NIF Questioned Over Grants to 'Apartheid' Campaigners

New Israel Fund grantee Machsom Watch displays photos on its Web site of Palestinians surmounting barriers on their way to school and work, such as this shot from Abu Dis in 2003. Photo by MachsomWatch/Neta Efroni

New York
In October 2003, on the eve of a JTA series about its financial support for vitriolic pro-Palestinian groups, the Ford Foundation announced a landmark $20 million grant to a Jewish group -- and not just any group: the New Israel Fund, an organization dedicated to social change in Israel, yet criticized for funding groups involved in Israeli Arab and Palestinian rights that accuse the Jewish state of horrendous human-rights violations.

Nearly five years later, the NIF-run Ford Israel Fund is facing the same dilemma as Ford regarding the behavior of a small but influential number of its grantees: While these nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs, are mostly engaged in conventional civil-rights work, dueling perceptions exist over whether some cross the line into anti-Israel demonization.

Do the words and actions of these groups incite hatred or challenge the legitimacy of Israel, as some observers believe, or are they engaged in legitimate political activism, exercising freedom of speech that no pro-democracy organization should dare censor?

For the NIF, the answer is clearly the latter. Yet cognizant of its predominantly U.S. Jewish donor base, the group often finds itself navigating a delicate line.

"Our family of organizations represents a wide range of opinions on various difficult issues, and we do not expect them to adhere to an NIF position in every instance," said Naomi Paiss, the group's spokeswoman in the United States. "We expect organizations to share our values in the broad sense, and one of the most important of those values is free discourse in the democratic context."

Even as it defends freedom of speech for its grantees, the NIF downplays the role some of them have played in injecting fodder into the steady stream of anti-Israel propaganda that permeates the public debate in Israel, in the international arena and on the Internet.

Critics of the NIF counter that some of the grantees' public pronouncements have inflamed domestic tensions between Israeli Jews and Arabs -- and between hawks and doves -- while also feeding into a global P.R. machinery that tends to ascribe the most nefarious motives to Israel's every move.

More specifically, a portion of these NIF-Ford grantees, like some of Ford's direct grantees, supply kindling to the notion of a binational state in Israel and to the so-called "Durban strategy," a reference to the 2001 U.N. anti-racism conference in South Africa that castigated Israel.

Pro-Israel advocates say that the latter destructively brands the country as an "apartheid" state -- in other words, racist and criminal -- while stoking global pressure to punish Israel just as apartheid South Africa was punished: through boycotts, divestment and sanctions.

The NIF itself would never endorse such a position, said one longtime supporter, so it wrestles with how to respond.

"I'm sure it causes a lot of controversy among NIF donors because the fine line between endorsing and tolerating is a huge distinction, not a small quibble," said Brian Lurie, co-chairman of the Inter-Agency Task Force on Israeli-Arab Issues, a coalition of 80 American Jewish organizations that promotes Israel as a "Jewish democratic state" providing full equality to its Arab citizens.

Among the more controversial examples of positions taken by NIF grantees:

· In 2006-07, two NIF grantees entered Israel's national debate over a constitution with their own proposals: Adalah: The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, with its "Democratic Constitution," and the Mossawa Center's "An Equal Constitution for All?"

These two groups propose a "binational" state that would couple an unlimited "right of return" for Palestinians with abolishing the Jewish Law of Return.

In addition, some NIF-Ford grantees weighed in on a third such proposal, the "Future Vision of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel," which appears to oppose Israel being a Jewish state.

· In March 2007, eight groups successfully petitioned the Israeli High Court of Justice against what it labeled the "Apartheid order" to create an "Apartheid road," on which Israeli police would restrict Palestinians from traveling in Israeli cars in the West Bank. The petition did not mention Israel's justification for the directive, which it said was to prevent the transport of possible terrorists. Seven petitioners were NIF grantees: Yesh Din, Bimkom, Machsom Watch, HaMoked: Center for the Defense of the Individual, the Association of Civil Rights in Israel, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel and the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel.

· In March, The New York Times quoted a lawyer for the Association of Civil Rights in Israel -- a flagship grantee of the NIF and a prime recipient of its funding -- saying, "There is already a separate legal system in the territories for Israelis and Palestinians. ... With the approval of separate roads, if it becomes a widespread policy, then the word for it will be 'apartheid.' "

· Adalah's April 2008 newsletter contains an article by the group's general director, Hassan Jabareen, titled "The Israeli Regime of Hafradah (Separation in English and Apartheid in Afrikaans)." With no mention of Palestinian attacks, Jabareen alleges that Israel "aims to redefine the Jewishness of the state." Also in April, five Adalah board members joined an Israeli-Arab delegation to South Africa in a visit the group portrayed as commiserating with fellow victims of apartheid.

Critics find this unacceptable.

These groups "campaign against Israel in the United Nations, and around the world, using terms such as 'racist' and 'apartheid,' " said Gerald Steinberg, the executive director of NGO Watch, a Jerusalem-based group that monitors organizations for what it views as anti-Israel bias. "This is not in any sense a 'civil-rights' movement, but rather the Durban strategy of demonization."

Such a slogan as "Israel is apartheid" both damages the image and undermines support for Israel, said Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.

Hoenlein, who also sits on the Inter-Agency Task Force on Israeli-Arab Issues along with Larry Garber, head of the NIF, said that he does not think "Jewish monies should be supporting organizations that advocate the dissolution of Israel as a Jewish state."

The $20 million, five-year Ford grant to the NIF in late 2003 injected significant funds into the group. The overall NIF budget for 2008, for example, is $29.2 million, of which the $3.5 million in Ford money constitutes 12 percent, according to Paiss.

Ford officials said a second $20 million grant to NIF will likely be made in October, with virtually the same Ford grantee guidelines applying to NIF grantees.

At the same time Paiss, the NIF spokeswoman said that NIF had its own guidelines. NIF grantees must operate according to Israeli law on nonprofit organizations, or in Hebrew, amutot.

The NIF agreement with grantees cites the Amutot Law of 1980: "An Amuta shall not be registered if any of its objectives negates the existence of the democratic character of the state of Israel, or if there are reasonable grounds for concluding that the Amuta will be used as cover for illegal activities."

And that, NIF officials say, imposes an even tougher standard than the Ford guidelines.