Eleventh Plague Deadly to Israel

Posted by johnhouk on Apr 25, 2007
John R. Houk
© April 25, 2007

Apparently Israel has an extreme problem with their extreme Left just as America with its extreme Left. Israel’s Left Wingers are actually on the side of Palestinian Arabs that desire the destruction of Israel and Jewry. Now there is a mindset of delusional national suicide in the making.

Israel’s Left might as well build the jackets that contain suicide bombs that kill Jews. This makes our Lefties look tame in comparison. America’s Lefties actually think they are pro-American when they promote the end of Christian morality, the end of the freedom of speech of Christians (Christianity offends homosexuals and Mohammedans), the end of a war that could ultimately bring security to America and to the globe as well, etc., etc. and etc. The Jewish delusional Left means Jewish extermination.

Bill Mehlman describes the Leftist Jewish virus as the Eleventh Plague particularly virulent in Israeli Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). Only this plague could be the death of Israel unlike the Ten Plagues that liberated Hebrew slaves from the dark oppressive grip of the Egyptian Pharaoh.

JRH
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NGOs in Israel – The 11th Plague

Bill Mehlman
April 25, 2007
ZionNet

Jerusalem -- If they did not exert the extraordinary influence they do on the public’s perception of its policies vis a vis its Arab minority and the 2.4 million Arabs resident in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, the locust swarm of highly politicized NGOs (non-governmental organizations) that has invaded Israel could be written off as yet one more installment in the list of moral extortions the Jewish state must pay for the right to call itself “democratic.”

In Israel’s case, however, the picture these NGOs portray of the Jewish State as an “apartheid, racist,” xenophobic entity in “occupation” of a hostage Arab population stripped bare of all civil and humanitarian rights has turned the whole process into a zero sum game. And it is this faux reality, uncritically conveyed and amplified by the media, that is mirrored in every report and study of Israel’s human rights record produced by the national and world bodies concerned with the subject.

First on that list in terms of its impact on Israel’s image is the U.S. State Department. and its annual “Country Reports on Human Rights Practices.” As the Jerusalem-based “NGO Monitor” observes, these reports have always relied “heavily on allegations from politicized NGOs that display anti-Israel bias, publish claims that lack credibility and ignore the complexities of human rights requirements in the context of conflicts involving terrorism and warfare.” The recently released Statement Department report for 2006 will disappoint no one to whom consistency, even of error, is nature’s highest virtue. The very title of its section on Israel, “Israel and the Occupied Territories,” telegraphs a mindset rooted in the factoids characteristically flogged by the NGO claque. It is out of precisely such mulch that the State Department has produced a report on Israel’s human rights practices that, among other things, identifies Israeli atomic spy Mordechai Vanunu as a “whistleblower;” while regurgitating, minus any criteria of assessment, the claim of one NGO that Israel systematically fires on Palestinian ambulances and emergency medical personnel in Gaza; the allegation of another that the 2006 war in Lebanon was marked by “indiscriminate” and “disproportionate” Israeli attacks on Lebanese civilians, including “at least 322…not engaged in hostilities when killed;” the charge by a third that Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security arm, used “torture” in 20 percent of its interrogations, and finally that the Jerusalem Municipality and the Israeli Interior Ministry conspired in the demolition of 12,000 Arab structures in eastern Jerusalem. It should come as no surprise that this mockumentary evidence of Israel’s misdeeds is eagerly picked up and retailed to the chattering classes by the UN, the European Union, public and private think-tanks, international academia and the media’s designated shapers and molders of world public opinion.

