organization:new israel fund

Israel’s Shin Bet detains Peter Beinart at Ben-Gurion airport over political activity
The Jewish-American journalist wrote that he was pulled aside for questioning upon entering Israel ■ Netanyahu says he was told detention was ’administrative mistake’ and ’Israel welcomes all’
Amir Tibon and Noa Landau Aug 13, 2018 8:27 PM
▻https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-beinart-i-was-detained-at-ben-gurion-airport-over-political-activi

https://www.haaretz.com/polopoly_fs/1.6381254.1534175666!/image/1787986305.jpg_gen/derivatives/headline_1200x630/1787986305.jpg

Beinart’s interrogation is the latest in a series of incidents at Israel’s border entry and exit points that involved political questioning of Jewish Americans.

Last month, a Jewish American philanthropist who donated millions to Israeli hospitals and schools was interrogated because security at Ben Gurion found a booklet about Palestine in his suitcase.

Last week, two left-wing Jewish American activists were detained for three hours at the border crossing between Israel and Egypt. One of the activists, Simone Zimmerman, one of the founding members of the Jewish anti-occupation IfNotNow, claimed she was interrogated about her political opinions.

Israel’s security service, the Shin Bet, stated in response to Zimmerman’s allegations that it did not recommend that she be questioned about her political leanings, but simply advised that she and activist Abigail Kirschbaum be questioned.

Beinart mentioned Zimmerman’s detention and questioning in his article. He described Zimmerman’s questioning as part of an overall trend in Israel, noting that “the day before, Netanyahu all but incited violence against the New Israel Fund’s director in Israel.”

The journalist also referenced the Israeli government’s passage of the contentious nation-state law as part of a process in which, in his view, “Israel is getting uglier.”

Yael Patir, the Israel Director at J Street, responded to the Beinart’s detention on Monday, saying that “slippery slope has turned into a dark and dangerous abyss when every citizen who dares criticize the Netanyahu government can find himself interrogated over his opinions.”

“The clerks of the Immigration Authority and Shin Bet interrogators become, against their will, become the obeyers of a regime that uses them as a tool for political persecutions,” she continued.

“If the government of Israel wants some sort of connection to the vast majority of U.S. Jewry, as well as to preserve the Israeli democracy, the political interrogations ought to stop entirely,” Patir concluded.

In May, the Shin Bet held Israeli peace activist Tanya Rubinstein at Ben-Gurion International Airport for half an hour in early May, Rubinstein told Haaretz. She is general coordinator of the Coalition of Women for Peace and was returning from a conference sponsored by the Swedish foreign ministry. Left-wing activist Yehudit Ilani was detained two weeks later on her way back from Europe after visiting a flotilla headed to Gaza in the coming weeks in her capacity as a journalist.

The Shin Bet responded to the report on Beinart’s arrest as well, saying that it operates only according to law and for the state’s security. “Mr. Beinart’s detention was carried out as a result of an error of judgment by the professional official at the scene.”

The Shin Bet also told Haaretz it was “sorry for the unpleasantness Mr. Beinart experienced. The Shin Bet chief has instructed that the case be looked into.”
Amir Tibon

#BenGourion

Archives : 9 août 2006, les bombardements israéliens contre le Liban durent depuis bientôt un mois, le massacre de Cana s’est déroulé une semaine plus tôt, et Spielberg annonce qu’il va offrir 1 million de dollars à Israël.

Spielberg Foundation to donate $1 million for Israeli relief
▻https://www.haaretz.com/1.4860807

A foundation created by filmmaker Steven Spielberg will donate $1 million to relief efforts in Israel as it battles with Hezbollah.

The Righteous Persons Foundation will make an initial contribution of $250,000 to the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles Israel Crisis Fund. The foundation will then follow up with gifts to the New Israel Fund and other organizations that are providing relief to those evacuated from northern Israel, said Marvin Levy, foundation spokesman.

Israel’s Message to U.S. Jews: If You’re Against the Occupation, You’re Not Welcome
Libby Lenkinski Sep 20, 2017 4:39 PM
▻http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/1.813422
With the Jewish Agency now surrendering to the extremist right-wing witch-hunt, more and more of Israel’s institutions are closing their doors to U.S. Jewish progressives. We must refuse to be excluded

(...) This week the Jewish Agency for Israel withdrew its funding for Achvat Amim, a Masa-funded program overseen by Hashomer Hatzair based on spurious allegations by a shadowy group called Ad Kan.

Ad Kan is an arm of the most extreme elements of Israel’s settler movement. It has been called “Israel’s volunteer thought police,” a group that recruits Israelis to become citizen-spies, reporting on their fellow Israelis in a two-bit McCarthyist attempt to weed out anyone who doesn’t fit their vision of an Israel for Jews only.

