New Israel Fund Still Plans To Call Everything In Israel Terrible, Racist

“We certainly don’t want the people who pay our salaries to realize our work here is no longer as necessary!”

Jerusalem, June 14 – Israel swore in its most diverse government in history today, including an unprecedented number of women, at least one gay cabinet minister, and, in a first, coalition membership by an explicitly Arab party. The broad show of unity has helped shore up the country’s image as an island of tolerance and democracy in a Levantine sea of repressive dictatorships where Arabs, a religious and ethnic minority, enjoy greater civil rights, freedoms, and prosperity than Arabs in surrounding countries where they constitute the majority. Nevertheless, a spokeswoman for a major left-wing American-Israeli organization insisted their materials will continue to decry the Jewish State as reactionary and discriminatory.

New Israel Fund representative Gayiskha Mishi told reporters at the organization’s Talpiot-neighborhood offices today that the NIF will not chuck in to the trash the years’ worth of materials it has amassed that describe Israel as plagued by institutional and systemic racism, prejudice, inequality, discrimination, and segregation, even though the government that just took office gives the lie to such allegations.

“We have an obligation to our donors and our mission,” she insisted. “It does neither us nor our funders any good to be presented with clear evidence that minorities fare better in Israel than in the US. We certainly don’t want the people who pay our salaries to realize our work here is no longer as necessary as it may have been before! Heaven forbid! Of course we will continue to compare Israel with Apartheid-era South Africa; with the Jim Crow south; and with the Pale of Settlement in Tsarist Russia, but in this case with the Jews as the lords of the land and the poor, beleaguered Arabs forced to bear the consequences of feudal whims.”

“You can’t reasonably ask us to cut off the hand that feeds us,” continued Mishi. “We will continue to paint Israel as falling far, far short of the ideals that we, as representing an American organization, have declared must animate Israeli government and society, no matter what actual events demonstrate. We can always cherry-pick our examples and the data to buttress our case for our donors; the EU, especially, loves a good Israel-as-moral-failure narrative, as do various individual European governments. Our reporting and proposals will keep reflecting that bias, regardless of the demonstrable political achievements and privileges that the ostensible victims of systemic discrimination enjoy here, especially in contrast to the situation in all the states around us for a considerable distance.”

“It’s the grift that keeps on giving.”

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