Israel Harel vs. NIF in Ha-Ha-Haretz!!!

The New Israel Fund for Deepening the Jewish-Arab Rift
By Israel Harel, Haaretz Correspondent

The Im Tirtzu organization accuses the New Israel Fund of financing Israeli organizations which Judge Richard Goldstone used for information to accuse the Israel Defense Forces of "war crimes." The fund's response, as is the wont of radical leftist organizations under fire, was to smear its critics as "fascists". Granted, the NIF's president, Naomi Chazan, signed a petition that defined the IDF's operations in Gaza as "terror against civilians" and demanded that Israel abide by "all UN resolutions relating to the conflict" (including 194, which Palestinians interpret as granting them a "right of return"). Nevertheless, the personal campaign against her is a mistake.

The NIF's many supporters in the media and among political organizations (which benefit from the fund, both directly and indirectly) have used this personal campaign to divert the debate from the fund's subversive goal (a "new Israel," not Jewish or Zionist), which it has furthered by donating more than $200 million thus far to hundreds of anti-Zionist organizations (I have a list, if anyone is interested).

...The NIF also finances Jewish-led groups that seek to undermine Israel's Jewish identity, such as the Association for Civil Rights in Israel...

Thus in funding organizations that work to deepen the rift between Jews and Arabs in Israel, the NIF has racked up noteworthy successes. Astonishingly, however, these successes are not proudly displayed to the fund's philanthropists. These donors, most of them Jews who support Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, are asked to contribute to the fund's praiseworthy - but as it turns out, not primary - activities: improving welfare, education and human rights in Israel.

Many NIF donors do not know that their money is being used to fund dozens of organizations committed to inflaming the Arab street, intensifying its nationalist tendencies and deepening the rift between Jews and Arabs.

These philanthropists would almost certainly object to their money being used to undermine Israel's Jewish identity and to lay a theoretical, legal and political framework for establishing another Arab state, on top of the proposed Palestinian state, in place of the State of Israel.

[See also http://www.jewishtribune.ca/TribuneV2/index.php/201002102639/Knesset-to-probe-New-Israel-Fund.html]