Cash is flowing to NGO-fueled Israelis who hate State of Israel

While most Israelis celebrated 67 years of independence last week, a fringe Israeli nongovernmental organization (NGO) hopes this year will be the last for the Jewish state. Zo-chrot, a tiny radical anti-Zionist group, was established with the aim of “rais[ing] public awareness of the Palestinian Nakba (“Catastrophe” in Arabic)” and “recognizing and materi-alizing the right of return,” an agenda equivalent to calling for the abolishment of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people. With no local support base or constituency, Zochrot operates only through generous funding from a coterie of foreign Christian aid organizations.  

Using church funds, Zochrot promotes a “de-Zionized Palestine,” meaning free of Jews. The group’s founder, Eitan Bronstein, advocates for Jews to abandon Israel en masse. He dreams of a time “when the refugees return, Jews will become a minority in the country. … There may be Jews, most of them of European origin, who won’t be able to adjust to a non-Zionist real-ity, and prefer to use their other passport to move elsewhere.”

Last month, together with Palestinian NGO BADIL, Zochrot embarked on a speaking tour across the U.S. to promote the “historical overview of the Nakba and the Right of Return.” Several years ago, BADIL awarded a prize to a blatantly antisemitic cartoon, featuring a grotesque caricature of a Jewish man standing over a dead Arab child and holding a pitchfork in the shape of a menorah dripping with blood. BADIL’s anti-Semitic history apparently does not concern Zochrot or its funders.

Last year Zochrot commemorated Israel Independence Day by launching a smartphone app called “iNakba” to delegitimize the Jewish state. The app, an interactive map and photos of Palestinian Arab villages from pre-1948, was featured by The New York Times, proving the real influence of a small fringe group armed with millions of shekels of foreign funds. A year before, in 2013, Zochrot hosted a costly Tel Aviv conference titled “From Truth to Redress: Realizing the Return of Palestinian Refugees.”