What most appalls about this sanctimonious coterie of anti-Israel NGOs is the number of them directed and controlled by Jews, including Israeli Jews. If further evidence were needed of the fact that Israel’s most poisonous detractors lie within the Jewish fold, this group provides it in spades. Herewith, a closeup view of four of its bigtime players –- the Israel Committee Against House Demolitions, B’Tselem, New Israel Fund and Human Rights Watch -- plus two others – Bimkom and Machsom Watch -- in the up-and-coming category

Israel Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD)

ICAHD is the most implacable, and among the most influential and best funded of Israel’s NGO foes. Directed by radical Israeli leftist Jeff Halper, a 2006 nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize, the ostensible mission of this recipient of lavish European Union and Ford Foundation funding is “to oppose and resist Israeli demolitions of Palestinian houses in the Occupied Territories.” Were it to stick to that objective, ICAHD might rank as no worse than a minor thorn in Israel’s backside. But Halper and his organization are all over the lot and wherever they go demonization of Israel is the plat du juor. Even among a uniformly bad crowd, ICAHD is the only Jewish NGO that questions Israel’s legitimacy as a sovereign state; and it does that wherever and whenever it gets the opportunity – at the United Nations, over the microphones of the BBC World Service, at the Royal Academy of Medicine, before audiences of mainline Protestant churches and in the pages of its internet magazine, “Counterpunch,” a forum for the likes of Alexander Cockburn, Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney and other top-tier tenants of the anti-Israel fever swamps.

In a paper peppered with references to Israel as an “apartheid” state submitted to the September 2003 UN “International Conference on Civil Society in Support of the Palestinian People,” Halper declared that “the stage is set for the next phase of the struggle for a just resolution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict: an international campaign for a single state.” Mr. Halper did not mean Israel. “A Jewish state,” he informs us, “has proven politically, and in the end morally, untenable.”

The repeated commingling of Israel’s name with apartheid, a ritual embraced by virtually all the Middle East-focused NGOs has been depicted by NGO Monitor Executive Director Gerald Steinberg as apart and parcel of the “Durban Strategy,” which sprouted from the infamous 2001 “Conference on Racism and Xenophobia” in Durban, South Africa. Hijacked by the Arabs and their Third World cat’s-paws, Durban’s stellar accomplishment was its linkage of Israel’s policies toward its Arab residents with the draconian treatment of their Bantu population by the pre-1994 white rulers of South Africa. The “Durban Strategy” is echoed in ICAHD’s persistent calls for sanctions against Israel, divestment in it and those doing business with it, a ban on its participation in international sporting events and the cutoff of all military assistance. “We as members of international civil society,” Halper instructed the 2003 UN conference, “must be prepared to fight Israeli apartheid just as we led the struggle against apartheid in South Africa.” Later, speaking in the same vain, he added, “Our slogan in the post-Road Map period will be that of South Africa’s struggle against apartheid: One person, One vote.”

ICAHD pursues Israeli delegitimization across an undemarcated border. Halper has not hesitated to share a platform at anti-Israel divestment events with Naim Ateck, head of “Sabeel,” an eastern Jerusalem-based NGO in fixed biblical denial of the right of the Jewish people to live in the Jewish state. Steinberg has described Sabeel as the “driving force behind the scene in pushing mainline Protestant denominations to adopt a policy of divestment [toward Israel].”

In so far as its mission of preserving every illegally erected Arab structure in the Land of Israel is concerned, ICAHD takes no prisoners. “Israel’s policy of house demolitions,” the organization declares, “has nothing to do with security. It has to do with Israel taking the land and trying to break the will of the Palestinian people to resist its occupation. ICAHD’s response to the IDF’s razing of Arab houses in Rafah used as bases for terrorist activity was to label it “a war crime” that “may be likened to rape.”

Not quite “a war crime” but clearly akin to “rape” was ICAHD’s assessment of “Amazon.com’s” treatment of Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, Jimmy Carter’s priceless paean to the “Durban Strategy.” Professing himself “deeply disturbed” by the on-line bookseller’s critical review of “this important new book,” Halper accused Amazon of hiding the fact that reviewer Jeffrey Goldberg was “a citizen of Israel as well as the U.S. and that he had volunteered to serve in the IDF, where he had worked as a prison guard of Arab detainees.” The missive to Amazon closed with the threat that “if you do not …remove the Goldberg review, move it to the more appropriate ‘See all Editorial Reviews’ page, or restore a semblance of balance by giving comparable space and prominence to a more positive evaluation [of the book], we pledge to stop shopping at Amazon and encourage our friends, family and associates to do likewise.”

