The New Israel Fund Steps in It a Bit (Updated)

[shira]

Via Noah Pollak, this rather devastating portrait of the New Israel Fund's view of the Jewishness of the Jewish state. Or at least the view of one senior NIF official. I'm a big fan of much of NIF's work, but if this cable from the Wikileaks trove is true, it's very unpleasant:



New Israel Fund (NIF) Associate Director in Israel Hedva Radovanitz, who manages grants to 350 NGOs totaling about 18 million dollars per year, said that the campaign against the NGOs was due to the "disappearance of the political left wing" in Israel and the lack of domestic constituency for the NGOs. She noted that when she headed ACRI's Tel Aviv office, ACRI had 5,000 members, while today it has less than 800, and it was only able to muster about 5,000 people to its December human rights march by relying on the active staff of the 120 NGOs that participated.

She commented that she believed that in 100 years Israel would be majority Arab and that the disappearance of a Jewish state would not be the tragedy that Israelis fear since it would become more democratic.

UPDATE: This is from the New Israel Fund's website, a statement by Hedva Radovanitz, who asserts that she left the organization last year in large part over ideological differences with its other leaders:

more...
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/09/the-new-israel-fund-steps-in-it-a-bit-updated/244628/

[shira]

1. Wikileaks - NIF member B'tselem receives 95% of its funds through foreign donors

¶6. (C) B'Tselem Director Jessica Montell, who estimated her 9
million NIS ($2.4 million) budget is 95 percent funded from
abroad, mostly from European countries, told PolOff on
February 10 that she did not believe the legislation would
pass in its current form. ACRI's International Communication
and Development Coordinator, Melanie Takefman, also told
PolOff on February 10 that she believed the troublesome
legislation would be amended and that the NGOs would likely
be able to influence the draft legislation so that it would
achieve its goal of greater transparency without restricting
the NGOs' ability to operate. Both denied any need for
greater transparency, but said they would welcome it if it
applied equally to all NGOs, including NGO-Monitor and
especially Jewish settler organizations.
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2010/02/10TELAVIV439.html

[Ken Burch]

2. It doesn't matter if the donors are foreign.

Nobody is funding NIF out of evil intent. Besides...groups like STAND WITH US get a lot of foreign funding too...but that's ok with you, because it's alright to have foreign funding for groups that DON'T want the war to end and don't want the injustice of the Occupation and the settlement project to end.

[shira]

4. It means they're not grassroots HR orgs, but political orgs. n/t

[Ken Burch]

7. It means nothing of the sort

It simply means a significant amount of their funding comes from other countries. Those who are members of the groups in the countries where they work ARE legitimately grassroots. There's no reason to assume foreign donors are automatically insincere in their concern for human rights. Not all foreigners who support the NIF(in fact, hardly any of them)are opponents of Israel's very existence. And what they say and do doesn't jeopardize Israel's existence. It's not as if the Israeli government HAS to be given a moral pass to do whatever it wants to Palestinians and Israeli Arabs simply to preserve the country. Israel isn't that weak...never really has been. Give the place a little credit for durability, shira. And give it at least enough credit to be able to face critique and open debate without cracking like an eggshell. This is the country, after all, that has the fourth-strongest army in the world.

And the NIF isn't anti-Zionist, so you have no reason to demonize them. A speculative statement about what the majority population of Israel might be in a century does not equate to opposition to Israel's existence. Do you really believe that you could prevent Israel from ending up with a majority Arab population IN A CENTURY simply by denying that such a thing was possible? Why WOULD you think that? How would that work? It's not as though refusing to acknowledge such a possibility would, by itself, lower the Israeli Arab birthrate or raise the Israeli Jewish birthrate(or halt Jewish outmigration from Israel).

All she did was make a casual observation. Simply saying what she said is not damaging to Israel.

[shira]

11. The lady quoted is beholden to those who pay her salary...

The problem is she doesn't think Jews being a minority within Israel is any big deal. I think the both of you need to live without basic freedoms in a closed society for a good while, hopefully on equal footing with the rest of the miserable population before saying that is a preferable situation.

