Israel Hayom..
13 June '17..
Link: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=19227
At Monday's big conference of dinosaurs, otherwise known as the Israel Peace Conference (sponsored by the Haaretz newspaper), the speech by New Israel Fund President Talia Sasson stood out.
Sasson isn't good at rhetoric; she spills her heart out. So it's easy to pick out of her speech the avowed stance for which she was chosen to lead the fund. In the speeches I've heard her make, she quickly identifies the enemy: "the settlers."
But the Israeli majority sees the settlements as a solution both to security issues at the heart of the country and a discourse about the rights of the Jewish people to their land. It's hard to find any discourse about Jewish rights among Sasson or her organization.
In her speech, Sasson said, "In the lack of any opposition that puts up a battle to defend Israeli democracy and Palestinian human rights, human rights groups are glowing in their isolation." This one sentence distills the New Israel Fund's raison d'etre: a combative political opposition that will take the place of the official Knesset opposition, which isn't "doing its job." At the end of her speech, she expressly suggested founding a political party in the spirit of what she was saying ("not under the auspices of the New Israel Fund" -- sure, sure).
We are talking about a political organization in every aspect that in the guise of hollow talk about human rights aims to seize hold of the political agenda and provide legal and propaganda weaponry to organizations, many of which have been working for years to change the Jewish-democratic character of the country -- in other words, which see even the parts of Israel that are within the Green Line as "occupied." Nowhere in the text of Sasson's speech does the phrase "Jewish-democratic" appear; the "Jewish" is used in her speech only in the context of control, occupation, and separation (apartheid).
So what remains to justify her political activity? "Protecting democracy." But there is no real room in the president of the New Israel Fund's democratic vision for debate or polemic or for decisions made through democratic means such as elections. She sees all legitimate activity by a right-wing government as a "threat" to "democracy." The result is growing alienation between devotees of the New Israel Fund and the state, to the point of taking action against its existence as the national state of the Jewish people.
The old-guard establishment that gathered Monday under the umbrella of the NIF and Haaretz newspaper is still trying to sacrifice itself on the altar of a paradigm of peace that has collapsed, and sees any other proposal as blaspheming against its dearest belief.
The New Israel Fund provides gas for the stalled "territory for peace" paradigm. The regular infusions of this concept give hope to those who wish us evil that, heaven forbid, Israeli society is about to break down and give in.
Ironically, the NIF's "civilian" disguise hurts the Israeli Left because it strengthens its fixated thinking and encourages it to adopt a combative approach, not against our enemies and opponents on the outside, but against Israeli society itself. My friends on the Left, do you want to know why you aren't reaching the hearts of the Israeli majority? Look at Talia Sasson and the organization she leads. That is your mirror.
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