At last report, Amazon.com was still among the living.

B’Tselem

In contrast to other NGOs covering the Israel scene, B’Tselem (“In the Image of”) frankly admits to having an openly political agenda. It calls itself “the information center for human rights in the Occupied Territories” and proudly proclaims that it is in business to rally Israeli opposition to the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria and their country’s overall presence in these enclaves.

Business has never been better. NGO Monitor avers that one would be hard put to find a study on human rights in Israel by any U.S. government agency that was not “heavily influenced” by one or more B’Tselem reports. And B’Tselem turns them out by the carload. Its large, professionally trained staff of Hebrew and Arabic speaking “researchers” is the gold standard of the NGO trade and it has money coming out of its ears. Reading like a “Who’s Who” of the self-annointed Tikunai haOlam (“repairers of the universe”) priesthood, any partial recitation of B’Tselem’s donor list would include the Ford Foundation, the Commission of the European Communities, the International Commission of Jurists – Swedish Section, Switzerland’s Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, the Mertz Gilmore Foundation in the U.S., ICCO in the Netherlands, Christian Aid in the UK and Denmark’s Dan Church Aid.

Steinberg finds the heavy foreign government involvement in B’Tselem’s funding “particularly disturbing” in light of the organization’s “blatantly ideological” advocacy of Israeli abandonment of Judea and Samaria and their 120 Jewish communities behind a façade of concern for “human rights.” He regards efforts by these governments to sway public opinion in Israel as “subversive.”

The weight of B’Tselem’s powerful international support and big budget is compounded by its unparalleled access to the major participants in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- the Israeli government and its power centers, the Palestinian Authority, the IDF, the Palestinian refugees and the local and international aid agencies. Because of that access and because it is an Israeli NGO, B’Tselem’s reports and analyses, accurate or tendentious, are prized by the media, foreign government organs, the EU, the UN and delegitimizers of the Jewish State far and wide as proof-positive of Israel’s callous disregard for the human and national rights of the Arabs in its midst. “The roads regime, which is based on separation through discrimination,” reads one of these reports, “bears clear similarities to the apartheid regime that existed in South Africa until 1994. This policy, based on a racist premise that all Palestinians are security risks…[is in] violation of their human rights and of international law.” The “Durban Strategy” is alive and well at B’Tselem.

To its credit, B’Tselem has spoken out against Palestinian terrorist attacks on Israel, calling them “unjustifiable” and “war crimes.” Moreover, it has declared that Israel is not only entitled to take measures to defend its citizens from such attacks but “is required to do so.” In the same breath B’Tselem lists combatants as “victims” in its Palestinian casualty summaries, figures it knows are being freely employed to blackball Israel.

The configuring quality of B’Tselem’s influence on the world’s perception of Israel’s human rights record has begun ringing bells in circles normally oblivious to the nation’s image abroad. Nira Masharki, a high ranking attorney in the Office of the State Prosecutor, has condemned B’Tselem’s repeated claims of human rights violations to “attack the State of Israel and its security forces throughout the world.” And former High Court Justice Michael Chesin has identified the NGO as the prime mover in a “false flag” campaign to obtain automatic entry into Israel for Palestinians who marry Israeli Arabs. B’Tselem appears notably unimpressed.

New Israel Fund

The New Israel Fund is a testament to the truth of the old cliché about knowing people by the company they keep. The wealthy U.S.-based NGO has gifted Israel with some commendable projects, including a string of shelters for battered women and “Shatil” (“Seeding”), a provider of technical assistance and training to grass roots organizations committed to improving the economic outlook of the country’s less fortunate citizens and communities.

