By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews
Not long after Daniel Sokatch left the relative comfort of his executive director position at the Jewish Community Federation in San Francisco last year, a firestorm directed at his new organization erupted.
In January, a group called Im Tirtzu began a campaign against the progressive New Israel Fund, which raises money for civil and human rights groups in Israel, that condemned several NIF grantees for providing South African Justice Richard Goldstone with information that reflected badly upon Israel during the 2009 Gaza War. The Goldstone Report was heavily critical of the Israel Defense Forces’ handling of the war, and alleged several war crimes.
“The results of these groups’ activities caused significant diplomatic damage to Israel and harmed the country’s capacity to defend itself militarily,” Im Tirtzu said in a statement at the time.
But further study showed that less than 1 percent of the information included in the report came from these groups, and Sokatch, New Israel Fund’s CEO, said his organization has since been vindicated.
“The human rights and civil rights organizations that were pilloried by the hard right for being traitorous were thanked over the summer by the IDF,” Sokatch told JTNews during an October visit to Seattle. “And then it thanked the general Israeli human rights community for its work in reporting — not in making conclusions — but in reporting what it found, which had led the IDF to create and implement new operating procedures for civilian areas.”
But it’s the source of these attacks that has Sokatch concerned, and support for his organization has increased in the past year because of it:
“What we see in Israel, what is extraordinarily worrying to many of us at New Israel Fund and many of other people in Israel, is an increase in the attempts by many people who are currently in great positions of power in Israel to chip away at the very fundaments that underlie Israel’s status as a liberal democracy,” he said.
Sokatch pointed to the loyalty oath put forth by Yisrael Beiteinu, the party of foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, though he didn’t dismiss the idea of a loyalty oath in and of itself.
“When I was sworn into the bar in Massachusetts, I had to pledge an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States, and that’s what American elected officials have to swear, and people who become American citizens have to swear,” Sokatch said.
But he did express a distrust of the context in which the bill was introduced.
“There are bills there that would circumscribe the way civil society organizations can get funding from foreign entities, if those foreign entities are liberal European governments, not if they’re right wing — or for that matter, left wing — private citizens in the United States,” he said. Or bills that would strip Reform, Conservative or even some Orthodox rabbis from doing conversions that would be considered kosher in Israel.
“That’s one of the reasons why [the loyalty oath is] so upsetting,” Sokatch said. “It’s fundamentally not something liberal democracies do. They don’t ask prospective citizens to swear fealty to a particular religious identity.”
Sokatch also pointed to the broader freedoms that he sees as under attack: “Freedom of speech, freedom of conscience and freedom of religion, freedom to gather. These are all things that we see being challenged, and increasingly in Israel, people who voice oppositional opinions or dissenting opinions are branded or labeled as traitors,” he said.
In the past two years, Knesset ministers who have attempted to have Arab Israeli lawmakers arrested for treason. In the past two weeks, riots began when rabbis in the cities of Tzfat and B’nai Barak have told their communities not to rent property to Arab-Israelis or African immigrants. New Israel Fund supports NGOs that serve both populations.
“What’s next for the one-fifth of the population of Israel that isn’t Jewish, and what message does it send to them?” Sokatch said.
See the other articles in the state of the State of Israel series:
- Bradley Burston, senior editor of Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz’s online edition
- Rabbi Daniel Gordis of the Shalem Institute
- IDF lecturer and school guidance counselor Rabbi Shalom Hammer