Monday, September 05, 2011
The REAL New Israel Fund has Stood Up
politicians. They also sometimes serve to discredit moonbats.
Take this item about the REAL ideological position of the New Israel Fund:
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/147525
NIF Officer: Demise of Jewish State 'No Tragedy' – Wikileaks
In US cable from 2010, then-senior NIF officer is quoted as saying
Israel will be majority Arab in 100 years but this is not a tragedy.
Gil Ronen
A senior New Israel Fund officer (NIF) told a U.S. official in 2010
that the disappearance of the Jewish state would not be a tragedy,
according to a document that was leaked by Wikileaks.
The officer is Hedva Radovanitz, who was at the time (February 2010)
NIF Associate Director in Israel, according to the document.
The document relates to the attempts to pass a law that would demand
transparency of political NGOs operating in Israel that are funded by
foreign countries. An American diplomatic officer interviewed
Radovanitz and heard her bemoaning the state of Israel's Left:
New Israel Fund (NIF) Associate Director in Israel Hedva Radovanitz,
who manages grants to 350 NGOs totaling about 18 million dollars per
year, told PolOff [presumably an abbreviation for "political office"
or "political officer" – Ed.] on February 23 that the campaign against
the NGOs was due to the "disappearance of the political left wing" in
Israel and the lack of domestic constituency for the NGOs. She noted
that when she headed ACRI's Tel Aviv office, ACRI had 5,000 members,
while today it has less than 800, and it was only able to muster about
5,000 people to its December human rights march by relying on the
active staff of the 120 NGOs that participated. Radovanitz commented
that the NIF was working behind the scenes through many NGOs to
prevent the NGO legislation from passing in its current form.
The cable then quotes Radovanitz's prediction for Israel's future thus:
She commented that she believed that in 100 years Israel would be
majority Arab and that the disappearance of a Jewish state would not
be the tragedy that Israelis fear since it would become more
democratic.
Radovanitz also outlines the future plans of the NIF:
She also said the NIF was currently re-evaluating its strategy and was
hoping to create a movement rather than just a lot of NGOs. She said
the NIF had no plans to build a human rights constituency within the
right wing of Israeli society, though she believed politics had
shifted to the right for the foreseeable future.
The NIF has been operating since the 1980s and has been at the focus
of extreme controversy in the last three years. It was accused of
manufacturing unfounded and damning anti-IDF quotes that were used
extensively by the UN's Goldstone Commission to blame Israel for the
Gaza counter-terror campaign that began in late 2008.
Israel's leading pro-Arab NGOs are funded by the NIF. Many of them
testified before the Goldstone Commission.
In response to a report on the statement quoted by Wikileaks, the New
Israel Fund told Maariv that "Mrs. Hedva Radovanitz is no longer
employed at the New Israel Fund and therefore we do not know her
personal opinion on the subject of the Jewish majority on Israel."
"We stress that the statements attributed to the Fund in the news
report do not reflect the formal position of the NIF," the
organization said. "The NIF's position is that an agreed solution of
two states for two nations should be arrived at. This is based upon
its belief in the principle of the Jewish nation's right to self
determination and the principle of commitment to full equality to all
citizens and communities, which are anchored in the Declaration of
Independence."