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Dr. Gerald Steinberg, the head of the NGO-Monitor watchdog group, said that he believes that while most of the NIF’s funding goes to appropriate causes, “there are real issues with the NIF.”

“One of them is the secrecy with which they make decisions so the organizations that they fund are not revealed for a year or two afterwards and they make massive mistakes sometimes,” he said.

Steinberg said that he sees the funding of groups like Adalah, which in 2007 signed the Haifa Declaration calling for “a change in the constitutional structure and a change in the definition of the State of Israel from a Jewish state to a democratic state established on national and civil equality between the two national groups,” as such a mistake.

“There are elements of truth in that letter and NIF does need to have some serious internal discussions, as well as with the broader Jewish community about how it decides its funding,” Steinberg said.

In response to Steinberg, the New Israel fund replied that it does not “fund organizations actively working to change the nature of the State of Israel” and that since the Haifa Declaration was dined in 2006, “Adalah continues its primary mission of litigation on behalf of the Arab minority.”

At the end of the day, Steinberg said, “these are complicated issues and they are being unfortunately to some degree distorted and oversimplified for ideological purposes by everybody on all sides.”