How the Rockefeller Brothers Fund Became a Major Donor to BDS

Founded by the five sons of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the philanthropy known as RBF has some $842 million at its disposal. It funds a broad array of philanthropic activities, including several anti-Israel organizations; it also played both direct and indirect roles in advocating the nuclear deal with Iran. Armin Rosen reports:

Since 2013, at least $880,000 in RBF funding has . . . gone to groups working to advance a boycott of the world’s only Jewish state. Supporters of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel see the RBF funding as validation of their approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. . . . RBF’s support for Jewish Voice for Peace and other pro-boycott groups, which is virtually unique among major American institutional funders, is either a sign that the movement is inching toward mainstream status on the American left—or evidence of a revealing drift within one of the most respected family foundations in America. . . .

It seems unlikely that RBF is funding pro-boycott groups from a place of ignorance, or because of lapses in oversight. Charities have a history of paying attention. . . . RBF is demonstrably [not] oblivious [of its support to BDS]. . . .The Fund hasn’t altered its practices, despite repeated public and private criticism, including a May 2016 op-ed in the New York Daily News. . . .

Starting in 2001, shortly after [the fund’s current president, Stephen] Heintz took over, RBF [also] began exploring how it could help repair the relationship between Iran and the United States. This was partly as a response to the September 11 attacks. . . . For the past sixteen years, the Fund has organized dialogues between prominent American and Iranian figures. These types of closed-door meetings, called “track-two diplomacy” in foreign- policy parlance, allow private citizens from different countries to discuss issues of mutual importance with a frankness and freedom that would be impossible for government officials. . . .

RBF’s efforts in this vein brought it into close contact with Javad Zarif, now Iran’s foreign minister and the chief negotiator of the nuclear deal; the foundation has also given generous donations to the National Iranian American Council and the Ploughshares Fund—two of the most prominent organizations that stumped for the Iran deal.

Read more at Tablet

More about: Anti-Zionism, BDS, Iran nuclear program, Israel & Zionism, Philanthropy

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society