The Israeli government has scored yet another own-goal in its efforts to promote Brand Israel. A few years ago, Russian oligrach predators, the most notorious of whom are Mikhail Fridman, German Kahn, Pyotr Aven , and Len Blahvatnik, donated $50-million to establish the Genesis Philanthropic Fund (see also Connie Bruck’s remarkable New Yorker profile). Considering the billions contributed by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett to their charitable endeavors, this venture seemed very much on the low-down. For a relative pittance, five Russians with an exceedingly seedy, shady past would wash many of their sins away in the cleansing agent of philanthropy. The five are also known as being exceedingly close to Russia’s foremost oligarch and mafioso, Vladimir Putin. Tellingly, the Prize was launched in Russia during a visit by Bibi Netanyahu to Putin.
One of the major features of the Fund was the Genesis Prize. Other than promoting Brand Israel is an especially blatant way, the purpose of the prize seemed vague and amorphous. Here is the purpose as enunciated on its website:
The Genesis Prize honors individuals who have attained excellence and international renown in their chosen professional fields, and who inspire others through their engagement and dedication to the Jewish community and the State of Israel.
…By sharing the narrative of the Laureate, the Genesis Prize Foundation envisions the Prize encouraging younger generations of Jews to reaffirm their Jewish identity and to retain their sense of belonging to a collective future and collective past. By highlighting the inherent Jewish values which inspired the Laureate’s achievements the Jewish community can unify around its core tenets that transcend borders.
How this Prize is supposed to have any impact on “younger generations of Jews” is anybody’s guess. If you were to ask virtually any Jewish teenager anywhere in the world what the Prize is or who has won it, I’d venture to say 99.99% would stare at you and not have a clue what you were talking about.
The first recipient was Michael Bloomberg, who does not have an especially high Jewish profile. Nor did he need the $1-million prize money. The second was Michael Douglas, who also doesn’t have an especially high Jewish profile. Though he is of course a movie star…or was. The Genesis Prize seemed aimed to honor famous celebrities who happen to be Jewish. It was a prize in search of a purpose.
The Russian mafia teamed up with the State of Israel as co-sponsors of the Prize. The head of the state committee awarding it was Natan Sharansky, the chief of the Jewish Agency. The prime minister himself played a role in the process. In effect, Israel was rendering the untold billions these gangsters had stolen in Russian assets kosher through this charity charade. It was literally money-laundering, in the sense of cleansing their lucre of the stench of the ways in which it had originally been amassed (or stolen). When a nation-state teams up with robber barons in such a fashion, what does it say about the state itself? It’s as if the chairman of the Federal Reserve went on the lam with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and jumped off a cliff with them.
Sharansky offered this entirely fraudulent statement about his intent in establishing the Prize:
“All my life I had to prove again and again that there is no contradiction between a desire to contribute to universal values and your desire to be part of your tribe or your identity,” he said. “What gives your life value, what gives you strength to fight for universal values is your identity.”
Really. What “universal values” does Sharansky support? He’s a neocon protegé of both Dick Cheney and Vladimir Putin. I can definitely see the tribal nature of their affiliations. But universal values? C’mon.
With the fourth recipient, Anish Kapoor, the intent seemed to be to make a statement on the international art scene, where Kapoor has a flashy presence as a sculptor. Further, as the child of an Iraqi-Jewish mother and Indian Hindu father, Kapoor is what would be called a Mizrahi Jew. Finally, Kapoor hit another pro-Israel sweet spot when a sculpture he’s installed at the Palace of Versailles was defaced twice by anti-Semitic graffiti. The second time, he refused to remove the graffiti and was sued by a right-wing French politician. This would certainly endear him to Israel’s leadership, which believes Europe is rife with anti-Semites who hate Israel too.
In this sense, the award co-opted two important audiences on behalf of Brand Israel. Yet another benefit is Kapoor’s statement dedicating the award to NGOs working on behalf of refugees. This is a direct response to Donald Trump’s recent executive order barring refugees from seven Muslim countries from U.S. entry. One of the seven is Iraq, where his mother was born. Since Kapoor was born in Bombay, he is not restricted by Trump’s travel ban. But as an individual who is one-half Iraqi Jew, he no doubt feels the sting of the ban quite strongly.
But have the recipients, including Kapoor, thought through the problematic nature of accepting the charity of former Russian gangsters? Do they believe that the mere fact of their intending to do good with the proceeds of the award washes away the moral ambiguities?
