Peace in the Middle East may be a distant notion, but peace between the New
Israel Fund and NGO Monitor over funding issues may have already arrived, or at
least a stronger cease-fire.
The hardest thing about following the
funding debate between the NIF and NGO Monitor, most recently reignited in a
Jerusalem Post interview with NIF President Brian Lurie, is figuring out where
the battle lines are drawn.
During the interview, Lurie defended NIF’s
funding principles, but also hit back at NGO Monitor for allegedly not listing
its donors.
A quick review of NGO Monitor’s website reveals a list of
four donors, as well as a separate list of donors for its major patron Research
+ Evaluation = Promoting Organizational Responsibility and Transparency
(REPORT).
In addition to Lurie, other groups have made similar
accusations, asserting that the NGO Monitor list does not claim to be
comprehensive and that it does not list amounts.
Gerald Steinberg,
president of NGO Monitor, said that this argument is a “red herring.”
He
said that the “total amount of funding NGO Monitor receives is posted online in
its financial statements,” and that the list is as comprehensive as necessary to
give the full picture.
Steinberg added that NGO Monitor is not hiding
massive amounts of funding coming from hidden organizations, and said that the
attacks on NGO Monitor were really “a move to change the subject” from the two
issues which he considered the real battlefield.
Anne Herzberg, legal
adviser to NGO Monitor, said some of the organization’s critics “have a fantasy,
that everything is rooted in a grand right-wing conspiracy that doesn’t
exist.”
Steinberg said that one of the two real issues does not touch
either NIF or NGO Monitor – the question of receiving funds from foreign
governments.
NGO Monitor heavily criticizes various NIF-funded
organizations like Yesh Din and Adalah for receiving foreign government funds,
saying that kind of funding influences the internal Israeli discourse in a way
that is more problematic than funds from the private sector.
But during
his interview, Lurie implied that NIF would view any attacks on organizations it
heavily funds as implicit attacks on its work.
This appears to be one
reason why critics might compare the funding disclosure practices of NGO Monitor
and the organizations that NIF funds.
Some of the NIF-supported
organizations attacked by NGO Monitor for heavy foreign state funding have also
counterattacked, claiming that NGO Monitor’s data was faulty. There has been a
backand- forth exchange over where official data should be taken from
(organizations’ websites or the state registrar) and when different disputed
reports between the sides were posted on different websites.
But this
issue then morphs into fighting on another battlefield: Politics.
If NIF
and other critics allege that NGO Monitor only scrutinizes the funding of
left-wing organizations and not right-wing organizations, harming its claim to
objectivity, the organization would respond that it scrutinizes all foreign
funding, but that the issue has only arisen in in regards to left-wing
groups.
Steinberg also said that organizations he criticizes not only
have foreign state funding, but also have private sector funding that is
comparable to that received by right-wing groups, meaning it is not just a
question of the Left getting foreign state funds and the Right getting private
sector funds.
The second “main” issue flagged by Steinberg is his
criticism of NIF for currently or previously funding organizations involved in
compiling evidence for the Goldstone Report, in boycott and divestment campaigns
against Israel or in organizations that undermine the idea of Israel as a
specifically Jewish state.
Speaking to the Post, Lurie said that NIF does
not fund BDS-related groups. He took exception to the idea that it would need to
defund groups which criticize the IDF to improve it, or which support Israel as
a “state of all of its citizens,” even if NIF supports Israel as a “Jewish
state.”
In spite of all of the above, Steinberg said that he gave credit
to Lurie for dropping some NIF funding recipients because of what he called
their “polarizing” activities.
He also credited Lurie for leading the
organization in a more centrist and less radical direction than his predecessor,
Naomi Chazan (who Steinberg said had “used NIF as an alternate political base
which demonized” aspects of Israel’s actions).
Lurie, in turn, made one
official statement on Monday night, saying: “After being contacted by Gerald
Steinberg of NGO Monitor, I am now aware that there is a donor list on the NGOM
website.”
Will everyone now join hands and sing kumbaya? Probably
not.
But the open channel between the men at the top, Lurie and
Steinberg, and the lightning-fast resolution of the issue, with an email to the
Post copying Steinberg, was strikingly different than any reported relations
between Chazan and her critics.
Lurie’s leadership and direction of NIF
may in fact be succeeding in significantly altering how the organization is
treated by its critics, and in ways that go beyond mere style.
That does
not mean that Steinberg will not be on the watch for what NGO Monitor views as
problematic activities by NIF-funded groups, but any war that can be ended as
fast as this one was, signals that at least a stronger cease-fire may have set
in.