Like all other NIF spokespersons, Ya’ari speaks in generalities, avoiding any concrete question that could reveal how his $25-million-a-year operation actually implements its noble goals, and how cost-effective it is. But the New Israel’s Fund website provides some answers.

In a section titled “Netanyahu’s Economic Plan” the NIF website concludes that the plan resulted in “the most regressive budget in Israel’s history ” and that it “stands to shred much of what remains of Israel’s social safety net.” It charges that the plan is “stripping the poorest Israelis of some of the last benefits they receive.”

This is sheer nonsense. Israel is spending over $25 billion on transfer payments and other benefits for “the poor,” per capita among the world’s highest, and one of the budget’s biggest items. Any cut in bloated welfare costs is an anathema to the NIF ideologues. Their faith is absolute, despite the fact that Israel is a prime example of the great damage excessive welfare has inflicted on the poor.

The website further charges that Netanyahu’s plan will ruin Israeli democracy. It approvingly quotes Yuval Elbashan and Dr. Danny Guttwein, two academic leftists who charge that Netanyahu “will lead to the liquidation of the welfare state that protects the democratic system (from becoming) a totalitarian state.”

So, to protect democracy, “social change organizations [over 1,500 of them (!), many spawned or promoted by Shatil] are providing analysis and specific arguments against [Netanyahu’s] plan and leading the way to public mobilization and action,” the website reports. The bibliography does not list even one piece defending the plan. So much for pluralism.

Another section, devoted to “Shatil and the Coalitions,” explains “Shatil is working closely with several coalitions to make their public protest, lobbying, advocacy and media activities effective, providing strategic advice and consulting to a broad spectrum of organizations, including new groups that have organized around [resistance to] the economic plan.”

“Many NIF grantees,” the website adds, “are active in the coalition of women’s groups ” and in other similar “coalitions” Shatil has galvanized to undermine the government’s plan. Most are NIF front organizations, often composed of a few paid activists organized and funded by Shatil to promote its political agenda. One example is an unemployment forum that organizes anti-government demonstrations. This, the NIF would have us believe, is apolitical work.

Of course, the NIF has the right to try and convince the public that Netanyahu’s plan is dangerous. It is quite another matter, however, for a tax-exempt organization to organize political lobbying and advocacy groups, together with the political opposition, in order to defeat a plan promulgated by an elected government and force upon it a radical leftist agenda not approved at the ballot box via political agitation sometimes leading to violence.

THE USE by NIF of vague generalities, half-truths and obfuscation to hide its political agenda is revealed in the section devoted to Arab Israelis. “Even though the Netanyahu plan mostly makes cuts,” the website complains, “it includes NIS 56 million for a transfer program called ‘The Removal of Intruders’ It would expedite the transfer of 70,000 Beduin from unrecognized villages to seven ‘legal’ settlements.”

What the NIF does not reveal is that the Beduin who were so loyal to Israel that, unlike other Israeli Arabs, they volunteered in the IDF have over the past decade been subjected to intense anti-Israel indoctrination by Muslim extremists and radical anti-Zionist leftists from Ben-Gurion University.

PLO sympathizers have incited the Beduin to seize large strategic tracts of Negev government land and settle them with illegal “unrecognized settlements,” as the NIF euphemistically puts it. Israeli government mishandling and neglect, bureaucratic heavy-handedness and the failure to impose the law made the situation so inflammatory that the government finally developed a fairly reasonable plan for the resettlement of the Beduin living in those illegal “unrecognized settlements.” They were to be given land in what the NIF mocks as “legal” settlements, in inverted commas.

One wonders whether the NIF’s American and European contributors know that contributions made ostensibly to promote equality and justice are really being used to bash Israel and advance a radical leftist and pro-Palestinian agenda. One wonders what they think they have accomplished for Israel’s poor and weak by spending over $300 million on leftist political agitation, and on the promotion and perpetuation of a welfare system that for the last 50 years has created a debilitating culture of poverty.

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