Here's the issue with foreign funding...

Name another country with a major HR organization that goes public internationally with its criticism that is almost entirely paid for by foreigners.

I'll wait.

[azurnoir]

9. a timely attempt at delegitimizing B'Tselem could this be why or is it another case of serendipity?

Another B'Tselem Claim: IDF Denies Arabs Right to Protest

The extreme leftist group B'Tselem has released yet another anti-IDF report.

The latest report, the contents of which were made public Monday morning, accuses Israeli security forces of denying the right of Palestinian Authority Arabs to "demonstrate" in favor of the upcoming vote in the UN Security Council for a Palestinian state.

The report, which is based on an analysis by B'Tselem members of the way security forces are handling the weekly volent demonstrations held by Arab residents of the village of Nabi Saleh, argues that “Israel does not recognize the right of residents to demonstrate, and the military refers to any demonstration in the village as a disturbance, even when participants do not throw stones and do not resort to violence."

The report goes on to claim that "Soldiers and Border Police disperse the protests, sometimes even before it leaves the village, and in most cases without the protesters having used violence."

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/147779#.Tm31CuwsKPw

[shira]

12. The likelihood of violence for these demonstrations is high. It's good they're stopped.

If violence was extremely rare, that would be different.

[Ken Burch]

3. Why does it matter what happens in a hundred years?

Saying that the place might have an Arab majority wasn't an inherently anti-Israel comment...it was simply a demographic projection. You would agree, I hope, that it would be wrong to try to coerce Israeli Arabs to leave by deliberately making their lives worse just to preserve a Jewish majority within Israel.

Nobody can know for sure what the majority population of anywhere will be in a hundred years-what's so terrible about admitting that?
And must you assume that it is impossible for any Arab majority, anywhere, for the rest of eternity, EVER to be decent to people who identify as Jewish? How is that belief(if you hold it)NOT racist?

You've got to face facts, shira...any resolution of this crisis will require Israelis and those who sympathize with them to believe that Palestinians and other Arabs are capable of acting as civilized human beings. The fact that a million Mizrahi survived World War II nearly unscathed(yes, the 1,000 deaths in the postwar riots was terrible, but minor compared to what the Christian Europeans did) is proof that Arabs and Jews can live side by side in a civilized arrangement.
Obsessing about this innocent comment is proof that you are, at this point, unwilling to admit that this could ever even be possible. At some point, that is something that you and everyone else who identifies as "pro-Israel" will have to let go of.

[shira]

5. Ok, you move to the ME, not Israel, and live with limited basic...

...human rights (you and your friends, family) and tell us how wonderful life is for the whole Burch clan.

Deal?

Tell us whether life there outside of Israel ROCKS more than life within.

Think you'll be able to sell that to millions of Jews?

[Ken Burch]

6. What the rest of the Middle East has been like(which is now changing for the better

in case you haven't noticed)isn't the point.

You can't just assume that any situation in which Arabs are the majority, for the rest of eternity, would be a nightmare for everyone who isn't Arab. It isn't that simple and it isn't that hopeless.

Most people are trying to change for the better, and most will as time passes.

In any peace settlement, you're going to have to be willing to accept that Arabs can be trusted. Assuming they can never be trusted, and insisting on making them accept peace terms that are designed to make them agree that they can't be trusted, is a recipe for preventing actual peace from ever occurring.

I don't have to think that the current Arab world is utopia, or to be blind to its faults, to reject the idea that this person's statements aren't evil. In a hundred years, as no one else will be like they are now, Arabs also won't be like they are now. Like most people, they'll be better. If you don't believe that, than you don't really want peace. If you assume the worst of people, you're going to naturally prefer to stay at war with them and to continue to immiserate them if they are currently living at you mercy. That, sadly, is a universal statement.

[shira]

13. The best examples of democracy in that region are Lebanon and Turkey.

How do you think those societies would be for millions of Jews?

Seriously.