NIF also keeps some pretty questionable company. While it has shut the spiggot to ICAHD in response to Halper’s questioning of Israel’s national legitimacy and reevaluated a $20 million partnership with the Ford Foundation following disclosure of the latter’s involvement in funding of some of the NGOs that sparked the Israel hate festival in Durban, far too many of the 700 organizations NIF has bankrolled to the tune of more than $120 million over the years remain under a deep cloud. Two of these, HaMoked and the Mossawa Center, are especially worth noting.

Founded in 1988 by one Lotte Salzberger, HaMoked (The Focus) lists itself as “an Israeli human rights organization whose main objective is to assist Palestinians in the Occupied Territories whose rights are violated due to Israeli policies.” Pursuit of that particular grail has occasionally landed the organization in bed with such would-be nullifiers of Israel’s existence as Adalah, The Committee Against Torture in Israel, the International Solidarity Movement and the Palestinian Prisoners Club.

As chronicled by Alan Schneider, director of the B’nai Brith World Center, the case against HaMoked is rock solid. In its 2003 report on “Violence Committed by Security Forces,” the NGO blamed Israel for every Palestinian death and injury by gunfire that occurred in the previous three years. In 2006, HaMoked joined others of its persuasion in full cry against the closing of the Karni road crossing, despite the perilous security risks its opening would entail. The subsequently reopened Karni has become the entry of choice for the smuggling of terrorists from Gaza into Israel and the target of attacks that have resulted in Jewish deaths and injuries.

In addition to its regular NIF funding, the NGO was the recipient of a 93,000 euro grant from the EU’s “Partnership For Peace” program, a boon to the maintenance of its well appointed digs in eastern Jerusalem, its Jewish and Arab staff of 25 and its ”Emergency Human Rights Hotline” offering “real-time responses” to claims of Israeli violations of the human rights of Palestinians living in the Territories.

Nira Masharki in the Office of the State Prosecutor has accused HaMoked of abusing its claim as a human rights defender and urged the courts to reject requests from the organization for any information regarding Israeli security personnel and procedures. Her stated grounds for the order was that HaMoked and its frequent partner, B’Tselem, “undermine the existence of Israel, cause it damage in the world and harm its security forces.” HaMoked, she added, “works in the interest of [the Palestinians], whose elected leadership is in harsh conflict with the State of Israel and undermines its existence.”

HaMoked’s response was not long in coming. Dalia Kerstein, the NGO’s director, has filed a protest with Attorney General Menachem Mazuz, branding Masharki’s charges “attacks by the State on human rights organizations and their legitimacy” that “pose a serious threat to democratic rule.”

The jury is still out.

When it reconvenes, its first order of business should be NIF’s unconscionable association with the Mossawa Center. Mossawa is the Arab Israeli NGO responsible for disseminating a report calling, inter alia, for the replacement of Israel’s “Law of Return” with a law guaranteeing Palestinian refugees and their descendants unrestricted “right of return” to the lands they were allegedly dispossessed of by Israel during the 1948 War of Independence, along with suitable reparations for the suffering they’ve endured. The document asserts that Israel cannot be both a democratic and a Jewish state, while a separate but virtually identical Mossawa tome characterizes the Jewish State as inherently illegitimate, to be replaced by a bi-national entity.

NIF’s response to the charge of funding and lending respectability to Mossawa’s agenda laid down by Lori Lowenthal Marcus, the Zionist Organization of America’s Greater Philadelphia district chair in a 13 February, 2007 article in the Jerusalem Post, could essentially be labeled nolo contendere. Yes, NIF does fund Mossawa, admitted Larry Garber and Eliezer Ya’ari, respectively NIF’s executive director and executive director in Israel in a Jerusalem Post article a week later. No, NIF does not subscribe to Mossawa’s contention that Israel cannot be both a Jewish and a democratic state. Stuffed between these statement was a hodgepodge of genteel non sequiturs about the need to “listen to the disempowered voices of Israeli society,” women being “forced to sit in the back of Haredi buses,” “economic equity,” “religious pluralism,” the environment, bridge-building, “dialogue,” more dialogue -- anything but the issue at hand.

