From my column in the American Prospect on the right’s defamation campaign against the New Israel Fund:
Ronen Shoval caught me off-guard. I’d phoned the newly prominent rightist to listen to him repeat his allegations that the New Israel Fund, the major philanthropic backer of Israeli human-rights groups, was “aiding Hamas.” But I wasn’t expecting him to say that the NIF was “serving communist interests.” He’s not actually an Israeli neo-McCarthyist, I realized. He’s an authentic, original McCarthyist — cut loose in both time and space, in free fall, looking desperately for his mother ship. For a few seconds I felt sorry for him.
My moment of lost-kitten pity didn’t last. Anachronistic as he sounds, Shoval is quite dangerous. With politicians and major media figures helping to arouse hysteria, his Im Tirtzu movement has enjoyed very quick success in its campaign against the NIF. At the end of January, Im Tirtzu (“If You Will It”) issued a study portraying the NIF as the hidden force responsible for war-crimes allegations in the Goldstone Report on the fighting between Israel and Hamas a year ago.
The daily Ma’ariv, with the second-largest circulation in Israel, launched the Im Tirtzu study with a lengthy, supportive article. Im Tirtzu followed with a direct personal campaign against NIF President Naomi Chazan, a former Knesset member. Demonstrators outside her house held signs depicting Chazan with a horn sprouting from her forehead — playing on the fact that Hebrew word for “fund” also means “horn.” Israel’s Government Press Office translated another right-wing Ma’ariv columnist’s attack on the NIF and e-mailed it to foreign correspondents as if it were a government press release. Within a week, the Knesset Law Committee established a subcommittee to investigate foreign funding of Israeli organizations.
It’s a safe bet that the new panel (the Committee on Un-Israeli Activities?) is not intended to investigate the funding that Im Tirtzu has itself received from the Rev. John Hagee’s Christians United For Israel or from the Central Fund, an American body that serves as a pipeline for donations to far-right groups in Israel and West Bank settlements. Nor is it likely to look into the donations from U.S. businessmen Sheldon Adelson and Ronald Lauder to the neo-conservative Shalem Center think tank, from which Prime Minister Netanyahu has drawn top appointees. Foreign financing, especially from Diaspora Jews, plays a major role in Israeli politics, and the right would suffer far more than the left if the cash flow from abroad were blocked.
So the fight here isn’t over funding. It’s about free speech. …
Read the full article here, and come back to South Jerusalem to comment.
Those who defend or are a part of Shoval’s Im Tirtzu movement get very upset of course when the word “fascism” or even the milder “fascistic” is used to describe them.
I would like to know how supportive the government of Israel is to this movement. To me this seems like a continuation in a more organized but grass roots way of what has been happening for awhile on other levels: attempts to silence, intimidate and denigrate those who criticize Israel’s actions and policies, those many who sincerely are supportive of Israel and feel that Israel is not acting in it’s own best interests.
It is sad to see that you prefer to attack IM TIRTZU instead odf accepting the true!
NIF is supporting anti-zionist NGO’s!
S, who is the Mc Carthy? YOU
The story is not complete without mention of the Knesset conference of Dec 1, held by NGO Monitor’s Gerald Steinberg, a number of right-wing MKs, and some academics.
http://www.ngo-monitor.org/article/13
The draft they produced, endorsed by the government, would require NGOs to register with the Registrar of Political Parties before receiving any support from foreign “governmental entities” and to report donations on every single publication and at every event (not just annually, as required anyway under the amutot law). Registration as above will also lose them their tax status as a Public Institution.
(And here I was thinking preferred tax status was the justification for requiring transparency from an organisation.)
The draft is clearly designed to apply only to human rights NGOs, as those are the ones who receive support from foreign “governmental entities”, which, btw, are rather widely defined. Funding of Im Tirzu by CUFI, for example, does not need to be transparent.
think that Naomi Chazan has nothing to apologize for. The Goldstone Report was an epic detailing the failed country of israel. I like the term “New Israel Fund” and view it as a supercession of the old israel based upon religious extremism and territory in favor of a New Israel, in which we all strive for universal justice. You go, girl!!!!!
From the piece: “‘The purpose of the New Israel Fund is to dismantle Israel as a Jewish state,’ he told me.”—If we do not admit the abstract possibility of our demise, that we might be wrong, we limit the power of our arguments. In the States, those curtailing “obsessive interest” in civil liberties speak of the danger of viewing the Constitution as a “sucide pact”; an outstanding Apellate Judge on the Federal Circuit (Posner) published a book not too long ago called “Not a suicide pact,” the phrase taken from a former Supreme Court Justice. A scientist cannot decide under what circumstances he will allow himself to be wrong. Truth comes of its own. Fears associated with “suicide pact” limit our ability to explore how the world might be. Yes, there are true dangers of failure in exploration. But failure is with us now, just distributed differently. We who worry of “suicide pact,” mostly, do not experience present failure. Yet it is there, experienced by others. This outsider sees this as the bittersweet heart of Israel, where failure cannot be easily turned from, unlike some other States. Frankly, the courage to be Israeli must be daunting; I do not believe I have it. The imperative to explore is at its greatest there; so too therefore the desire to have such quashed. The confrontations of this State are shared by all in history, but not in living. Some have to walk to make a forward even when greatly afraid. I can only hope there is some sense to what I have just said.
I’m having a problem wrapping my mind around your political spectrum. If the “right-wing” is what we might call “pro-Israel in extremis”, where does that put the American Council for Judaism, which is a collection of Reform Jews that opposed the creation of a Jewish state and which has historically had strong ties to the GOP? For that matter, where would one place the anti-Zionist Hasidics? Are they right-wing or left-wing? (Or are they the true centrists?)
Moving beyond strictly Jewish issues, what about Americans of a neo-isolationist bent who oppose all forms of foreign aid (both military aid and humanitarian aid) as a waste of taxpayer dollars? Are they creatures of the extreme left or the extreme right?
My point is that the left-right political spectrum is of limited use when discussing subjects at the intersection of Israel, Zionism, Judaism, and American foreign policy. One can easily write good articles without using it–and perhaps all of us should try to do so.