Armed with hidden cameras and microphones, Ad Kan members lie about their identities, join left-wing organizations and try to capture “gotcha” moments with members. Other times they scrutinize and “investigate” individual activists and then offer their deceptive material to Israel’s mainstream news.

In this case, Ad Kan was incensed that Jews would participate in nonviolent activism alongside Palestinians in the West Bank. So they got to work identifying individual activists to name, shame, and blame.

This is the settler-Right’s tried and true tactic: guilt by association. Ad Kan and other extreme right-wing organizations like it understand that when the public conversation focuses on how policies like the occupation affect people’s lives, they lose. So instead, they create bogeymen and come up with convoluted chains of association among them to imply some nefarious cabal.

Sound familiar? These are the same types of fantasies about power and treason that anti-Semites used for generations to target Jews. It’s eerily similar to the implication of the cartoon posted by Yair Netanyahu to Facebook – for which he has been embraced by neo-Nazis in America.

Ad Kan and its settler-Right allies, like Im Tirtzu and the Samaria Settlers’ Committee, have been reading from the same anti-Semitic playbook for some time. In 2009, Im Tirtzu created a campaign designed to topple the New Israel Fund using imagery of NIF’s then-president, Naomi Chazan, with a horn on her head.

The attacks on NIF by Im Tirtzu and others did nothing to hamper our activities to promote democracy and equality for all Israelis. But this time, guilt-by-association tactics led the Jewish Agency to withdraw funding from a Hashomer Hatzair-affiliated volunteer program.

This is a disappointing surrender to the settler-Right, and not just because of its underhanded and dishonest tactics. These decisions determine what kind of Zionism is acceptable in today’s Israel, and the answer is far narrower than ever before in Israel’s history. The incremental witch-hunting that attempts to mark and silence undesirable elements often starts in organizations like Ad Kan. But dropping the Hashomer Hatzair program is just the latest example of how these actions influence policy.

There can be no mistake: the Jewish Agency canceled its support of Achvat Amim because of the leaders’ progressive political perspective – though plenty of right-wing programs receive Jewish Agency support.(...)

#inter_israéliens

Don’t advocate for Israel one more day, until you’ve done this - A Special Place in Hell

Whatever your politics, you should know this: These soldiers and the people of Breaking the Silence are Israeli patriots. They are advocating for Israel.
By Bradley Burston | May 5, 2015 | Haaretz
▻http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/a-special-place-in-hell/.premium-1.655059

You don’t know me. I’m just a guy from California who once fell in love with Israel, and stayed. But if you’re a person who advocates for Israel in California or anywhere else outside of here, I have a message for you.

It’s the same message whether you belong to StandWithUs or J Street, the Republican Jewish Coalition or the New Israel Fund, AIPAC or Americans for Peace Now, the ZOA or Ameinu: Before you advocate for Israel one more day, you owe it to yourself and to Israel to do this: Download and open a report called “This is How We Fought in Gaza: Soldiers’ testimonies and photographs from Operation ’Protective Edge’ (2014).”

Read it until you can’t go on. Then read it some more. Don’t go back to advocating for Israel until you’ve read it to the end. It’s not that long. Length is not the problem. Nor is language. It’s just people talking.

Honesty is the problem. The calmly shocking honesty of scores of brave and deeply scarred soldiers who served in that war last summer. It won’t be easy to read this, nor should it be.

Whoever you are, whatever your politics, you need to know what happened in Gaza. You need to be able to begin to explain – first of all to yourself – why at least half, and perhaps many more than half, of the some 2,200 Palestinians killed in the war, were civilians, many of them children.

You need to begin to sense the scope of the devastation in large areas of the Strip, in case after case the direct result of IDF policy and directives from the higher echelons of government.

You need to begin to know what happened. You need answers. For your own sake.

When you advocate for Israel, you need to make up your own mind. You need know that the answers you give are honest. Real. Complete.

There will be people – lots of people – who will tell you not to read “This is How We Fought in Gaza.” They will tell you that these soldiers are traitors, or defeatist radical activists, or dupes, or made up.

If you hear someone saying this, you’re being flat-out lied to. Not only that, the person that tells you this is spitting on Israelis who were willing to give their very lives to defend their country and their loved ones.

There will be people who will slander and denigrate and deceive and misrepresent the organization which gathered the soldiers’ stories – Breaking the Silence, itself a project of former and reserve IDF officers and soldiers.

There will be people who make their living suggesting that Breaking the Silence is part of a vast, dark, international conspiracy aimed at destroying Israel. 

If you’re honest about advocating for Israel, you need to think for yourself.