The power of example — the NIF, the attacks, and Goldstone

One way to figure the increasingly fraught to and fro between the New Israel Fund and its Israeli critics (including the Israeli government) is as a family fight: Not exactly articulate, at first.For the past few days, ever since it’s become evident that the army is using some of the same NIF-funded evidence to examine itself as the Goldstone commission, I’ve been wondering why exactly — at the same time — NIF’s critics have intensified their attacks. The criticism, aired over the summer, that the evidence is tendentious now, itself, appears to be tendentious.

What’s emerging — and may yet be articulated (or maybe has been articulated, I have yet to see it clearly) — is not that the evidence is bad, or manufactured, but that it was wrong to share it with Goldstone. Period.

That posture may be grossly simplistic — nativist, even — but I think the psychology that underpins it stems from legitimate Israeli concerns about legitimating Goldstone — and it’s here that NIF falls short in shaping the argument.

Otniel Schneller, a Kadima lawmaker in the Knesset and one of several Knesset members seeking the criminalization of some of the activity of the human rights groups at the center of this, seems to hint at this psychology Thursday in The Jerusalem Post:

Schneller added that he felt at least one of the groups connected to the NIF, which had given testimony to Goldstone’s commission of inquiry, had overstepped the bounds of legitimacy in that it had already tried to bring the same issue — regarding IDF actions in Gaza — to the Israeli Supreme Court, which rejected the case.

“They attempted to bring a case alleging that the IDF had destroyed entire villages in Gaza,” Schneller said. “The Supreme Court threw it out and dismissed it as false, but the group nonetheless presented the issue to Goldstone. That’s a prime example of an illegitimate activity, because it’s not only faulting the IDF based on false testimony, but it’s saying that decisions made by the courts of the State of Israel are not binding.”

Let me be crystal clear: I’m not endorsing Schneller’s view, or even saying it makes sense. He doesn’t bother to identify the group or the case, rendering his claim a centimeter or two short of nonsense; recourse to an international body is, a priori, out of bounds, according to his outlook, although he doesn’t explain why Israel is happy, for instance, to use the World Trade Organization’s good offices to bludgeon Arab states into allowing trade.

Where this argument may be going, where it may finally grasp legitimacy, is in his "nonetheless": "Goldstone" has become a byword, in Israel, for "travesty," and not without reason. The report includes some substantive charges, but makes its overall case — that Israel’s policy was to intentionally target civilians — on flimsy grounds, including meaningless bluster from Israeli officials who were not involved in the war’s planning, and the bizarre claim that because of Israel’s development of precision weaponry, human error cannot be a factor. This, as I’ve written, is like blaming Canon for Uncle Marv’s tendency to point the PowerShot at Aunt Edna’s ear instead of her face. The camera may be state of the art, but Uncle Marv, unfortunately, is still an idiot.

And this report underpins a process that Israelis have every reason to suspect is corrupt. Had the U.N. Human Rights Council, make no mistake, received from Richard Goldstone a paper plate illiustrated with his absent doodling, it would have used it to launch a bid to refer Israeli officials to the International Criminal Court. That such a referral now has the patina of legitimacy because of Goldstone’s authentic background as a jurist, a human rights icon and a Zionist makes it worse, for Israelis.

And the fact that he has marshaled facts, and from Israeli sources, makes it even worse, which is where this becomes vexing. This fury, at the subliminal level where it now brews, needs little justification; B’tselem’s facts seem as outrageous to Israelis like Schneller, as Goldstone’s distortions of the same facts.

It is the responsbility, of course, of the Israelis acting on this fury to responsibly tease apart the malicious from the meticulous, and so far, they’ve done a really horrible job of it: Legislation that would shut down NGOs would probably cause as many problems as it would solve, if for no other reason than it would provide a pretext to shut down NGOs watching out for the welfare of Jews in the Ukraine and other states of the former Soviet Union and would lend credibility to the smearing of human rights groups providing valuable information in the immediate neighborhood. Do we need an "even Israel does it" moment?

But this need for clarity is also the responsibility of the human rights groups exploited by Goldstone — and their sponsors, like the NIF. Not because of some McCarthyist notion by which every critic must first swear fealty to a politically correct notion of what it means to be Israeli. Not because the NIF and the groups it sponsors have been named by the likes of Im Tirtzu, but because they have been named by Goldstone.

