Bob Feldman

The surplus oil industry wealth of the now-deceased former Samson Investment Company CEO is apparently being used to help subsidize the activity of the Israel on Campus Coalition (ICC) and its affiliated David Project. In 2004, for instance, the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation — with assets of $100 million — gave a $1,050,000 grant to Hillel to support the Israel on Campus Coalition [ICC] project, according to its website.

Directed by a member of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies Council and a recent head of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies (JCSS) at Tel Aviv University named Shai Feldman (no relation to this writer), the new Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University apparently won’t have to operate on a shoestring budget. According to the Boston Globe, the Crown Center for Middle East Studies already has an endowment of $25 million. “The center will seek to produce a discourse on the Middle East as dispassionate, objective and centrist as possible,” Feldman told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in a recent interview. Looking at the players, this seems unlikely.

With annual revenues of $15,112,321 and assets of $10,936,961 in 2002, the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces group assists members of the North American public in providing financial support for certain designated programs of the Association for Welfare of Soldiers in Israel. At its $1,000-a-plate 2005 New York Gala Dinner on March 15, for instance, the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces New York chapter “will once again honor the soldiers” in “the largest single fundraising event” for the U.S.-based IDF support group, according to its website at www.israelsoldiers.org.

Most people in the U.S. now realize that Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) board member James Woolsey’s pre-war talk about the Iraqi government’s alleged hidden “nuclear weapons equipment” and “biological weapons laboratories” was inaccurate.  Yet the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs role as a pro-war pressure group with an annual budget of $2.5 million, is rarely mentioned by the U.S. media. Since 1982, at least twelve trips to Israel have been sponsored  by the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs for retired Pentagon admirals and generals who are connected to the American security establishment. 

Most U.S. anti-war activists do not support the Israeli establishment’s Likud party because Likud’s leaders have violated many United Nations resolutions which require the Israeli government to withdraw from all post-1967 occupied territory, dismantle all Israeli settlements in post-1967 occupied territories, and allow all Palestinian refugees to return to pre-1967 Israel/Palestine.  Yet a pro-Israel, apparently tax-exempt organization in the United States, the American Friends of Likud, is “part of a global federation of center-right Zionist movements known as Likud Olami—the World Union of Liberal and National Zionists” and “maintains close links to Israel’s Likud party,” according to its website.

Most U.S. anti-war activists are opposed to the Bush Administration’s policy of using U.S. tax money to provide military weapons to various governments in the Middle East, including the Israeli government. But the Republican Jewish Coalition [RJC], which describes itself as “the sole voice of Jewish Republicans to Republican decisionmakers and the Jewish community” on its website [www.rjchq.org], promotes continued U.S. aid to the Sharon regime and favors an expansion of strategic cooperation between the U.S. government and the Israeli government.