The JEWISH AGENCY FOR ISRAEL has ceased to do what it was created to do and has even begun to undo it in ways that are inimical to the People of Israel, whom it was founded to serve.
To name only a few:
Aliyah: The Law of Return, pursuant to which any Jew in the world has a right to come home to Eretz Yisrael and become a citizen, was amended to define as a “Jew†any person who has one Jewish grandparent. In case it were not enough that Israel has adopted, in essence, Hitler’s definition of “Jew†(yimah shemo vezikhrono), it appears that those with so happenstance a tie to the Jewish people are the ones being recruited in the former Soviet Union and little effort is made to even verify that the documents showing the one Jewish grandparent are real and not forged. It seems equally little effort is made to recruit the Jews of Georgia, the Caucasus and Central Asia . We strongly suspect that the reason is that the overwhelming majority of those Jews are Edot Mizrah (Oriental Jews) and the overwhelming majority are Orthodox. The JEWISH AGENCY FOR ISRAEL seems to think that educated, cultured non-Jews who hate Judaism and the Jewish people are the ideal Israelis. Estimates are that up to two thirds of those brought from the former Soviet Union in the last ten years are not halakhically Jews and most of them have no connection to Judaism or the fate of the Jewish people. Many of them are Christians, anti-Semitism is rife among them and cells of neo-Nazis have been found among them, even in the IDF.
None of this has given the slightest pause to the JEWISH AGENCY FOR ISRAEL. On the contrary, the JEWISH AGENCY FOR ISRAEL has proudly linked on the home page of its website an interview with its Chairman, Zeev Bielsky, in Haaretz in which Bielsky advocates retaining the Law of Return, and opposing attempts to initiate a public discussion on restricting efforts to bring non-Jewish immigrants to Israel.
Jewish Settlement of the Land of Israel : The Jewish National Fund passed dozens of buildings to the Jewish Agency a few years ago, and because the Jewish Agency failed to pay taxes to the regional councils and to the municipalities, it owed millions of Shekels to the regional councils & to the municipalities. In order to pay the debts the Jewish Agency offered properties that the JNF had passed to them .
Parallel to this, about 3-4 years ago, the Saudi Arabian government was looking to purchase failed kibbutzim and the court decided that the kibbutzim could not sell to them, not because Saudi Arabia is an state officially at war with Israel , but because their lands belong to the JNF and those lands are available to Jews only.
Since then, the Supreme Court has rendered a decision that the Israel Lands Authority, which administers lands belonging to the JNF, cannot sell or rent lands to Jews only even though the lands belong to the JNF. The ILA, said the Supreme Court, is a state agency and cannot discriminate between citizens. The response of the JNF should have been to administer its own lands as the WAKF does, as every church does. Instead, its response was to post on its web site a call to support its protest against the decision. We wrote to the JNF suggesting that the relevant response would be to remove its lands from ILA administration. No answer. Even the call to join the protest has also been removed from the JNF web site. JNF lands will be sold to Arabs and the JNF will do nothing to prevent it.
If a government agency cannot discriminate between citizens in the distribution of non-governmental lands which it administers, it is doubly clear that the district councils and municipalities cannot discriminate between citizens in the distribution of municipal lands, which are state lands. Therefore, some or all of the lands which were formerly JNF lands, which were transferred to the JEWISH AGENCY FOR ISRAEL and surrendered to the regional councils and the municipalities in payment of debt which the JEWISH AGENCY FOR ISRAEL had allowed to accrue on its properties through neglect, will be sold to Arabs. Those lands were purchased with Jewish money at exorbitant rates for the purpose of establishing Jews on them and reestablishing and rebuilding the Jewish national home. Those lands have been lost to the Jews because of the neglect and indifference of the JEWISH AGENCY FOR ISRAEL.
Since that decision, Saudi Arabia has opened an interest section in Tel Aviv.
Distribution of money of the JEWISH AGENCY FOR ISRAEL to Arabs: The Jewish Agency for Israel is spending money raised from Jewish sources to develop the Arab sector, thus strengthening the Arab presence in the Land of Israel , and to promote binationalism rather than Israel as a Jewish state. The JEWISH AGENCY FOR ISRAEL is doing this with funds from sources that we view as unfriendly toward Jewish nationalism and Jewish sovereignty, such as the European Union, and in cooperation with groups, such as the Abraham Fund, which have as their goal the transformation of the Jewish national home to a state of its citizens which has a Jewish majority for the time being.
