ZOA: Former ADL director is ‘attack dog of the thought police’

Foxman expressed dismay over the results of Israel’s recent national election, which paved the way for the formation of a government coalition of exclusively right-wing parties.

By Lauren Marcus, World Israel News

Senior officials from the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) released a statement on Tuesday slamming the former head of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) for suggesting that his support for Israel is conditional.

“If Israel ceases to be an open democracy, I won’t be able to support it,” Abe Foxman, the ADL’s current director emeritus, told The Jerusalem Post last week.

Foxman expressed dismay over the results of Israel’s recent national election, which paved the way for the formation of a government coalition of exclusively right-wing parties.

Several of the parties have lobbied for changes to the Law of Return and a judicial override bill, legislation which Foxman claimed would transform Israel into a “fundamentalist, theocratic state.”

“I never thought that I would reach that point where I would say that my support of Israel is conditional. I’ve always said that [my support of Israel] is unconditional, but it’s conditional,” he added.

“I don’t think that it’s a horrific condition to say: ‘I love Israel and I want to love Israel as a Jewish and democratic state that respects pluralism.’ I want Israel to be Jewish, absolutely. But I want it to be a democracy.”

ZOA National President Morton A. Klein and ZOA Director of Research & Special Projects Liz Berney blasted Foxman for his comments, saying they proved he is an “attack dog of the thought police.”

Kelin and Berney said that Foxman “absurdly claimed that his views constitute democracy – rather than the voices of Israel’s democratic electorate, including the well over [500,000] Israelis who voted for the Religious Zionist party. Apparently… according to Foxman, ‘it’s only democracy when the Left wins.’”

They added that “Foxman’s comments are especially repugnant at a time when the Israeli people need and voted for a stable, strong government to appropriately deal with multiple serious problems, including defending against massive Palestinian Arab terrorism; dealing with tens of thousands of EU-funded illegal Arab buildings on state lands; reversing Lapid’s illegal surrender of Israel’s maritime border and gas field to Hezbollah- and Iranian-controlled Lebanon; and counteracting the Iranian nuclear threat.”