According to a recent report
published at Tablet, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF) has supported “groups
working to advance a boycott of the world’s only Jewish state” with “at least
$880,000” since 2013, and this support for BDS advocates “is virtually unique
among major American institutional funders.”
It is interesting to note in this context that in 2013, the
Anti-Defamation League (ADL) listed
ten of the “worst of the worst” groups engaged in vicious anti-Israel activism
that seeks to de-legitimize the Jewish state as “the worst violator of
international human rights.” Among the groups listed by the ADL is the misleadingly
named Jewish Voice for Peace – which received $140,000 from RBF in 2015.
RBF’s funding for groups dedicated to demonizing the world’s
only Jewish state has been repeatedly exposed
and criticized.
A year ago, Ziva Dahl of the Haym Salomon Center wondered
why “the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a premier philanthropy based in Manhattan”
would “finance non-governmental organizations intent on annihilating the Jewish
state,” but apparently, no one at RBF could be bothered to answer this
question.
It seems that Tablet’s Armin Rosen was luckier. As
Rosen rightly points out: “RBF has given money to groups that serve mutually
reinforcing purposes within the BDS movement’s ecosystem, targeting a variety
of publics within a range of political, social, national, and even religious
contexts. It is impossible to argue that these grants are being made without
the advancement of BDS in mind.” And indeed, RBF’s president Stephen Heintz was
only too happy to justify the funding for BDS groups:
“Given that the
occupation has continued for 50 years and there have been numerous failed
efforts to negotiate peace, we are looking for ways to disrupt this status quo […]
and some of our grantees, a relatively small number, are either groups that
have officially endorsed the BDS campaign, or undertake some related forms of
what we might call economic activism in order to protest the ongoing
occupation.”
Right, Mr. Heintz, let’s call it “economic activism” – and
let’s recall who was among the first to advocate this kind of “economic
activism” as a
form of “war by other means” almost 90 years ago. As Professor William
Jacobson has pointed
out, “BDS is a direct and provable continuation of the Arab anti-Jewish
boycotts in the 1920s and 1930s and [the] subsequent Arab League Boycott,
restructured through non-governmental entities to evade U.S. anti-boycott
legislation and repackaged in the language of ‘social justice’ to appeal to
Western liberals.” A JTA report
from September 1929 – published a
month after the notorious Hebron massacre and the subsequent Arab violence that left 133
Jews dead – reveals the strategy of Haj Amin al-Husseini, who had incited the violence, and who was now advocating the kind
of “economic activism” that RBF president Stephen Heintz is happy to support.
Under the title
“‘My Hands Are Clean,’ Grand Mufti Asserts in Interview,” the report shows that
the man who would eventually become known as “Hitler’s Mufti” felt rather confident that the Jews would soon
be forced to leave British Mandate Palestine. He asserted (rightly) that “it is
untrue that the world is siding with the Jews” and then proceeded to explain: “We
are … assured of the solidarity of the entire Moslem world and have actually
offers of armies to help us if necessary. Help is unnecessary. We will win
through an economic boycott. The boycott in Moslem countries against Jewish
industries is tight and daily growing tighter, until the industries will be
broken.” The mufti expected that eventually, the “English friends” of the Jews
would be “moved by pity” and would proceed to “remove the last remaining Jews
[from British Mandate Palestine] on their battleships.”
According to
another report from 1948 – which called the mufti “Hitler of the Holy Land” and described him as “a master of
terrorism” – al-Husseini explained that “the sword of Islam” had been “unsheathed
in Palestine” because the “fighting in Palestine has been inevitable since the
first Jew set foot there.”
While the mufti
was surely disappointed that his economic boycott and the “unsheathed … sword
of Islam” were not able to “remove” the Jews from their ancient homeland during
his lifetime, he couldn’t have imagined in his wildest dreams that in the 21st
century, there would be groups like “Jewish Voice for Peace” celebrating Palestinian terrorists and enthusiastically
campaigning for BDS with the generous support of a renowned philanthropic
foundation in the US.
Just how cynical the RBF officials responsible for BDS
funding are becomes apparent when Rosen asked Ariadne Papagapitos, director of
the RBF Peacebuilding Program, “if she understood why some Jews would find it
problematic that RBF funded organizations that believed Israel’s existence to
be dispensable or undesirable—like JVP, Zochrot, and other pro-BDS grantees do.”
According to Rosen, this “didn’t bother” Papagapitos in the least; as she
explained: “I think what is most problematic is that there would be a monopoly
on the solution or on what the correct approaches are […] And so long as they
are striving for the same kind of peaceful and just values or values of justice
and peace for the region and for all people, then I think that’s OK, and I
don’t see what makes Zochrot or JVP any less Jewish than a different Jewish
group.”
The ADL has noted
that “JVP uses its Jewish identity to shield the anti-Israel movement from
allegations of anti-Semitism and to provide the movement with a veneer of
legitimacy,” and apparently, Papagapitos is more than happy to hide behind the
“shield” provided by JVP. When it comes to Israel, Papagapitos is all for
diversity of opinion: who would want “a monopoly on the solution or on what the
correct approaches are” when there is an opportunity to fund people who work so
hard to make the case that the world’s only Jewish state is too evil to be
allowed to exist?
So presumably, Ms. Papagapitos can see nothing wrong with
the “solution” favored by prominent BDS advocate Omar Barghouti, who gloated in
a programmatic essay published
during the murderous Al-Aqsa
Intifada at Ali Abunimah’s Electronic Intifada:
“The current phase has all the emblematic properties of what may be considered
the final chapter of the Zionist project. We are witnessing the rapid demise of
Zionism, and nothing can be done to save it, for Zionism is intent on killing
itself. I, for one, support euthanasia.” [Emphasis original]
As far as the
Rockefeller Brothers Fund is concerned, people advocating “euthanasia” for
Zionism – i.e. for the world’s only Jewish state – are worthy recipients of philanthropic
funding: according to Tablet, Al-Shabaka – which lists both BDS co-founder Omar Barghouti and ardent Hamas fan Ali Abunimah as “policy advisors” – has received
“$130,000 from RBF since 2013,” and Rosen rightly notes that this sum is “an
important backstop for an organization that reported $127,000 in total revenue
in its 2014 tax filings.”
The former chief rabbi of the United Kingdom Rabbi Lord
Jonathan Sacks has pointed
out that “[in] the middle ages, Jews were hated because of their religion.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, they were hated because of their
race. In the twenty first century, they are hated because of their nation
state. Anti-Zionism is the new anti-Semitism.” And it’s not so surprising that in
the twenty first century, this new anti-Semitism is legitimized as worthy of
philanthropic funding – after all, for anti-Semites, “philia,”i.e. love, for “anthropos,”man
or mankind, has never included the Jews.