Bottom line: New Israel Fund will continue playing house with an organization dedicated to the deJudaization of Israel.

Human Rights Watch

Human Rights Watch prides itself on not accepting financial support from any government or government-funded agency. With $50 million in the till as of its most recent financial statement, HRW doesn’t need to

There isn’t all that much else this New York-based NGO behemoth and its powerful executive director Kenneth Roth can point to with pride -- Jewish pride, that is. HRW was indeed the recipient of a 1997 Nobel Peace Prize for its campaign to ban land mines, but as NGO Monitor points out, the organization’s “disproportionate condemnation of Israeli security policy” rather belies the “even-handedness and accuracy of our reporting” that the organization proffers as its “hallmark and pride.” Unless, of course, Mr. Roth and his eminent board of directors esteem that the care and feeding of NGOs like HaMoked fall under that rubric.

In fact, HRW has compiled a record over the years of actions and decisions that bespeak anything but Jewish pride, including most notably its active participation in a 2001 Durban Conference that did its level best to resurrect the “Zionism is Racism” canard . Where it comes to Israel, HRW has a habit of talking out of both sides of its mouth. On the one hand, Steinberg avers, its annual report quite properly takes the UN Human Rights Council to task for making a “mockery” of its founding principles with its excessive focus on Israel’s alleged sins. On the other, the same annual report gives credence to a host of unverified charges against the Israeli government and the IDF of having “repeatedly violated the laws of war” and of having launched “indiscriminate attacks” on Lebanese civilians. No condemnation of Hezbollah’s use of human shields or the concealment of rockets and other weapons in homes, mosques, hospitals and schools. No mention of Israeli military casualties. What we do get is uncorroborated claims that the majority of the Lebanese dead were “civilian,” as were at least half the Palestinians killed in Gaza in 2006.

It is precisely this lopsided view of the Arab-Israel conflict that has drained HRW of credibility over the decades since its metamorphosis from the justly heralded “Helsinki Watch” organization that stood sentinel over the former Soviet Union’s human rights behavior. It is doubtful that the NGO in its original incarnation would have associated itself with HRW Middle East division director Sara Lea Wilson’s January 2006 letter to President Bush denouncing the development of peaceful, productive Jewish communities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza as “a violation of international humanitarian law [IHL] under United Nations Security Council resolutions and Israel’s own commitments under the U.S.-sponsored Road Map of April 2003.” All this in response to an announcement that Israel would be adding 600 units to its housing stock in Yesha.

“No one but Israel disputes the fact that its settlement policy violates IHL,” Wilson railed, taking the same occasion to denounce the country’s security fence as “an illegal annexation of the settlements on the Israeli side of the wall.” She urged the President to “use U.S. diplomatic and financial influence to stop this trend…” by reducing American aid to Israel by the amount spent on settlement housing construction and maintenance and the security barrier.

To scathing criticism of the letter from virtually all sectors of the American Jewish establishment Roth could only reply that HRW had been “extremely outspoken condemning both suicide bombings by Palestinians…and deliberate attacks on civilians,” adding that the Geneva Conventions “so clearly apply to the West Bank that it’s not even a serious dispute outside of Israel.” Except, of course, to a host of international scholars who don’t share HRW’s preemptive acceptance of Palestinian ownership of Judea and Samaria and other disputed areas. That would be the only criterion, they observe, that would validate the assertion that the existence of 120 Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria and the security fence constitute a violation of the Geneva Conventions.

The Up-and-Comers – Bimkom

This Israeli NGO was founded seven years ago by “planners and architects with the goal of strengthening the connection between human rights and spatial planning in Israel.”

