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In the warm summer of 2011, a twenty-something Israeli named Daphne Leef set up a Facebook protest page agitating against the high cost of housing in Tel Aviv. She pitched a tent and helped touch off a social protest movement that received national and international attention.
While the protests were billed as grassroots, there was nothing grassroots about them. The protests had been organized and funded by the New Israel Fund. Daphne Leef worked as a video editor for the New Israel Fund.
In the winter of that same year, as the protests had died down, a woman named Tanya Rosenblit boarded a bus which runs through religiously hyper-conservative neighborhoods and staged an incident with the passengers. Rosenblit was dubbed an Israeli Rosa Parks and her stunt helped generate waves of articles about major social problems in Israel.
Rosenblit was associated with One Voice, an organization funded by the New Israel Fund, whose board included Alon Liel, the husband of New Israel Fund director Rachel Liel. Hardly had the NIF gotten through manufacturing one phony social protest movement than it was hard at work on another.
The pattern in both social protests was traditional divide and conquer methodology that pitted the segments of society against each with the goal of creating maximum disruption and mobilizing warm bodies to call for political change.
The New Israel Fund is the local Israeli version of Soros’ Shadow Party and it receives money from Soros. The Liels are the ultimate insiders. Rachel Liel worked as the Deputy Director of Rehabilitation Services in the Ministry of Labor and Alon Liel was the Director General of two ministries and a foreign affairs advisor to former Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Their real program is to bring the left to power.
As the mothership organization of the Israeli left, the New Israel Fund seeds funding to smaller NGOs, which go out and do their community organizing best to carry off the same sort of social conflicts on a communal level, mobilizing protests, manufacturing outrage and recruiting local activists to embed their agenda into a communal identity.
This program is a vital one for the Israeli left which has no voting base left to cling to. The Labor Party, once the dominant establishment, has become a shadow of its former self, forced into a coalition with the ruling conservative Likud Party. To understand their plight, imagine if the Democratic Party lost almost all its seats in Congress.
The Labor Party had alienated Israeli immigrant groups and the country’s religious population. The only minorities willing to vote for it were Arab Muslims, which wasn’t enough to keep it in power. The fringe left-wing parties meanwhile attracted the local version of the Berkeley vote but couldn’t get past their small number of parliamentary seats.
Most plans to revitalize the Israeli left as a political force beyond the ministries and organizations still controlled by its bureaucracy hinge on giving it a political base in Israeli society. While the Western left’s parties have become successfully identified with immigrants and identity politics, the two primary immigrant groups in Israel tend to skew conservative.
The current center-right consensus in Israel is reflective of Israeli society. Disrupting that consensus to create a mandate for change is the agenda of the New Israel Fund. Class warfare was the obvious opening shot.
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