A wakeup call for the left

[shira]

To my friends on the left-wing, this is a wakeup call. Ezra Nawi's story was supposed to set off the warning bells. It didn't. If you keep on with the regular chorus of "this is an attack on left-wing organizations," you will be doing a great service for the extreme right-wing When did anyone level relevant criticism against you? If your automatic reaction has been for many years to cry out "fascism" or "a danger to democracy," and never really address the issue at hand, then something has gone completely wrong with you, because this is the way to close yourselves off, it's not the way to deal with it. After all, most of the automatic reactions to the "Uvda" investigative report focused on the program itself and not the things it exposed. You've been praising exposés for years, and all of a sudden you're against them? What happened?

....

The main argument that was made was that even if Nawi was wrong, he and left-wing organizations are, at the end of the day, doing holy work against the injustices of the occupation. I wish. The reality is that in recent years, some left-wing activists have been going down a dangerous path. They're not opposing the occupation, they're opposing the State of Israel. They're not dealing in criticism, but in demonization. They're not against the settlement enterprise, they're against a Jewish and democratic state.

This isn't about just one person. This is about a prevailing mood in some left-wing organizations. Five years ago, it was revealed that Hedva Radanovitz, the deputy director of the New Israel Fund, told the American Embassy that she "was not worried about not having a Jewish state, because that would make it more democratic." That should have sounded off the warning bells, but it didn't. Radanovitz found her place in another organization, Bimkom - Planners for Planning Rights. Lizzie Sagi, a former senior official in B'Tselem, wrote that "Israel causes humanity's greatest horrors ... Israel proves devotion to Nazi values." She had to leave B'Tselem. She too found herself a new home at the Human Rights Defenders Fund, a subsidiary of the Yesh Din NGO.

The executive director of the Fund is Alma Biblash, who called Israel "racist and murderous" and "an apartheid Jewish state that is temporary." She also supports the right to destroy Israel, which hides under the guise of the "right of return." Biblash takes it one step further and calls for "a struggle of Israelis, Palestinians and the international community against the Israeli regime." And this is where the punch line is: What is the struggle for? To "put an end to the occupation from the Jordan to the sea." Yes, even Tel Aviv is occupied territory. And we'll have a wonderful time here under Palestinian rule. Just like in Syria there is wonderful harmony and peace among nations.

A year ago, a researcher in B'Tselem, Atef Abu a-Rub, was revealed to be a Holocaust denier, so it's reasonable to suspect his motivation in providing materials to B'Tselem. Some of the leaders of the organization over the past decade, Prof. Anat Biletzki and Prof. Oren Yiftachel, are avid supporters of the "right of return." Attorney Hussein Abu Hussein, a member of B'Tselem's Public Council, claimed that "Israel is worse than the Nazi regime," and that "it's not enough to speak about the monster. Something has to be done." He has nothing to do with Nashat Melhem, who went out and did something, but if that is not an encouragement to violence, then I don't know what is.

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4753465,00.html