Anti-Israel propaganda In These Times

[kahaneloyalist]

inthesetimes.com/features/one_israel_fund_settlement_guards.html

Very hostile article full of usual Leftist and SJW lies. Comments are going both ways a few in Israel's favor would be good.

I'll only include a little so you can get a taste of the vileness.

THE MONEY TRAIL TO ISRAELI SETTLEMENTS BEGINS on a main thoroughfare in the quiet New York suburb of Cedarhurst. Inside a brownish-red building next to a Judaica gift shop, up the stairs to the second floor, and behind the glass doors of Suite 210 are the offices of the One Israel Fund.

This unassuming office on Long Island is where donors send their checks before the One Israel Fund directs the money 6,000 miles across the ocean, to Israel, to help “brave pioneers establish and maintain a safe and secure life in our Biblical Heartland.”

The bulk of the money goes to aid Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. These settlements, located on Palestinian land conquered by Israel in the 1967 war, are considered by most of the world to be illegal under international law, as the Geneva Conventions prohibit settling conquered lands.

Between 2001 and 2014 (the years for which records are available), the One Israel Fund raised at least $26 million from donors across the United States, making it one of the wealthiest pro-settlement nonprofits in the country. Scott Feltman, the One Israel Fund’s executive vice-president, says the organization is “strictly humanitarian.” Most of the money goes to initiatives that fortify the settlements: hospitals, religious schools, playgrounds and senior centers.

“Our goal,” Feltman says, “is to make sure that the people who are living there … have what they need in order to remain secure and to live normal lives and flourish as they would anywhere else in the country.”

But not all of the One Israel Fund’s spending fits the typical definition of “humanitarian.” According to its tax records, the organization has given at least $960,000 to security personnel in Israel and the occupied West Bank. The money has gone toward armored vests, security vehicles, guard trainings and surveillance equipment.

Each settlement typically has a security director, known as a ravshatz, who is a civilian employed by the settlement but armed and specially trained by the Israeli military. (The word ravshatz—plural ravshatzim—is an acronym for the Hebrew words rakaz bitahon shotef tzahali, meaning coordinator of security with the army.) There are about 265 such security guards living in Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and along Israel’s borders with the Gaza Strip and Lebanon. The ravshatzim are considered the settlements’ first line of defense against Palestinian militant attacks.