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Pro-Israel efforts on US campuses have failed, Jewish Agency fundraiser says

This is an important measure of the desperation of Israel supporters in the face of the next generation’s attitudes. Josh Nathan-Kazis has a report in the Forward that with the blessing of Netanyahu the Jewish Agency for Israel plans to spend up to $300 million a year on a new p.r. campaign for Israel, principally in the United States, basically because the current efforts aren’t working. Note that the campuses are the crux of this– “The bottom line is, it’s clear it hasn’t worked,” says the Jewish Agency fundraiser– and that the Hillel director seems to think students will be won over by a program funded in part by the Israeli government. Jeez.

Nathan-Kazis: 

A Jewish Agency for Israel plan currently in development would combine donor dollars from the United States with Israeli government funds to create what is likely the most expensive pro-Israel campaign ever….

As described by [Jewish Agency fundraiser in the US] Misha Galperin, the plan would take a portion of the contributions made by American Jews to Jewish federations and send the funds to the Israel-based Jewish Agency, where they would be combined with government funds and sent back to the Diaspora for pro-Israel programming.

The program would dwarf earlier pro-Israel efforts like the Israel Action Network, created by major Jewish institutions based in the United States with a $6 million commitment over three years….

Another pool of funds would be used to bolster immigration to Israel among young Jewish professionals. Other money would be used to support Israel education in Diaspora Jewish communities and to send Israelis to Jewish institutions outside Israel. Finally, some funds would be used for pro-Israel programming on campuses…

Galperin believes that current Jewish organizational activities on U.S. campuses are failing. “The bottom line is, it’s clear it hasn’t worked,” Galperin said. “It hasn’t gotten us over the hump…. The issue is the scope, the scale, and to make sure whatever is being done really has measurable impact.”..

[Hillel’s Ellen] Goldstein said that she is not concerned about potential objections to pro-Israel programming on campuses in the United States being funded directly by the Israeli government.

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Don’t they get it? Most Americans resent being propagandized and pressured by ethnic and religious nationalists of any stripe. All of these efforts are doomed to backfire.

The most popular foreign nations among Americans are those which keep the lowest profile and which don’t rudely invade their space. Those nations avoid controversies, debates and arguments. They are not glib used-car salesmen or overexcited zealots. They don’t claim to be lights unto the nations leading a holy war against the evil ones. They go about their business quietly.

Meanwhile IDF admits that picture of a flash shopping mall in the Gaza Strip (look how rich those fugees are) actually comes from Malaysia

http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/.premium-1.541772

The propaganda is not working because the underlying argument is flawed…
They can polish it…
They can put a lipstick on it…
You’ve got the idea…

In the mean time, precious resources ($$$ and brains), that could be deployed to start building a better one state, are being wasted on a dead-on-arrival project.

The Jewish Agency has faced fierce opposition to US meddling in the past. Consider it was the Jewish Agency that:

a) helped set up a massive illegal weapons-smuggling network when David Ben-Gurion visited American Zionists in the 1940s; Most of the hundreds of smugglers and their backers became known to federal law enforcement.

b) funded the American Zionist Council (until ordered to register as a Foreign Agent by Kennedy) and its research division AIPAC (which spun off 6 weeks after the order) through hidden funding;

c) fought properly registering its American Section as a foreign agent of the Israeli government until law professor William Mallison forced DOJ scrutiny in the 1970s;

The Jewish Agency has siphoned $534 million from US taxpayers for “refugee resettlement” since the year 2000, but the spending is untraceable. So this latset move may essentially be making an (unwitting) U.S. taxpayer propagandize himself through dollars that never should have gone to the Jewish Agency in the first place.

Redonkulous.

http://antiwar.com/blog/2013/03/21/1963-the-year-the-israel-lobby-transcended-us-law/

RE: “[Hillel’s Ellen] Goldstein said that she is not concerned about potential objections to pro-Israel programming on campuses in the United States being funded directly by the Israeli government.” ~ Josh Nathan-Kazis

WELCOME TO “THE CLUB”, ISRAEL: “The Trial of Israel’s Campus Critics”, by David Theo Goldberg & Saree Makdisi, Tikkun Magazine, September/October 2009

[EXCERPT] . . . It is an extraordinary fact that no fewer than thirty-three distinct organizations – including AIPAC, the Zionist Organization of America, the American Jewish Congress, and the Jewish National Fund – are gathered together today as members or affiliates of the Israel on Campus Coalition. The coalition is an overwhelmingly powerful presence on American college campuses for which there is simply no equivalent on the Palestinian or Arab side. Its self-proclaimed mission is not merely to monitor our colleges and universities. That, after all, is the commitment of Campus Watch, which was started by pro-Israel activists in 2002. It is, rather (and in its own words), to generate “a pro-active, pro-Israel agenda on campus.”
There is, accordingly, disproportionate and unbalanced intervention on campuses across the country by a coalition of well-funded organizations, who have no time for — and even less interest in — the niceties of intellectual exchange and academic process. Insinuation, accusation, and defamation have become the weapons of first resort to respond to argument and criticism directed at Israeli policies. As far as these outside pressure groups (and their campus representatives) are concerned, the intellectual and academic price that the scholarly community pays as a result of this kind of intervention amounts to little more than collateral damage. . .

ENTIRE ARTICLE – http://www.tikkun.org/article.php/sept_oct_09_goldberg_makdisi