The New Israel Fund Steps in It a Bit (Updated)

Via Noah Pollak, this rather devastating portrait of the New Israel Fund's view of the Jewishness of the Jewish state. Or at least the view of one senior NIF official. I'm a big fan of much of NIF's work, but if this cable from the Wikileaks trove is true, it's very unpleasant:

New Israel Fund (NIF) Associate Director in Israel Hedva Radovanitz, who manages grants to 350 NGOs totaling about 18 million dollars per year, [said] that the campaign against the NGOs was due to the "disappearance of the political left wing" in Israel and the lack of domestic constituency for the NGOs. She noted that when she headed ACRI's Tel Aviv office, ACRI had 5,000 members, while today it has less than 800, and it was only able to muster about 5,000 people to its December human rights march by relying on the active staff of the 120 NGOs that participated.

She commented that she believed that in 100 years Israel would be majority Arab and that the disappearance of a Jewish state would not be the tragedy that Israelis fear since it would become more democratic. [Emphasis added]

UPDATE: This is from the New Israel Fund's website, a statement by Hedva Radovanitz, who asserts that she left the organization last year in large part over ideological differences with its other leaders:

I left the New Israel Fund almost a year ago, largely because my own views did not conform to the positions and direction of the organization, and under the circumstances, the principled course of action was to resign. Specifically, the new funding guidelines, and the pending exclusion of organizations that would no longer be eligible for NIF support, would have been problematic for me to enforce.

Despite my differences with the New Israel Fund, I hold the organization in the highest regard for the work it does supporting civil society and building a better society in Israel.