Further, neither Kapoor nor Natan Sharansky seem to have thought through several problematic issues involved in his accepting the Prize. First, Israel’s prime minister tweeted his own admiration and support for America’s refugee ban. Second, Israel itself treats its own refugees with disdain and extreme prejudice. Third, Israel’s treatment of its own Holocaust survivors has been shoddy. Many of those who still survive are either homeless or living in extreme poverty, while the government does little to alleviate their suffering.
There are 65,000 African refugees from several countries suffering civil war, famine or Islamist insurgencies. Most of them walked hundreds of miles through both the Sahara and Sinai deserts, where they were beset by bandits who raped and robbed many. When they arrived in Israel, they were hunted down by the Border Police. They were assaulted during riots in Tel Aviv. They were called a “cancer” by current culture minister, Miri Regev. They were arrested and detained in a desert prison.
If they grew despondent about remaining in Israel, the State bribed them with a few hundred dollars to board planes which dropped them unceremoniously in African countries they’d never seen in their lives. Once there they had no papers and were stateless. They could not work legally. Israel, in violation of international refugee law, washed its hands of them.
How can Kapoor accept an award from Israel and dedicate it to the world’s refugees (as laudable a purpose as that may be) when the money is as tainted as it is? How does one deal with the moral contradiction inherent in such a transaction?
One Israeli news report says the artists will dedicate the proceeds to Syrian refugee relief. If that’s the case, Kapoor should know that Israel has, if anything, been a cause of the disintegration of the Syrian regime, which has exacerbated the refugee crisis. Further, Israel has accepted no Syrian refugees for resettlement despite other neighbors like Lebanon, Turkey, and Jordan accepting millions.
Kapoor, unfortunately, does not provide any means of contacting him directly via his website. I’ve e-mailed his London gallery and sent a tweet via a Twitter account in his name asking some of these questions. I look forward to hearing his response.
Russia’s foremost oligarch and mafioso, Vladimir Putin.
Putin has a number of undesirable traits but being an oligarch is not one of them. The claims that he has amassed huge personal wealth are without any evidence whatsoever. These claims have been made, without any evidence, by expatriate Russians who fled Russia during Putin’s early years in power when he was purging the country of some of its more blatant gangster oligarchs. Mafioso in the post-Soviet Russian era refers to the private security agencies that protected the oligarchs. No one has accused Putin of engaging in that kind of activity. From 1991 to the present he has been a public employee.
Richard’s dislike of Putin is quite clear, but perhaps supporting that bias with some evidence would help his credibility.
@ ToivoS:
Oh please, Putin presides over a kleptocracy. Just because he hides his assets well doesn’t mean he’s not just as corrupt as the oligarchs he feeds like sharks. You think he permits them to steal hundreds of billions of dollars and lives a chaste, humble, honest life? Really.
Jeez, from 1933-1945 Hitler was a public employee as well. He just so happened to have killed 20 or 30-million Europeans. Boss Tweed was a public employee just like Vladimir Putin. He also just so happened to preside over one of the most corrupt city governments of his age.
Evidence you seem to have overlooked:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/vladimir-putin-corruption-five-things-we-learned-about-the-russian-presidents-secret-wealth-a6834171.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/02/20/is-vladimir-putin-hiding-a-200-billion-fortune-and-if-so-does-it-matter/?utm_term=.33bed194e667
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2013-09-17/vladimir-putin-the-richest-man-on-earth
http://time.com/money/4641093/vladimir-putin-net-worth/
And this was only a small fraction of the articles I found in a quick Google search, which you could & should have done yourself before claiming there was no such evidence.
Look, I don’t want to get into a pissing match with you over this. Nor do I want to continue in this vein with future comments. So let’s call it a day in this thread. You’re welcome to comment in any other thread you wish, of course.
Richard
I looked at those links you gave. They do not provide evidence — they just provide a bunch of assertions that have been made by expatriate Russian gangsters and oligarchs. The photo of the palace in the Independent link, for example, is the property of the Russian State for the use of the President. Would you accuse Obama of owning Camp David or the White House?
@ ToivoS: Wrong. They provide evidence via former Kremlin insiders who witnessed transactions, saw paperwork, or had inside access to information. You just don’t accept the testimony.
As for palaces, American presidents don’t have palaces. Further, if an American president spent a billion dollars building a new palace he’d probably be impeached. If not, there would be such a storm of protest he’d immediately back down. That’s because political leaders are generally answerable to the people here. In Russia, not so much…
Actually putin didn’t build that palace — the Soviet State inherited it from the Csar and the RF inherited it from the Soviets.