Let me get a little Dickensian here, and risk casting Israel as Oliver Twist: You catch the kid picking your pocket, you turn him over to the constabulary. When you discover that he faces the gallows, is it your responsibility to do your damndest to get him out?

Ok, Cast Lead was no pocket-picking expedition, but the UNHRC — and to a degree, the international court — is about as corrupt as the interest-vested England of Dickens’ day.

And the thing is, once the responsible organization makes it clear that it has repudiated Goldstone, a weight, at least, is partly lifted. B’Tselem, for instance, made it clear in October that it found Goldstone’s report profoundly* flawed; is it a coincidence that Israel’s government cited B’Tselem as a source in explaining its efforts to track down wrongdoing last week? Not that B’Tselem is satisfied — but it has scored an irrevocable victory. The army has validated its research.

The same is true this side of the pond. Yuli Edelstein, the Israeli Diaspora affairs minister, who’s here meeting with Jewish leaders this week as I noted earlier, lists the usual litany of wounded broadsides against the New Israel Fund:

This matter has come to a head through a body called the New Israel Fund, and this body, as I have said and we all know, has a number of projects that are very beautiful, very welcome in the social sector, and I as a former minister of absorption can testify ran very desirable activities in various areas. But alongside these ran activities I would say are very problematic, some of the funding is not private, … funded by all sorts of foreign agents, foreign governments, but certainly, and I haven’t checked 100 percent the reliability of the research, but as far as I know, and the study is in my room, but as far as I know, most of the material submitted to Goldstone report was submitted by groups funded by NIF.

Nowhere in this rambling, barely grammatical (in its original Hebrew) declamation does Edelstein address whether the materials submitted to Goldstone are truthful, which you’d think would be the point.

NIF’s director, Daniel Sokatch, understandably slid into the "kill the messenger" cliche when I read back Edelstein’s remarks. "We’ve made an enormous difference to the texture and character of civil society over last 30 years," he said. "Human rights groups are reporting what they see in the field and absolutely have a duty to validate the reports — to take it out on the organizations, and  and particularly the New Israel Fund seems to me an attempt to kill the messenger."

He would not, however, pronounce an opinion on the Goldstone report: "We don’t take positions on political issues," he said. But that’s exactly what NIF does, and with good reason. (Nothing in Israel is more political than the hegemony of the Orthodox, for instance.)

Contrast this with Rabbi David Saperstein, the director of the Reform movement’s Religious Action Center, who was even more robust in his condemnation of the anti-NIF campaign — and who even reached out to me to vent spleen.

"It’s ironic that people who condemned the Goldstone report as sweeping generalities, taking facts out of context, are getting on the bandwagon of a report that does the same thing here," he said, referring to Im Tirtzu’s "study" of the NIF.

Saperstein has the credibility to point out that irony because his organization was among those that "condemned the Goldstone report as sweeping generalities."

Saperstein made it clear that he believed whether NIF or the groups it sponsors have condemned Goldstone or not, was beside the point. "I don’t see how they can be blamed for the Goldstone report because they provided information they knew to be factual — their assertions ought to be evaluated on their own merits," Saperstein said. And he and Sokatch made the valid point that had the groups not cooperated with Goldstone, their material is, by definition, open source, and would have been available to Goldstone for quotation (or misquotation).

All true — but it was Saperstein, whose movement has made its rejection of the Goldstone report clear, who scored the one-on-one meeting with Edelstein, who now says he will return to Israel to report to the Cabinet an impending crisis in relations with the Diaspora. Not Sokatch, nor his boss, Naomi Chazan.

Saperstein would not share with me his discussion with Edelstein, but I know David, and he is nothing if not blunt spoken.

UPDATE: Jerry Haber (below) does not agree that B’Tselem’s characterization of the Goldstone report is "profoundly flawed," as I do. I think the flaws that B’Tselem describes are profound — particularly, this sentence: "The mission’s conclusions regarding Israel’s overall objectives in carrying out the operation were not sufficiently supported by facts arising from the mission’s research."

But it is also true that B’Tselem does not necessarily see things my way; as Jerry points out, B’Tselem also finds that the "faults do not nullify the report’s main recommendation, that Israel must investigate the suspicions that its army acted in Gaza unlawfully and immorally." So I have crossed out "profoundly." B’Tselem found the report flawed, and one of the flaws B’Tselem finds is that Goldstone leaped to conclusions about intent unsupported by the evidence — the very flaw I believe points to a profound corruption at the Goldstone commission’s core. That’s how I should have put it.