None of this is on the web site of the JEWISH AGENCY FOR ISRAEL, of course, not even with the spin that “coexistence†is in the interest of the Jewish people in Israel and therefore strengthens the hold of the Jewish people on the land. The Abraham Fund, however, states quite openly that the Abraham Fund works to create “what was once called coexistence, but we call equality, cooperation or a shared society,” a state of its citizens which has a Jewish majority for the time being. The Abraham Fund does not look to the openly stated genocidal intentions of Arab leadership toward the Jews.
Education: Just one example of the idea of the JEWISH AGENCY FOR ISRAEL to “[connect] the next generation with Israel and Jewish peoplehood as a core part of Jewish identity“, is the following, from the Jerusalem Post for January 11, 2007,
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Bielski will visit the Language as a Cultural Bridge project, which seeks to “institutionalize spoken Arabic and Arab culture as a required subject in Jewish elementary schools,” Popper told the Post. “Until today, [Jewish children] either study classical Arabic, which doesn’t help them to speak with local Arabs, or don’t learn Arabic at all,” she said.
Another program Bielski will see first-hand is the Mirkam Encounters in the Galilee project, which was started in the wake of the summer’s war with Hizbullah. Ten Jewish elementary schools and 10 Arab elementary schools in the mixed towns of Acre, Haifa and Ma’alot-Tarshiha, hold cultural and educational events together. The project is meant “to break the stereotypes we saw during the war,” Popper said.
There are valid reasons why Israeli Jews should know the Arabic language and be familiar with Arabic culture. Those reasons, however, have nothing to do with “connecting the next generation with Israel and Jewish peoplehood as a core part of Jewish identity.“ Those reasons bear on the policy of government and are a legitimate subject of policy making. The JEWISH AGENCY FOR ISRAEL is not the government, however, and its role is not concerned with the Arab sector. The JEWISH AGENCY FOR ISRAEL was created for the Jews and its legitimate function is to be there for the Jews.
Furthermore, as state policy, those are goals and policies which one can agree with or disagree with and are the proper subject of the give and take of the political process. It is not legitimate for the JEWISH AGENCY FOR ISRAEL to use its wealth and reach to implement them on its own by stealth, by misleading solicitation of donations.
It is because we perceive that the JEWISH AGENCY FOR ISRAEL is not doing what it was founded to do and is, in fact, undoing it, that we have founded the NEW JEWISH AGENCY to pick up the flag and do what the JEWISH AGENCY FOR ISRAEL is supposed to do.
The JEWISH AGENCY FOR ISRAEL has served us with letters of demand (see attachments) that we cease and desist in the use of the name, claiming the exclusive right to the words “Jewish agency†and claiming that we are interfering with their performance of their function of bringing and settling Jews in Israel and, furthermore, that we are misleading people who think they are donating to the JEWISH AGENCY FOR ISRAEL into donating to THE NEW JEWISH AGENCY instead.
Curiously, it is the JEWISH AGENCY FOR ISRAEL that accuses us of the NEW JEWISH AGENCY of misleading and defrauding donors when we are doing nothing of the sort and it is apparent on the facts that that is precisely what they are doing.
We have refused to comply. The JEWISH AGENCY FOR ISRAEL threatens us with legal action and threatens one of the directors of The New Jewish Agency, Advocate Ya’akov Golbert, with disciplinary action before the Israel Bar for unspecified ethical infractions in the matter.
We ask you, the Jewish people, to help us defray what are bound to be crushing legal expenses in defense of our right to promote and assist in the aliyah of actual Jews and the redemption of Eretz Yisrael for the people of Israel and to do so under the name “THE NEW JEWISH AGENCY“ for that is truly what we are. We seek to pick up the flag that the JEWISH AGENCY FOR ISRAEL has thrown to the ground. The JEWISH AGENCY FOR ISRAEL is an enormously wealthy institution and its directors will have no compunction whatever about using the legal system as an instrument of repression.
Please give generously. This is to rescue Eretz Yisrael. Donations can be made conveniently at www.thenewjewishagency.org. We have applied for exemption and we hope that eventually all donations will be deductible retroactively but they are not deductible at this time. Of course, we will notify all donors.