@ ToivoS: Apparently there may be more than one of these monstrosities used by His Excellency. Whichever one you refer to is not the same as this one, which was built for Putin himself at the cost of $1-billion. Of course, like the smart KGB agent he once was, he knows how to cloak the payments and entire affair in layers of transactions & cross-dealings in order to hide their ultimate benefactor. Here’s some more history to the accusations concerning it.
It is also no accident that one of the key Russian figures documenting & publicizing Putin’s personal corruption was Boris Nemtsov. Guess what happened to him? Oh no, you’re right Putin didn’t kill him personally. That would be far too messy. For this he has his own personal hit men like Kadyrov and his ilk. They are terribly convenient for a Killer who doesn’t personally kill his enemies, but only orders them killed. And he probably even does that through emissaries.
As I already said. I don’t want to go off in an tangent here. I believe I’d asked you not to prolong this with a response. You may believe whatever you want about Putin. Just don’t expect to persuade me of it.
“They were arrested and detained in a desert prison.”
The vast majority of African migrants are walking around Israel free and unmolested. Many are working and make enough money to get by and send money to their people back home.
@ Ben:
A lie. African refugees (not “migrants”) are not free nor unmolested. During Tel Aviv riots they were beaten & their businesses were torched. Border Police routinely harrass them or beat them for no reason. During raids Border Police pour lye into their restaurant pots just for the hell of it. All documented. Unlike your stupid empty, unsupported claim.
Working? Yes, they work at jobs providing cash. Jobs that are off the books. JObs which permit employers to cheat & blackmail them.
As for sending money back home–are you insane? I’ve watched interviews with scores of such refugees and not one says he sends money back home. You think these people are becoming rich in the Israeli paradise? In a country which refuses to offer any means of refugee status? Which offers them money & dumps them in African countries which have been bought off to take them? Try as you might, you can’t put lipstick on this pig, buddy.
You insult us. You insult African refugees. You insult common sense. You even insult Israel with your vapid nonsense. I am losing patience with you. You ought to make travel arrangements. There’s a flight leaving soon that will take you back to Ben Gurion (it’s an “in joke”). I think you’ll be on it & not with us here very much longer.
Unlike you, I’ve been to South Tel Aviv many times, among the African migrants, some of whom are refugees. I was there last week with my partner Neil and we saw many Africans working, shopping, or looking for work, unmolested by any Israeli.
No jack booted Border Police anywhere to be seen. No municipal police harassment either.
Just poor folk getting by, right alongside poor Jews and Arabs.
We spent time in Tel Aviv’s Old Bus Station, the mecca for these migrants. The Old Bus Station is full of migrants, who were uniformly well mannered, well fed and clothed. We felt perfectly safe everywhere we went. Everywhere we went was clean and orderly.
You cherry pick you facts and tar Israel with a broad brush. You should be ashamed of yourself.
@ Ben: That’s a lie. I’ve been to South Tel Aviv as well. And regardless of where you’ve been in Israel, you don’t know any more about the neighborhood than I do. YOu forget this is 2017, not 1917. In fact, I’ll bet I know more overall about living conditions of African refugees than you.
I guess you never managed to see these hundreds of scenes featured in these images of Border Police beating up, strangling, arresting & harrassing African refugees: https://www.google.com/search?q=israeli+border+police+violence+against+african+refugees&tbm=isch&ei=4E2aWIi5LYvojwOOqqD4Bg&start=20&sa=N
So either you are legallly blind, you don’t see what you don’t want to see, you actually have never been to South Tel Aviv and are lying about your claims above, or you are telling us an anecdote that reflects your own personal experience which isn’t necessarily reflective of reality. Also, there are thousands of African refugees protesting against this treatment which you claim doesn’t happen. So either you’re calling them liars, or you’re imposing your own Ashkenazi-white-privilege version of their reality on them.
Whites in the American south said precisely the same things about Jim Crow. Our “darkies” are neat and tidy. They enjoy slavery. THey enjoy segregation. They dance and have parties and play fiddle & banjo. Happy Old Joe. Oh they’re happy folk. What patronizing bullshit you peddle. Either way, your views are demeaning and racist. And I’m growing exceedingly tired of them.
This is your fourth comment today. Recently I warned you that you had exceeded this daily limit. YOu’ve ignored me. So the next time you exceed the limit you will be moderated.
[Comment deleted: have a nice flight. I expect you to be leaving us momentarily. Ready yourself for touchdown at Ben Gurion and a gala reunion with your pals at Hasbara Central.]