A "peace activist" based in Jerusalem this week sent out the following email to friends: "For my birthday on May 2, I'm asking my friends and family for a special gift: help me raise $5,000... It's a great cause that advances peace –two states for two peoples – Israel and Palestine. Please consider giving to my Birthday Wish, and together we can help to make peace."Indeed, as we have seen, the average West Bank worker earns $22 a day. $5000 would feed his family for over seven months.
The Palestinians call such people who go out asking for money in the name of coexistence and a two-state solution "Merchants of Peace." And there is no shortage of such "peace activists" in Israel and the Palestinian territories.
There are, in fact, dozens of non-governmental organizations that raise millions of dollars every year under the pretext that they want to help the cause of peace in the Middle East.
Most of the money goes to paying high salaries to the directors and employees of these organizations.
Some of these organizations also invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in "seminars" and joint Israeli-Palestinian meetings in five-star hotels in Europe in the name of peace.
Those who are invited to these gatherings are usually people with close ties to the heads of the organizations and government officials on both sides. Only a few represent the grassroots in both societies.
Many Palestinians and Israelis who attend these meetings say that they rarely contribute to the cause of peace.
In many instances, Palestinians and Israelis who go to these meetings as friends return home as enemies after being forced to confront each other in front of foreign audiences.
It is time that the donors who fund such organizations start revising their policies and think of better ways to invest their money.
They should, for example, consider supporting Palestinian university students who come from poor families. The money could also go to build sports facilities and create job opportunities for Palestinian youths. In short, there are one million projects that the donors, some of whom appear to be extremely gullible, could make use of their money to help the cause of peace.
Giving a US-born "peace activist" a $5,000 gift on his birthday is certainly not one of the ways to help advance the cause of peace. It is also hard to understand how such a gift would help bring about a two-state solution.
There are, however, so many deprived Palestinian families who, with $5,000, could feed their children for weeks and months.
I confess I am not so familiar with the many dozens of groups that say they foster peace. Some do seem to be doing important things, others seem more like what Toameh is talking about.
But it does bring up the question: who funded Vittorio Arrigoni's life in Gaza for the past couple of years? The ISM? The ISM says that donations are
...used to cover operational expenses in Palestine such as communications, transportation, legal expenses, apartment maintenance expenses and small stipends for key coordination positions.Sounds like a scam right there - probably the bulk of ISM's contributions (many of them laundered through the A. J. Muste Institute in order to be tax deductible) go to maintaining the lifestyle of Greta Berlin, Adam Shapiro and other rabid Israel-haters.
I wish Toameh would have named names. It would be fun to track back the money trails of useless "peace" organizations.
UPDATE: Stan says he got the same email: from IPCRI's Gershon Baskin.
Sure enough, a quick look at its website shows that ICPRI does essentially nothing. It styles itself as a "think tank" and holds lots of meetings and conferences that accomplish little. (I only found one exception: helping sewage treatment in an Arab community. Even that project's link doesn't work to find out more information.)
Even more outrageous, many of their "policy papers" are not available at their website (they claim that many of them are "classified!") The only articles I could find are the ones that Baskin writes for the Jerusalem Post and elsewhere, with very few exceptions. Their downloadable e-books are all over ten years old.
If the only output that IPCRI generates is stuff that Baskin writes, then maybe I should turn this blog into a think-tank! I probably generate more content than he does.
Hey, donate some money to EoZ! I need to work on my begging techniques!
UPDATE 2: Here is the email (h/t Stan):
Here you can see his progress towards the $5000.