NIF Publishes Response Report to Accusations

Israeli right wing activists protest against The New Israel FundPic: Israeli right wing activists protest against The New Israel Fund. Photo: AFP/Gali Tibbon

The New Israel Fund has released a counter-report as a response to a report by Im Tirtzu, which made allegations against the organization that it funded 16 NGOs who had then supplied negative reporting from Israeli sources to members of the Goldstone Committee.

Since the publishing of Im Tirtzu’s document, demands have been made that the Knesset investigate the NIF’s activities, while supporters of NIF have called to stop the attempts to silence freedom of speech in Israel.

In its counter-report, the NIF calls the Im Tirtzu report “a series of lies, manipulations and distortions which stem from the amateur research methodology and the systematic intention to adapt the ‘facts’ to the conclusions that had been reached beforehand.” It adds: “The authors counted references without relating to their content or context, considered the proportion of the references that originated from NIF-supported organizations in an arbitrary way in relation to the total references from Israeli organizations... and inaccurately calculated the number of ‘incriminating’ references from NIF-supported [NGOs] by manipulating and inflating the numbers in order to exaggerate the role of [the] NIF in the Goldstone Report.”

NIF also claims that the NGOs it supports only contributed to the Goldstone Report in 16 of 1,208 instances, and that most of the references were not actively conveyed to the Goldstone Committee rather, the committee collected the references passively from sources on the internet.

“The writers of [the Im Tirtzu report] succeeded in calculating 191 references from NIF-supported organizations only by double and compound calculations. Thus, if six organizations signed a letter which was mentioned once in the Goldstone Report, the editors of [the Im Tirtzu report] counted it six times. In addition, if the Goldstone Report refers to the same letter or report from an organization more than once, the [Im Tirtzu report] counted the references as if they were from different sources. These types of distortions occurred in many instances,” the NIF report says.

An article entitled Breaking down the Im Tirtzu report on New Israel Fund published February 9 on JTA’s website, states that Im Tirtzu acknowledges that the 160 NGOs named in its report are only a small portion of the groups funded by NIF and that most of them have nothing to do with building infrastructure, assisting immigrants and the like however, Im Tirtzu ignored these distinctions and decided to lump the groups together.

The JTA article also lists what NIF had pointed out as errors of the Im Tirtzu report: While Im Tirtzu claims that “hardly a word was hear from the organizations” when Sderot was continuously hit by rockets fired from Gaza in the years prior to Operation Cast Lead, NIF affiliates such as Shatil run projects in Sderot.

NIF’s report, published by Dr. Amir Paz Fuchs, a lecturer in the Faculty of Law at Ono Academic College in Israel, summarizes by saying that the composers of Im Tirtzu’s report only counted references to information sources without acknowledging their content or context. Furthermore, the authors arbitrarily calculated the fraction of referrals by organizations supported by the fund. They counted “incriminating” references to NIF organizations by manipulating the numbers.