About deception and decency

The NIF website tried to whitewash this subversive initiative by using newspeak, calling the Beduin settlements established on illegally seized land “unrecognized villages,” as if the whole dispute was about some bureaucratic intransigence in recognizing the theft of government land.

It later turned out that Shatil’s Negev operation was handed over to two Arab communists who are at the top of the anti-Zionist Hadash party Knesset list. They were appointed head and deputy head of the NIF’s Negev operation, despite the fact that Hadash strives, like the PA, to erase the Jewish nature of Israel and wants to establish instead a binational namely, another Islamic state.

Worse still, Beduin protesters reported on Israel Radio that Shatil operators were so anti-Israel that they refused to let Beduin who had served in the IDF join their protest.

This is, of course, not the only instance of the NIF helping organize anti-Zionist activities. NIF established Adala, an Arab “civil rights” organization, and Kav Laoved, ostensibly to protect the rights of foreign workers. But these organizations went to the anti-Israel Durban conference and accused Israel of being a racist state that exploits both Palestinian and black workers for its imperialist purposes.

This message has been repeated by these NIF-funded organizations at every opportunity, in every international forum they reach.

Critics also point out that the putative human rights organizations the NIF has spawned, especially B’Tselem, habitually pillory Israel by spreading worldwide any charge of human rights abuse leveled against it, even when based on the flimsiest evidence or advanced by the most suspect (PA) sources.

At the same time they totally ignore human rights violations by the PA and its habitual use of terror. Such distortions help propagate the pernicious myth that Israel is guilty of most human rights violations and is chiefly responsible for the Middle East calamity.

To these and other concrete and factual charges the president of the New Israel Fund, Peter Edelman, a US law professor, responded in “Yes, the New Israel Fund helps Vikki Knafo” (August 14) with the mother of all deceptions.

Did anybody deny that the NIF helped Vikky Knafo? The issue is the NIF’s co-opting of her struggle to advance its own radical leftist agenda, to the detriment of the single mothers.

From his perch in Washington the distinguished professor describes what Knafo is and what she is not, again as if Knafo was the issue and the imagined insult leveled at her independence of judgment the only matter Shatil had to answer for.

YOU WOULD expect a law professor like Edelman to have no difficulty understanding my argument.

I did not claim that single mothers allowances had not been not cut. I claimed that the effort to reinstate them was futile and unjust. Futile because reinstating their allowance and other such welfare cuts would result in an inflationary upsurge that would harm them most; and unjust because it is not out of the politicians’ pockets that such subventions are paid but mostly from taxes paid by hardworking people who cannot make ends meet themselves.

So that while the full restoration of handouts may “set things right” as Edelman puts it, the single mothers would end up with lower purchasing power. Instead, I suggested, they should fight the monopolies that impose a 50% hidden tax on all consumption by inflating prices. Lowering these “monopoly rents” would increase the purchasing power of all Israelis and more than compensate single mothers for the cuts.

But this must be too arcane an argument for a mind fixated on “setting things right” by always demanding more welfare payments as a panacea for “correcting social injustice.”

Edelman was too modest to inform us that he resigned from a Clinton White House position to protest vitally needed welfare cuts.

But then, neither the professor nor others who wrote letters to the editor to defend Shatil (all people either benefiting from its largesse or connected with it) want to face Shatil’s true activities, or have a rational debate.

So Edelman waxes poetic about “the work of Shatil and the New Israel Fund [that] is rooted in Jewish tradition and in Israel’s founding percepts,” claiming that it also represents “the very essence of democracy.”

What Edelman and his colleagues fail to explain is how the NIF and Shatil hope to implement “Jewish tradition and [our] founding precepts” by entrusting their implementation to radicals like the two confirmed communists who deny the right of Jews to their own state and who are notorious for their particular understanding of “democracy.”

How does the NIF hope to promote “the essence of democracy” when it crowned the un-elected Knafo head of the single mothers’ protest, excluding people who questioned her authority or policy from participating?

How democratic is it to try to undermine the economic program of a democratically elected government, and to do it via the clearly anti-democratic means of subversion and deception?

And what gives Edelman, an American despite the fact that he refers to “the kind of society we want to build, the limits of inequality we are prepared to tolerate” the right to make common cause with a small radical minority and spend over $300 million on pushing its leftist agenda by organizing a militant political opposition to Zionism, and on “lobbying, and [organizing] advocacy groups together with the political opposition?”

How democratic is such a massive political interference of foreign money in the internal affairs of Israel?

Another former American president of the NIF, Franklin M. Fisher, also avoids addressing these issues, resorting instead to vilification. As if to illustrate the liberal spirit, the distinguished economics professor pronounces ex-cathedra that the NIF and Shatil are not crypto-Marxist organizations. Perhaps not. Perhaps they are simply neo-Marxists seeing that they promote violent anti-globalization demonstrations, which the professor apparently supports.

He rebuffs my charge that they are by comparing me to Senator Joe McCarthy.

Then follows the pat deception: “What matters,” the professor declares, is not what they are not, “but what they are.” The NIF and Shatil are dedicated, he avers, to the preservation of the values set forth in Israel’s Declaration of Independence, Jewish values as well as democratic ones. Doubters are engaged in a “malicious attack,” their arguments are “a disgrace” not even deserving of consideration.

These are the kind of arguments used by those who would teach us Israelis toleration and open debate claiming, I suppose, that they are promoting such values as democracy, pluralism and even decency. Decency?