A new campaign launched by the Zionist Im Tirtzu group is calling on the Israeli government to end all cooperation with the New Israel Fund (NIF).
The campaign will feature billboards titled “Kicking the New Fund Out of Israel” on display around the country, the first of which, a 100-foot wide sign, was put up Tuesday morning over Tel-Aviv’s Ayalon Highway.
The billboard depicts NIF President Talia Sasson opposite an IDF soldier, the target of the NIF $87 million efforts to harm the State of Israel and its army.
Sasson’s 2005 Report to the Sharon government redrew the lines of the Judea and Samaria map, declaring that numerous Israeli communities which had settled with state approval since the mid-1970s, were, in fact, partially or completely illegal.
According to Im Tirtzu, the campaign’s goal is to expose the NIF as a foreign political organization operating as a political opposition within Israel against the government and the IDF, while engaging in anti-Israel “lawfare” in the country’s High Court of Justice.
At the same time, Im Tirtzu has published a new position paper detailing what it dubs the NIF’s MO in wiping Israel off the map. Titled “The Roadmap to Israel’s Destruction,” the document offers a map of Israel showing how the NIF sponsored proxy NGOs exploit internal issues to stain Israel with accusations of war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid.
The report also notes how many NIF client NGOs receive extensive funding from European governments, the European Union and the United Nations.
According to Im Tirtzu, its decision to launch the campaign came following the NIF’s subversive efforts to torpedo the government’s plan to remove thousands of illegal migrants, as well as the recent wave of petitions by NIF client organizations against the IDF.
In response to the Gaza riots, a number of NIF-funded NGOs petitioned the Supreme Court against the IDF with the demand that it change its rules of engagement in dealing with the rioters.
Im Tirtzu CEO Matan Peleg called it “absurd” that government ministries and public institutions continue to cooperate and hold events with NIF-sponsored groups.
“There is no parallel to this phenomenon in the democratic world, whereby a foreign political organization openly declares that it represents the political opposition in its host country,” Peleg protested.
“This unique problem, coupled with the fact that the NIF transfers millions of dollars to NGOs that work to slander the IDF, erase the Jewish character of the state, and petition the Supreme Court against state policy, has led us to the conclusion that the government must cut all ties with this insidious organization.”
“We hope that our elected officials will adopt this approach and work immediately to implement it,” Peleg said.