Thanks to the very successful campaign of the Im Tirzu movement in exposing the New Israel Fund as an organization that supports organizations out to destroy the Jewish character of the State of Israel, the Jerusalem Post has fired Naomi Chazan, the Israeli chairman of the New Israel Fund.
Im Tirzu claimed in a feature published in the Hebrew daily Maariv last Friday that it found that 92 percent of the negative references to the IDF in the Goldstone report originating with Israeli sources came from organizations sponsored by the NIF. The fund's grantees include Adalah, Breaking the Silence, B'tselem, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, Yesh Din and the Israeli branch of Physicians for Human Rights.
Although information pertaining to the support of these organizations by the NIF is not news, it was not until Im Tirzu gathered the information on the Goldstone report and publicized it in a very well seen campaign in Israel that the public became aware of this information.
The storm provoked by the campaign has reached the Knesset, where the Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee rushed to set up a subcommittee to look into how foreign foundations sponsor Israeli organizations. MK Otnietl Schneller (Kadima) announced he was working to reach a wide consensus on setting up a parliamentary inquiry commission to probe the conduct of the NIF and its grantees, while a number of other MKs issued statements supporting the fund and freedom of speech in Israel.
