Their grandstanding interventions — like those blockade-busters sailing to Gaza or the wealthy American Jews who fund extremist settlers' housing purchases in Arab East Jerusalem — often fuel the worst trends on either side and divert our energies from the only thing that is important: forging a two-state solution.
Lapid and the ultra-nationalist Naftali Bennett, once allies, are at odds over new funds for settlers.
The new U.S. Ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, until recently headed a settler fund-raising group.
The nonprofit that runs the bingo night is the same Irving I. Moskowitz Foundation that funds the controversial settler groups.
Not a single progressive Zionist is surprised to learn that the bill's provisions somehow avoid applying the same "transparency" requirements to the mechanisms that fund Israel's ultranationalist and settler organizations on the right.
Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem are preparing a legal case to stop excavation of an ancient Jewish site — led by an Israeli settler group and partially funded by the Israeli government — which they say are causing major damage to their homes.
The tunnel runs almost 2,000 feet (600 meters) from inside the Old City to the nearby Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan, where an Israeli settler group, the Elad Association, both funds archaeological digs and moves in Jewish families, angering Palestinians.
This would be bad enough in itself, but such extremist national-religious groups, once fringe and marginal, are now powerful and mainstream, partly because they are supported and funded by the current, settler-endorsing Israeli coalition.
It was among the main supporters of creation of the Settlement Commission, an official authority with a fund to buy up the land from the Poles and redistribute it among German settlers.
Finally, there is the settler state of hardliners who appropriate Palestinian land across the 1967 border and build, with government funds and support, their separate networks of roads, water and electricity supplies.