Whatever all that means, Bimkom (“In Place Of”) has succeeded in parlaying it into bigtime funding and recognition. Donors include the deep pockets belonging to New Israel Fund, the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund, the Porter Foundation, the Green Environment Fund, the Heinrich Boell Foundation, the Naomi and Nehemia Cohen Foundation and the Rdist Foundation. The Danish government wrote a $200,000 check to the NGO for a study of “Palestinian neighborhoods” and just after 2007 took over the calendar, the British Embassy in Tel Aviv disclosed that it had contributed 10,000 pounds toward a study by Bimkom on the impact of Israel’s security fence on Palestinian villages along its borders.

Ten thousand pounds hardly falls under the category of big money, but in this case it wasn’t the money, but the principle. The announcement provoked an uncommon rebuff from a normally docile Israeli Foreign Ministry. A spokesman termed the grant “interference by Britain in an internal Israeli matter.” “How would they react in London,” the spokesman snapped, “if our embassy was to fund research on a British organization that is trying to promote an agenda that is critical [of the government]? This is not acceptable in international relations.”

An “agenda,” Bimkom certainly has and given its pronounced left wing mindset, its conclusions vis a vis the impact of the security barrier are hardly likely to jibe with those of the Israeli government, The British Embassy conceded as much in its response to the Foreign Ministry’s remonstrations. “We recognize Israel’s need and right to defend itself,” a representative told Ha’aretz correspondent Aluf Benn, “but we believe the route of the separation fence should follow the Green Line. [Our] funding of the research was intended to examine the implications of the current route of the fence on the Arab population.”

Bimkom’s contribution to the study has apparently been completed. It has yet to be released but Benn, who apparently has seen it, reported that it “describes the difficulties that the fence causes for Palestinians in the enclaves on either side of the barrier. The authors of the report conclude,” he added, “that in addition to the security aims of the fence, it is also intended to aid the Jewish settlements and permit them to expand at the expense of the quality of life of the Palestinian residents.”

Interference in Israel’s internal affairs or not, the Brits will obviously be getting what they paid for.

Machsom Watch

This all-female NGO has begun to spread its wings. Machsom Watch, which has the distinction of including one of Prime Minister Olmert’s daughters in its ranks, was the recent beneficiary of a 60,000 euro grant from the EU’s “Partnership For Peace” program to essentially keep doing what it has done for the past six years – monitor the behavior of Israeli soldiers and police stationed at the country’s various checkpoints toward Palestinians attempting to enter Israel. Given the organization’s aggressive approach to its mission of insuring that tenderness to Palestinian sensibilities takes precedence over Israeli security, it’s a sure bet the Europeans won’t be asking for their money back.

Machsom Watch bills itself as “politically pluralistic within the context of opposition to the Occupation,” a claim that hardly accords with its cozy relationship with hard left groups like B’Tselem and Physicians For Human Rights/Israel. Nor is its use of what NGO Monitor describes as “emotive and politically charged language that contributes to the demonization of Israel” consistent with political pluralism. The NGO certainly defined its character on that score with the U.S. State Department’s citation in its 2006 human rights roundup of a Machsom Watch allegation that the IDF strip-searched Palestinians at the Jabbar checkpoint.

The NGO’s rough treatment of Israeli troops trying to do their job at the checkpoints touched off a sharp response from former IDF Chief of Staff Dan Halutz at a 2006 meeting with a Machsom delegation. “Humanitarianism is not exclusively owned by Machsom Watch,” he told them, “but also in preventing suicide bombers from reaching the markets of Tel Aviv and Netanya.”

No longer content with checkpoint badgering, Machsom Watch has requested permission from the Israel Airports Authority to monitor security checks on Arab passengers at Ben- Gurion Airport. NGO Monitor informs that if the request is granted, the program will be financed by the New Israel Fund.

Eleventh Plague Deadly to Israel
John R. Houk
© April 25, 2007
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NGOs in Israel – The 11th Plague
Bill Mehlman represents Americans For A Safe Israel (AFSI) in Israel and is co-editor of the Jerusalem-based internet magazine ZionNet.