UJA-Federation of NY donates $1 million to help Gazans

Some donors have already expressed opposition by pulling their donations to the Jewish group.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

The UJA-Federation of New York made waves by announcing Friday that it is donating $1 million to provide Gazans with humanitarian aid.

In explaining the organization’s reasoning, UJA CEO Eric Goldstein first denounced Hamas for its brutal treatment of its own population and the lies it spreads about Israel starving Gaza.

He also blasted the fact that the recent Hamas videos showing that they are starving the 20 live hostages still in captivity did not “generate widespread global condemnation.”

But, he said, Jewish people “cannot lose” their own “moral compass,” and that “understanding that Hamas bears ultimate responsibility for this conflict does not negate that civilians in Gaza are facing desperate conditions.”

There is “a Jewish imperative to act,” he said, and so the organization is giving this funding to its “longtime partner IsraAID,” Israel’s largest nongovernmental humanitarian aid organization, which works with “the IDF unit responsible for aid in Gaza (COGAT), as well as highly reputable global aid organizations on the ground, positioning them to ensure the effective delivery of relief.”

IsraAID traditionally helps bring relief to disaster and war zones around the world but turned its attention both to Israel and Gaza after the Oct. 7 Hamas invasion and massacre of 1,200 people, which sparked the ongoing war in the coastal enclave to eliminate the terrorist threat once and for all.

The group’s CEO, Yotam Polizer, told eJewishPhilanthropy in an interview earlier this month that IsraAID first began helping in Gaza by coordinating between Israeli authorities and other organizations that wanted to bring in aid.

Eventually, it established “a logistics hub for partners on the ground” in Gaza, he said, insisting that there is a strict vetting process in place, “making sure basically that all of these partners do not have team members affiliated with Hamas, making sure that everything they bring is scanned properly.”

The UN itself has admitted that most of the aid now flowing into Gaza is being stolen by Hamas.

This earns the terror organization hundreds of millions of dollars that is enabling it to prolong the war.

Legal scholar Netta Barak-Corren, who has studied conflicts all over the Middle East and Africa, including Gaza, recently wrote in The Wall Street Journal that “unless the U.S. and other donors rewrite the rules so that aid can’t be separated from accountability, they will keep subsidizing the conflicts they abhor.”

Gaza, she added, “presents the longest-running case of diverted aid.”

The UJA-Federation announcement garnered immediate criticism from some donors who pledged to withdraw their financial support from the organization, whose stated core mission is to “care for New Yorkers of all backgrounds” as well as “Jews everywhere,” with an emphasis on Israel and endangered Jewish communities.

Pro-Israel activist and multimedia brand consultant Aliza Licht gained 900 likes in less than a day after posting to Instagram, “Shame on UJA and for all of us who have given you money – we want it back.”

Her angle was simply that civilians in Gaza are not that different from Hamas fighters.

“Do you guys not recall the celebrations on Oct. 7? Because I sure as hell do,” she said, referring to the well-documented scenes of ordinary Gazans cheering when Hamas operatives brought hostages they had kidnapped during their invasion of Israel through various city centers.

Released hostages have also described how they were beaten and spat upon by civilians in the streets when they were hauled off the cars, trucks and motorcycles used to force them into the Strip.

“I am going to quote [American influencer] Lizzie (Elizabeth) Savetsky: We are tikkun olaming ourselves to death, and you’re at the forefront of that,” she added angrily.

“Tikkun Olam” is the Jewish concept of improving the world, but “time and again,” Savetsky has said, “Jews stand up for everyone but ourselves. This isn’t righteousness, this is self-hatred disguised as morality.”