An Arab extremist group has submitted an urgent petition to Israel’s Supreme Court, demanding that Palestinians be permitted to rescue Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists who may be trapped in a terror tunnel bombed by Israel.
And guess who’s funding the petitioners? American Jews.
The organization trying to save the terrorists is called Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel. What the rescue of Hamas and Islamic Jihad murderers in Gaza has to do with “Arab minority rights in Israel” is anybody’s guess.
But that doesn’t seem to bother Adalah’s many donors. In 2016 and 2017, the Swiss Foreign Ministry gave Adalah $165,000. Prominent charitable organizations in Belgium, Germany, Holland, Spain, and England also have contributed generously in recent years.
One of the largest donors to Adalah is the liberal American Jewish organization New Israel Fund. According to NGO Monitor, New Israel Fund contributed more than $2 million to Adalah from 2008 to 2016.
It’s not as if Adalah ordinarily is a reasonable, moderate organization and this petition to save terrorists is some kind of aberration. On the contrary. Adalah’s record of extremist activity is long enough to fill several filing cabinets at New Israel Fund headquarters.
In other words, the folks at NIF have always known exactly what they were getting with Adalah. Yet they keep on signing the checks.
Just this past June, Nadia Ben-Youssef, director of the Adalah Justice Project, spoke at an event in the U.S. House of Representatives, during which she accused Israel of oppressing Palestinian children through “persistent human rights violations, systematic impunity, discrimination and a hyper-militarized environment.”
And that wasn’t her first visit to Capitol Hill. Two years ago, Ben-Youssef spoke at a Congressional briefing on Israel’s use of American weapons in the fight against terrorists in Gaza. Ben-Youssef declared that Israel is guilty of “indiscriminate war crimes.”
The seemingly tireless Adalah fanatics even helped draft the infamous anti-Israel section of the Black Lives Matter platform, in which Israel was described as “an apartheid state committing genocide.”
That’s the interesting thing about Adalah. It doesn’t hide its agenda. It openly and proudly incites against Israel. No, it’s the New Israel Fund that’s doing the hiding.
I received one of NIF’s mass-mailing solicitations the other day. It declared: “Please rush your gift to the New Israel Fund so we can keep working with organizations on the ground in Israel to win victories for minorities, for the voiceless, and for the powerless.”
The letter was accompanied by a glossy brochure listing the highlights of New Israel Fund activities from 1979 to the present. Buried deep in the long list was a passing reference to Adalah as one of the NIF-supported “human rights organizations” that acted in 2006 to force Israel to pay more compensation to “Palestinians in the Occupied Territories” who were harmed by the Israeli army.
The brochure had no reference to Adalah trying to incite the U.S. Congress against Israel. No reference to Adalah promoting BDS or spreading lies about Israel being “racist” and an “apartheid state.” No reference to Adalah’s role in attempting to persuade African-Americans to hate Israel.
Adalah is not fighting “for minorities, for the voiceless, and for the powerless,” as the New Israel Fund claims. Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists are not a persecuted minority. They are not “voiceless” or “powerless.” They have a voice through their many supporters around the world, and they have the power of their missiles, guns, and knives.
And when a few Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists get trapped in a tunnel they were going to use to murder Israeli children, they know they can count on Adalah, and its American Jewish donors, to ride to their rescue.