Are they as free as the USA, UK, or Israel? If not, why are you pushing that on millions of Jews who already have the same freedoms you enjoy? Unless you're willing to sacrifice your basic freedoms, and give good reason as to why you and millions of others should, what you think is irrelevant.

[azurnoir]

8. oh dear B'Tselem gets money from outside Israel surely evil is afoot

but gee where does the Jewish National Fund get its money from JNF is the organization that advertises itself as 'working with Bedouins' to 'help' move them to townships so they can 'make the desert bloom' or something

http://www.targetmarketingmag.com/article/viral-online-marketing-rejuvenates-jewish-national-funds-donor-base-71185/1#

[bemildred]

10. Not only that, she ADMITTED that you can't control what happens 100 years from now.

Horrors.

[shira]

14. You can't control it. Doesn't mean it's a good thing. You can have 'equality' with others....

...who live a miserable existence in closed societies, but do you think that's preferable to the situation now in Israel?

Of course not!

[LeftishBrit]

18. I think the whole point ...

is that Arab states may by then *not* involve a miserable existence or closed societies, rather than that this will inevitably continue, and Israel should join it.

We cannot imagine what life will be like in 100 years time. 100 years ago, Europe was extremely unstable and undemocratic (as it turned out, on the brink of horrific war); America, though at that time clearly more progressive than most of Europe, didn't allow women to vote and a significant part of the country would be dominated by Jim Crow for another half-century; and much of the Middle East, including what is now Israel, was part of the Ottoman Empire. Most people had little communication with people in other towns or villages, let alone the world at large; cars were a recent invention that few possessed; there was no adequate treatment for most infectious diseases; and about one-sixth of babies in Britain and America never reached their first birthday. However, some of our current problems were not an issue, as the world's population was about a quarter of what it is today.

[shira]

20. The likelihood of life in the ME outside Israel being liberal, socialist, democratic....

...is extremely low, but even if it happened do you think the need for Zionism would go away? Think of western, liberal democracies which require significant security for Jewish dayschools and synagogues, and every liberal/democratic nation in which it's not very easy being openly Jewish.

[bemildred]

22. You are in the right ballpark.

I would likely come in at a different slant, but what you said leads to precisely the same place. We live in a time of extremely rapid change, accellerating change, and even before the modern age you could not rely on much of anything on the social and political level 100 years on.

[shira]

15. JNF is not a Human Rights organization that deliberately goes international/public...

...with its criticisms and demonization of others, pretending to be legitimate grassroots.

[azurnoir]

16. well I'll agree with the first part of your statement but the link provided

in the post proves the second part to be kind of false

[shira]

19. What? The JNF is doing very noble, honorable work with Israeli Bedouins...

http://www.jnf.org/work-we-do/blueprint-negev/working-with-bedouin.html

Damned if they help, and damned if they don't.

Would you like to go on record now saying the Bedouins are better off impoverished and without sewage, infrastructure, and electricity?

[LeftishBrit]

17. While it was rather unnecessary for her to bring up issues of 100 years hence...

there being, after all, enough problems and conflicts to deal with right now - I don't see that what she said was all that bad. She was not calling for Israel to become majority-Arab right now, let alone for invasion and conquest of the Jewish state by Arab enemies; she was saying that demographic changes might make it majority-Arab in 100 years' time, and that by then greater democracy might make this work.

If it does, then great. I've never made it a secret on this board that a democratic secular one-state solution is something that I would support if I thought it would work, rather than leading to bloody civil war as would be the inevitable consequence at present. Same goes for many other countries.

But we haven't a clue what's going to happen in 100 years. I'm more worried about whether humans will destroy ourselves by then - even if the wars don't get us, the climate change might - than about the demographic details of the nations of that time.

[shira]

21. What does democratic/secular mean to you? Fatah, for example claims to be secular...

...and they sometimes hold democratic elections. So is life within the West Bank secular democracy in your POV?

If not, which country out there best demonstrates what you see as a superior secular/democratic society compared to Israel?