designed to promote the NGO "Durban strategy" to isolate Israel:
1. BDS: Boycotts, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaigns.
2. Demonization and delegitimization: Expressions including "apartheid," Nazi rhetoric, "war crimes," and deliberate misrepresentations of international law, as well as the use of UN frameworks for these goals.
3. Lawfare: Legal threats or activities in courts outside Israel directed against Israeli officials, "Zionist" or "parastatal" groups, or companies that do business in Israel.
4. Anti-Zionism: Opposition to the definition of Israel as a "Jewish and democratic state," including demands for a "one-state solution," the revocation of the Law of Return, and the elimination of national Jewish symbols.
"For an organization that claims that 'our supporters love Israel,' these red lines should be self-evident," said Steinberg.
He added that NGO Monitor has raised these topics in reports and correspondence with NIF officials on several occasions, but NIF has been unwilling to engage in substantive debate. "We remain committed to serious dialogue with the NIF, to address and debate these important issues and develop effective guidelines for funding," Steinberg said.
NGO Monitor, 1 Ben Maimon Blvd, Jerusalem 92262, Israel
Tel: +972-2-566-1020 +972-2-566-1020 Fax: +972-77-511-7030
For further info contact comms@ngo-monitor.org
www.ngo-monitor.org
"Instead of using its relationship with NGOs to advance constructive agendas, NIF has been supporting and defending campaigns that demonize and delegitimize Israel," charged Prof. Gerald Steinberg, president of NGO Monitor. "In many cases, it appears that NIF donors are unaware of the activities of these groups and their damaging impact. It is essential that powerful organizations like NIF establish clear guidelines and implement them in a unequivocal and transparent manner."
NGO Monitor proposes that NIF adopt "red lines" that prevent funding for organizations that support activities designed to promote the NGO "Durban strategy" to isolate Israel:
1. BDS: Boycotts, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaigns.
2. Demonization and delegitimization: Expressions including "apartheid," Nazi rhetoric, "war crimes," and deliberate misrepresentations of international law, as well as the use of UN frameworks for these goals.
3. Lawfare: Legal threats or activities in courts outside Israel directed against Israeli officials, "Zionist" or "parastatal" groups, or companies that do business in Israel.
4. Anti-Zionism: Opposition to the definition of Israel as a "Jewish and democratic state," including demands for a "one-state solution," the revocation of the Law of Return, and the elimination of national Jewish symbols.
"For an organization that claims that 'our supporters love Israel,' these red lines should be self-evident," said Steinberg.
He added that NGO Monitor has raised these topics in reports and correspondence with NIF officials on several occasions, but NIF has been unwilling to engage in substantive debate. "We remain committed to serious dialogue with the NIF, to address and debate these important issues and develop effective guidelines for funding," Steinberg said.
NGO Monitor, 1 Ben Maimon Blvd, Jerusalem 92262, Israel
Tel: +972-2-566-1020 +972-2-566-1020 Fax: +972-77-511-7030
For further info contact comms@ngo-monitor.org
www.ngo-monitor.org
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