

As I recently wrote about, donations to the New Israel Fund have reportedly dropped nearly 20% in the past year, from $33,062,783 in 2015 to $27,064,945 in 2016. This is the lowest amount of money that the NIF has raised in the past six years.

And while a review of their recently released annual financial statement shows that the NIF has also cut its overall funding to Israeli groups by 35% over the past several years, it’s worth examining where their money is still going.

According to my analysis, significant NIF funds went to “Adalah: Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel” — which sounds politically benign and PC. The reality, however is that Adalah, publishes an online “Discriminatory Laws Database,” which claims to collect “text, analyses, and legal action for present and proposed discriminatory laws in Israel and the OPT [Occupied Palestinian Territories].”

This deceptive list does not distinguish between laws and legislative proposals, and refers to Zionism pejoratively. Furthermore, laws regarding the historic Jewish connection to Israel are labeled by Adalah as discriminatory, including the use of symbols and the Hebrew calendar. Just this summer, following an attack on Israeli police at the Temple Mount — in which two Druze border police officers were murdered — Adalah demanded that the Border Police be investigated for “the police killings of three Palestinian citizens of Israel involved in a shooting attack in the Old City of Jerusalem at the Al Aqsa Mosque.”

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Hamoked also received funds from the NIF this year. That organization claims to work “for the enforcement of standards and values of international human rights and humanitarian law.” Yet under this mission statement, Hamoked attacks the Israeli tactic of demolishing the homes of Palestinian terrorists (which Israel uses to deter terrorism and the spread of violent ideologies within Palestinian communities). In my view, Hamoked is devoted to defending the families of terrorists. So why are American Jewish donors, such as the Leichtag Foundation or the Jewish Communal Fund, sending money to the New Israel Fund — when it then goes directly to Hamoked?

NIF money also goes to the Mossawa Center, which has published a position paper rejecting Israel as a Jewish state, and rejecting the use of “state symbols for Jews only” (such as the flag and national anthem). The position paper alleged that “[t]he State of Israel was established on the ruins of the Palestinian people, for whom the event was a national tragedy — the Nakba.” The NIF also funds anti-Israel groups such as B’Tselem, and many others.

And then, of course, there is the $469,053 that went to Breaking the Silence (BtS), which is regarded across the Israeli political spectrum as a dangerous, anti-Israel organization. Indeed, BtS has been banned from Israeli schools and from all IDF bases. As a bill that was supported by the coalition and opposition parties in the Knesset stated: “Whoever is going around the world aiming to harm the IDF’s soldiers at the UN, in South Africa and in Europe, will not be able enter schools in Israel.” And as opposition MK Yair Lapid said: “We cannot allow organizations that encourage draft-dodging and call the IDF officers and soldiers criminals inside the Israeli education system. Those kind of organizations harm soldiers, putting them in danger of facing a trial and slamming Israel among the international community by spreading blatant lies.”

Shame on the Jewish Communal Fund, the Jim Joseph Foundation, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, Sally Gottesman, the Jacob and Hilda Blaustein Foundation, Murray Koppelman, the Leichtag Foundation, Joan and Irwin Jacobs, and all those who fund the NIF.