By Daniel Sokatch–
This has been a shocking, horrifying, and frightening week for all of us, full of heartbreak and uncertainty. The death tolls continue to rise. Each day, more victims of the Hamas terror assault on Israeli families are discovered in kibbutzim and the other small towns near Israel’s border with Gaza. Desperate Israelis search for news of their missing loved ones. Scores are held hostage by Hamas in Gaza. And, as Israel’s military responds to the atrocities with withering air assaults and as the Israeli military masses on Gaza’s northern border for a ground invasion that will, inevitably, result in destruction and many civilian casualties there, rockets continue to rain down on Israelis. All the while, tensions rise in the West Bank and more rockets fall on Israelis from its northern border. Right now, it’s so easy to feel helpless.
There is so much more we have yet to learn about what happened and what will happen next. Yet, beautifully, the question that I, as the CEO of the New Israel Fund, hear the most these days is simple: What can we do to help those who are suffering and in need right now?
Our answer is the New Israel Fund’s Emergency “Safety Net” response—a plan that we have already begun to put into action on the ground in Israel. Because one thing we know for sure: we cannot afford the luxury of despair.
NIF’s Emergency Safety Net is focused on five critical areas:
1. Caring for the most vulnerable and affected: We are providing necessary shelter, food, clothing, and medical assistance to families and evacuees from the communities near Gaza who fled Hamas’ massacre last week, often with nothing but the clothes on their backs. We are also providing urgently-needed basic medical services for populations like the Bedouin who live in unrecognized villages with no bomb shelters and no ambulances, and asylum seekers who are extremely vulnerable right now.
2. Preventing intercommunal violence: Extremists’ calls for violent retribution often spike in moments like these. Shatil, NIF’s action arm, is leading calls for community and political leaders to promote Jewish-Arab partnership and denounce hateful rhetoric. NIF shared society grantees are also organizing community events and increasing the visibility of shared community partnership in areas prone to flare-ups to stop the tensions from spiraling into violence and to build a basis for a shared future for the day after the current fighting ends.
3. Combating hate speech and disinformation: NIF grantee Fakereporter is working around the clock to combat hate speech and counter misinformation online which is, unfortunately, rife during this time of crisis. Their work was featured on NPR (https://tinyurl.com/yfrukwen) and in The New York Times (https://tinyurl.com/phcrxzdb).
4. Providing trauma counseling: We are making trauma counseling available to civil society leaders, human rights workers, and others on the frontlines of the crisis as people, including NIF staff and grantees, reel from the events of the last week.
5. Responding immediately to human and civil rights’ violations: At a time when emotions and tensions are already high, we are working with our grantee partners to prevent human rights violations in Israel, the West Bank, and in the Gaza Strip. NIF grantees the Association for Civil Rights in Israel(ACRI) and Adalah are running hotlines for communities to report these violations.
The New Israel Fund has, for over forty years, been the leading organization advancing and defending democracy and equality for all Israelis. NIF is widely credited with building progressive Israeli civil society. And while NIF also supports a wide range of Israeli nonprofits (https://tinyurl.com/yzyybxr9) and has provided over $300 million to progressive civil society organizations since its 1979 inception, we are now earmarking funds for the previously mentioned efforts.
You can donate (https://tinyurl.com/46wtnzcu). Any amount will help.
Daniel Sokatch is the CEO of the nonprofit New Israel Fund, which works to advance and protect liberal democracy in Israel.
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