Toward what end?

That massive assistance by US Jews – despite good intentions – is not really successful is evident from the fact that after over 50 years of intense involvement in Israel’s social problems, spending fortunes, the same problems are still with us.

In the three major areas on which US Jewry has focused – immigrant absorption, education (including Jewish education) and the provision of health services and welfare (especially to the poor), improvements seem ephemeral.

Looking at the dismal absorption of Ethiopian Jews, at the near bankruptcy of the generously endowed Israeli universities and the failure of Jewish education to halt or reverse the fatal trend of assimilation, considering that poverty continues spreading as more welfare is being provided – it is questionable whether a focus on aid was a long-term help.

Some of the poor results are due to atrocious management. In the business world, when corporations fail to achieve goals, someone is held accountable. In the charitable world there is little accountability. The many astute businessmen who serve on the boards of charitable organizations seem to confine themselves almost entirely to fund-raising, and care little about how effectively funds are being spent.

As the case of The New Israel Fund – that has already raised over $300 million – attests, many Jewish contributors apparently do not really know what they are supporting and how their money is being spent.

Otherwise how could one explain massive contributions by conservative Jews to an organization that pursues radical leftist policies (to the tune of $25 million a year) and engages in anti-Israel and anti-capitalist agitation and in the defamation of Israel abroad?

It is doubtful that many of these contributors would support The New Israel Fund if they bothered to examine what subversive activities this organization actually undertakes under the guise of devotion to the values of Israel’s Declaration of Independence (equality, justice, etc.).

The dead hand of politics is another major factor undermining Jewish endeavors. It is only natural that politics, both institutional and party, will play a role in communal affairs. The problems start when this is not openly acknowledged and rules are not instituted to limit the damage that politics, fractious by nature, usually inflict. American Jewish leadership seems to have always preferred to entertain the illusion that what they were providing for Israel was some sort of consensual “humanitarian aid” devoid of political consideration and impact.

This enabled a highly politicized Israeli establishment to exploit such naivet or carelessness and utilize American funds without strings attached, namely with no accountability whatsoever. It should not come as a surprise then that such funds were spent – ironically – for political purposes even when they masqueraded as welfare.

AMERICAN JEWS were taken by the liberal-sounding rhetoric of the Israeli Left without understanding how radical the Israeli left always was, and how devastating their alliance with it proved to be.

Since the Twenties, American Jewish contributors innocently facilitated the domination of a fairly conservative Jewish community in Palestine by a group of radical Marxists who hijacked the Zionist enterprise.

American Jewish donations were channeled through Keren Hayesod (the precursor of the UIA) and directed almost exclusively by a Left-dominated Zionist organization to experimental communist-style settlements that were a failure economically and socially from their beginning.

American contributions also subsidized Labor’s economic empire, including its banks, industry and trade corporations. It enabled Labor to pursue a militant class warfare and to keep undermining potentially successful private enterprise in Israel.

After 1948, the Jewish Agency, totally dominated by the Left, put US Jewish funds into more failed collectivist settlements and into state- or Histadrut-owned industries. This despite the fact that it already knew that earlier collectivist efforts were an economic failure.

They had to be continuously subsidized and saved periodically from bankruptcy. Statist Jewish Agency policies, especially the nationalization of land and water, and the building of only collectivist settlements, bankrupted a technically excellent Israeli agriculture and left immigrant development towns a permanent disaster.

Did anyone ask how this happened and why? Was anybody held accountable? Was policy changed? No, more and more money was poured into these failed ideological enterprises. They even became a model for the absorption of the first waves of immigrants in the Fifties. Immigrants were settled then into desolate moshavim and development towns and assigned to economic backwardness and misery courtesy of the Jewish Agency and the United Israel Appeal.

The same has happened in all other spheres of charitable giving. Well-intentioned American Jews poured their hard-earned dollars into statist or socialist policies in education, health and welfare, guaranteeing their failure. No one apparently bothered to learn from mistakes or draw conclusions.

Before the great wave of immigrants from the former Soviet Union forced the Israeli government and the Agency to partially “privatize” absorption services by giving the immigrants a sum of money with which to buy basic necessities, they used to provide housing, to “create” jobs and generally allocate welfare to new immigrants.

Can anyone recall how politicized, ineffective, wasteful, and often corrupt the administration of these programs was? Did leadership draw lessons in real time from the failure of earlier absorption efforts? No, it took decades for UJA and Agency leadership to even face the facts, let alone do something to correct them.

In fact, they still continue to pursue damaging statist solutions executed by a highly politicized wasteful bureaucracy. The Jewish Agency became a favorite grazing ground for Israeli politician with no real experience or management skills.

The focus on fund-raising has not helped a healthy communal life in the US either. American Jewry is envied – justly – by its neighbors for its extraordinary commitment to communal work, and to charitable giving. Yet many, if not most, US Jews (and increasingly Israelis too) feel alienated and only tenuously Jewish.

In Israel, a post-modernist and anti-Zionist educational system (supported, again, by unwary Americans) weakens its sense of Jewishness and reinforces alienation toward the Diaspora. This alienation is aggravated by the sense that American Jews feel they do enough by giving charity and they therefore stay away from Israel when the going gets tough.

This is a great pity. The heart is flooded with warmth and joy at the sight of thousands of Jews, especially the young, who show their care for Israel. But their efforts are so narrowly channeled and often so misinformed and misguided that good intentions translate into bad policies that impact negatively on Israel. As a result they widen an already growing rift between two communities that are engaged in a heroic task of Jewish revival.