NIF baffled by KQED flip-flop

The New Israel Fund is troubled that its "Campaign for Israel's Future" will not be heard on the radio airwaves of KQED, a San Francisco affiliate of National Public Radio.

KQED has a policy against accepting underwriting sponsorship from advocacy groups, but NIF was especially disconcerted because its contract was at first accepted, and then rejected. An advertising representative for NPR said the contract was pulled because the station is under fire for its Middle East coverage.

"We know well that a lot of our donors and potential donors listen to NPR," said Naomi Paiss, a spokeswoman for NIF, based in Washington, D.C. "We're a small organization with a small budget, and didn't make that choice casually, so to see this e-mail that links the refusal to their concerns over listener perception of their Middle East coverage was very disturbing to us."

NIF was founded in San Francisco 26 years ago, and over the years it has distributed around $130 million to more than 700 grassroots organizations in Israel. Though the organization is no longer based in the Bay Area, it still has a regional office and many of its core supporters are here.

While the organization has remained non-partisan over the years, many feel that it has become innately political by its choice of grantees. Almost all of them are working in the fields of advancing the rights of Israel's Arab minority, women and poorer immigrants, as well as in the areas of religious pluralism and environmental issues.

But with Israel's impending withdrawal from the Gaza Strip this summer, the organization decided that it had a unique role to play.

With tensions in Gaza mounting, NIF is working to quell the unrest there by funding the moderates in the settler community — many of them Orthodox — who can serve as bridges between the more extremist elements and the rest of Israeli society in the withdrawal debate.

The underwriting statement that was to appear on the radio was going to say "for information on Israel's disengagement from Gaza," and then direct listeners to the organization's Web site at http://www.nif.org. That was rejected by several NPR affiliates. It was then modified to just say that support comes from "The New Israel Fund, promoting equality and social justice for all Israelis," then directing listeners to its Web site.

But shortly before the underwriting ad was to air, an NPR representative, David Zellhart, sent an e-mail — that was supplied to j. weekly by NIF — to NIF's ad representative, saying, "Since the copy was first approved (several weeks ago), the station has received several listener complaints about NPR's coverage. The thing is the complaints were that the NPR news coverage was both 'pro' Israel AND 'pro' Palestinian. I know this seems odd and doesn't make much sense, but the fact is people took time to call and voice their opinions. Because of the number of listener comments, the station feels this isn't a good time to run the NIF schedule."

Zellhart has refused comment but his boss at NPR said that what he said was a mistake, and that KQED never should have accepted underwriting from NIF in the first place.

NIF was also rejected by the NPR affiliate in New York, WNYC. The underwriting ad will now run on San Francisco's classical music station, KDFC.