By Ronn Torossian, NEW YORK POST
Why are the organizers of this year’s Celebrate Israel Parade letting a vehemently anti-Israel group march along down Fifth Avenue?
Sunday, May 31, brings North America’s largest one-day celebration for Israel. Each year, tens of thousands celebrate the beauty of Israel — the land and her people — marching beneath blue-and-white banners to commemorate the modern-day miracle of the state of Israel and to pay homage to America’s closest ally in the Middle East.
Yet the parade organizers — the New York Jewish Community Relations Council and the UJA-Federation — refuse to prevent a demonstrably anti-Israel group, the New Israel Fund, from marching.
How demonstrably? Well the New Israel Fund funds the Boycott, Divest and Sanction movement — which aims to treat Israel as an international moral leper like apartheid-era South Africa.
NIF also funds efforts to bring Israel — and soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces — before UN war-crimes tribunals. And it sends hundreds of thousands of dollars to groups such as the Human Rights Defenders Fund, which calls Israelis “racist” and “murderous” and Israel a “temporary Jewish apartheid state.”
Bizarrely, the Jewish Community Relations Council claims that BDS supporters aren’t allowed in the parade: “JCRC-NY, for clarification purposes, added a new rule that all groups must oppose, not fund, nor advocate for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS) against Israel, which seeks to delegitimize the State of Israel by not recognizing it as a Jewish state.”
When I asked how NIF could march, the parade organizers essentially told me that the ban is only on pro-BDS signs. Sorry: The rules clearly say groups that fund the BDS movement can’t march.
And the NIF’s Web site and annual report show support for BDS. Indeed, the site proclaims that NIF will “not exclude support for organizations that discourage the purchase of goods or use of services from [West Bank] settlements.”
The Scarlett Johansson-SodaStream debacle centered on this exact issue. The actress came under BDS-led fire for representing the Israeli carbonated-beverage company SodaStream, which dared to employ Palestinians in a West Bank settlement. The BDSers got the anti-hunger group Oxfam, which she served as global ambassador, to complain; she responded by dropping Oxfam.
This bold action was widely applauded at the time — including by the JCRC, which posted on Facebook and Twitter, “Go Scarlett, go! Go Scarlett, go! Go Scarlett, go!”
Johansson’s actions speak volumes, and so too does shamefully allowing the NIF into the parade.
Just last month, top NIF officials signed a petition calling on European countries to boycott products from the settlements, to restrict the entry of settlers and to restrict academic cooperation with Israeli institutions.
So why does NIF get to march?
Well, some leaders of the JCRC and UJA are also donors to the New Israel Fund, including UJA President Alisa Doctoroff and JCRC board member Karen Adler.
Doctoroff, Adler and other NIF supporters have every right to their views, but their support for a group that boycotts Israel should have no place in a parade to support the Jewish state.
Follow Scarlett Johansson’s example, and choose your side.
NIF’s ill works go far beyond BDS. It spends nearly $27 million a year on openly anti-Israel activities.
Notes Knesset Deputy Speaker Yoni Chetboun, “The main goal of the NIF is to undermine the Israeli Army, by knowingly financing left-wing Israeli groups that try to get young Israeli soldiers prosecuted for war crimes.”
The Celebrate Israel Parade is a place for friends of Israel. It should reject extremists of all kinds. It’s simply unspeakable that New York’s mainstream Jewish advocates would lend credibility to the New Israel Fund.
This isn’t an issue of right versus left, but one of right versus wrong.
As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at last year’s American-Israeli Political Action Committee gathering, “Everyone should know what the letters B-D-S really stand for: bigotry, dishonesty and shame. And those who oppose BDS, like Scarlett Johansson, they should be applauded.”
Those who stand with the New Israel Fund are wrong — as are those who’d let it march in our city’s Celebrate Israel Parade.
Ronn Torossian, CEO of the public-relations firm 5WPR, writes this in a personal capacity.
Years ago I had dealings in a professional capacity with the President of the NIF, Brian Lurie. He had just arrived as the new executive director of the San Francisco Jewish Federation.
I didn’t have a lot of experience dealing with him, but I came away with a distinct impression that he could be described by one word: arrogant.
I also encountered some of the results of what seemed to me to be his ruthless and heartless takeover and dispatch of some senior staff–staff that had been performing competently and satisfactorily for many years. He seemed to cruelly throw them to the street; some were middle aged executives that had no prospects of putting their lives back together, particularly in a small city like San Francisco–a city with almost no opportunities for those with executive experience in Jewish fund-raising. One of the men was in my office crying.
It was my impression that he did not like older staff.
I also came to find out that Lurie would not observe the protocols and courtesies of the organized Jewish community. He would bypass people who should have been involved because of the traditional allocation of responsibility among the agencies. While some might admire this trait–it is destructive and creates distrust and hard feelings. That could have been avoided.
Coincidentally, I happened to be reading the NIF website just a few hours before I came upon this article. Reading between the lines, Lurie seems like a major figure in the movement to divorce Jewish communal priorities from the heavy emphasis on Israel. He apparently doesn’t see Israel as in a desperate situation–with continuing and dangerous threats all around–and believes that more Jewish philanthropy should stay at home. That’s my surmise, anyway.
The NIF seems to speak out of both sides of its mouth when it comes to the BDS movement.