washington | After being a target for political attacks during the past year, progressive nongovernmental organizations in Israel are now bracing for another hit: the loss of one of their largest donors.
The Ford Foundation, which has provided $40 million to civil society NGOs in Israel since 2003, will not resume its funding for programs in Israel once its current grant round ends in two years.
Ford has been sharply criticized for backing Israeli Arab groups that helped steer the 2001 U.N. conference on racism in Durban, South Africa, into an anti-Israel and anti-Jewish forum. Other groups that Ford helps fund — including the New Israel Fund, itself an umbrella fund for hundreds of progressive groups — have been targeted for harsh criticism of Israel.
But the Ford Foundation denies making its decision to defund because of that criticism. Instead, it noted that Israel’s civil society sector is now capable of seeking funding from other sources.
For struggling groups in Israel, however, losing the Ford Foundation’s financial backing means spending time and effort on developing alternative resources — which might not be easy in an atmosphere of growing hostility toward progressive organizations that focus on human rights.
“This was not a surprise for us,” said San Francisco resident Daniel Sokatch, CEO of the New Israel Fund and the former head of the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation.
“There is a [residual] compliment here for the civil society sector in Israel,” he said. “This is a sign that they no longer need this kind of support and can stand on their own feet.”
Nevertheless, the end of the Ford Foundation grants is expected to have a significant impact on NIF, which fights for pluralism, equality and civil rights in Israel. Ford Foundation grants make up roughly a third of NIF’s donor-advised giving, which reaches $14 million to $15 million a year. NIF’s core giving, not affected by the Ford funds, totals between $10 million to $15 million annually.
In recent months, the Ford Israel Fund, the foundation’s arm handling grants in Israel, began notifying grantees that funding will not be renewed after the current $20 million grant expires in 2013.
The Ford Foundation, ranked the second-largest philanthropic foundation in the United States, with assets of more than $10 billion, launched its program in Israel in 2003 as a partnership with the New Israel Fund.
The Ford Israel Fund made the Ford Foundation a key player in Israel’s NGO world. The initiative focused its grant-making in three fields — advancing civil and human rights, helping Arab citizens in Israel gain equality and promoting Israeli-Palestinian peace.
“That initiative wound down successfully,” said the Ford Foundation’s director of communications, Alfred Ironside, in a statement he provided for the Forward. The statement noted that since 1948, the Ford Foundation’s support for programs in Israel exceeded $70 million.
“NIF has grown into a robust and capable independent foundation, and we look forward to seeing it continue to thrive,” the Ford statement concluded.
Aaron Back, director of the Ford Israel Fund, explained that the foundation’s commitments “had never been open-ended.” The new leadership of the Ford Foundation, including new president Luis A. Ubiñas, had conducted an across-the-board review of all programs and made significant changes in its priorities, he explained.
Back said Ford helped NIF become “a robust and capable” organization and that the groups Ford funded have a “hugely important voice.”
One of those groups is Israel’s Mossawa Center, which advocates for equal rights for Arab Israelis; it gets nearly 10 percent of its budget from grants from Ford. Another Ford grantee, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, gets $100,000 a year, or 3 percent of its budget, from the fund.
The Ford Foundation’s decade-long partnership with NIF was fraught with criticism over its choice of grantees and causes. The criticism peaked after the 2001 Durban conference, where NGOs, some of them funded by the Ford Foundation, backed resolutions equating Israeli policies with those of the South African apartheid regime.
In the past year, many in Israel attacked the NIF and other NGOs supported by the Ford Foundation, claiming they fund groups that support the delegitimization of Israel.
This report originally appeared in the Forward and was offered to JTA members for reprint. JTA contributed some updates. To read more, please go to www.forward.com.