Israel Activist Detained At Airport In Act Of ‘Political Persecution’

Jennifer Gorovitz, vice president of the New Israel Fund. Image by jewish community federation

By Naomi Zeveloff February 9, 2017

A senior official at the New Israel Fund was detained at Israel’s airport on Wednesday, in an incident that an Israeli opposition lawmaker slammed as “political persecution.”

Jennifer Gorovitz, the vice president of the New Israel Fund, a U.S.-based not-for-profit that supports Jewish and Arab civil society groups in Israel, traveled to Israel via Ben Gurion airport in order to participate in the organization’s board meeting.

According to a report in Haaretz, Gorovitz was detained for about 90 minutes, during which she was questioned three different times about the New Israel Fund’s activities.

Gorovitz said that one of the people questioning her was holding a large document about her, which included the word “BDS,” shorthand for the movement to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel for its treatment of Palestinians. Gorovitz told the questioner that NIF opposes BDS.

Israeli parliament member Tamar Zandberg, of the left wing Meretz party, asked Interior Minister Aryeh Dery to look into the legality of the incident.

“This is political persecution, harassment and an attempt to silence those who fight for Israeli society,” she wrote in a letter to Dery. She called what happened to Gorovitz “harassment and political labeling.”

Contact Naomi Zeveloff at zeveloff@forward.com

Naomi Zeveloff is the former Middle East correspondent of the Forward, primarily covering Israel and the Palestinian Territories.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

This year, we have stood together in strength and sorrow. Our Forward team has worked around the clock to help you find clarity amid the chaos.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO