The U.S. Billionaires Secretly Funding the Right-wing Effort to Reshape Israel
The Kohelet Policy Forum has wielded increasing influence on Israel's decision-making centers, with an ideology that weds conservative, settlement-supporting politics to free-market economics. Who is the guiding force behind this under-the-radar enterprise – and who's bankrolling it?
September 2020. Another stormy session of the coronavirus cabinet was underway. The raucous demonstrations outside the prime minister’s residence in Jerusalem were at their height. Maybe there’s a way to limit the demonstrations, Public Security Minister Amir Ohana wondered aloud. Although that possibility had already been ruled out by the attorney general, Avichai Mendelblit, Ohana said the idea had the backing of another legal expert. The expert wasn’t present at the meeting, but he just happened to be sitting outside the door, waiting to be called in. Mendelblit objected, and the expert remained in the hallway.
The clash between Ohana and the attorney general was widely reported at the time, but the jurist waiting to have his say was forgotten (and the demonstrations continued). He was Dr. Aviad Bakshi, head of the legal department of the Kohelet Policy Forum. The legal opinion he provided to Ohana is one of many that Bakshi has issued at the request of government officials, and only one aspect of the assistance the forum supplies to Israeli decision makers. Even Mendelblit, though he rebuffed Bakshi’s presence in that venue, later made it clear that he respects the Kohelet researcher and his organization. “My door is always open” to ideas from the forum, he was quoted as telling the Globes newspaper.
More than anything, perhaps, that event is a good example of the way the Kohelet Policy Forum operates: under the radar, not revealing its methods or the scale of its influence. Kohelet was founded only in 2012, but it is constantly growing – today its staff employs 140 researchers – consistently heightening the influence it wields in the state’s decision-making centers: Knesset, government, courts. And by influencing these key levers of power it is effectively recasting Israeli right-wing ideology in an American-libertarian image: right-wing, Jewish nationalism coupled to conservative economics. From one flank, it promotes the settlements, from the other, privatization. The whole Land of Israel yes, socialism no. Even as Kohelet keeps a low public profile, its impact on Israeli society is inculcated not only by its connections with officialdom, but also by the network of right-wing, civil-society organizations it itself has created.
The Kohelet (the word is the Hebrew name of the Book of Ecclesiastes) Policy Forum is headed by Moshe Koppel, a professor in the computer science department at Bar-Ilan University. It is he who runs the show, even though he’s largely unknown to the general public. He’s the conceptualizer and the creator, but he’s not alone. There are two other individuals, whose names are being revealed here for the for the first time, who have provided the forum with the oxygen it needed from the outset in the form of funding for an unprecedented platform to disseminate very specific ideas. They are the organization’s two principal financial backers, Jewish American billionaires who zealously guard their privacy. Only by following the serpentine path of the cash that ends up in the Kohelet treasury will one arrive at them.
The organization’s headquarters take up a full floor of a large office building in the business district of Jerusalem’s Givat Shaul neighborhood, not far from the Knesset and the Supreme Court. Walking distance, really. The size of its research staff is comparable to that of the largest academic college in Israel, but in contrast to the academic world, the Kohelet staff is not engaged in research for its own sake. They want to wield influence. They want to transform the country from the ground up.
Moshe Koppel, Kohelet’s chairman. The organization has outstripped every other right-wing organization in terms of budget, scope of activity and influence. Credit: Olivier Fitoussi
That goal is hinted at in the organization’s self-description on its official website (English-language version): “The Kohelet Policy Forum strives to secure Israel’s future as the nation-state of the Jewish people, to strengthen representative democracy, and to broaden individual liberty and free-market principles in Israel.” In the “conservatism conference” mounted by the Tikvah Foundation in 2019, the first of its kind in Israel, Prof. Koppel, a Tikvah board member, elaborated on the forum’s principles: “Economic liberty, Israel as the nation-state [of the Jewish people] and governance – governance is a euphemism for dismantling unelected centers of power that exploit the state’s power in order to impose their values.” (“Exploitative, unelected centers of power” can in turn be understood as a euphemism for the country’s judicial system.)
The national element within the set of goals is of prime importance for Koppel. The Basic Law on Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People had been passed a year before, in July 2018, but it was based on an original draft written by Koppel 15 years earlier. Since then he had labored to get it enshrined in law and finally succeeded, which is a source of not a little pride within the organization. The law defines Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, and includes reference to the Law of Return, to the official symbols and holidays, and the Hebrew language, with no mention of equality.
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And there are other examples, too, of Kohelet providing the legal and intellectual framework, as well as talking points, for policy that officials vaguely want. It was Kohelet that provided then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo with the legal grounding for his precedent-setting announcement of U.S. recognition of the legality of the settlements, in 2019. Pompeo even publicly acknowledged the support of the Israeli think tank in this formulation of U.S. foreign policy. (Pompeo, by the way, is scheduled to speak at the second conservatism conference, taking place in Jerusalem this Sunday and Monday.)
A number of people who spoke with Haaretz, both from within Kohelet and including observers in the legal and political realms, pointed out that the forum’s singular fingerprints are discernible elsewhere as well: in legislation, court petitions and legal advice bearing far-reaching implications for Israel.
The evidence is as close at hand as the current election campaign. Kohelet staff wrote the free-market economic platform of Gideon Sa’ar’s New Hope party, the plan for economic development of the settlements commissioned by Likud MK Nir Barkat, and position papers of Naftali Bennett’s Yamina party and of the so-called “Shulmans,” a movement that represents the self-employed and small businesses and has allied itself with Bennett.
"The future of Judea and Samaria is in our hands": An ad for Likud MK Nir Barkat's plan for economic development of the settlements.Credit: Barkat's Facebook page
The range of these projects underscore another point: Even though Koppel himself is a member of the Likud Central Committee, the organization he chairs assiduously avoids identifying itself with specific political parties – only with ideas. The MKs it cooperates with – feeding them data and drawing up position papers, legal opinions and even entire bills that come ready for submission to the Knesset – represent a range of parties. MKs who have drawn on work by Kohelet, at different levels, include, in Likud, Barkat, Amir Ohana and Yoav Kish; in Yamina, Bennett, Ayelet Shaked and Matan Kahana; and in New Hope, Zeev Elkin, Zvi Hauser and Sharren Haskel. But Kohelet is at the beck and call of everyone, including left-wingers, as long as what’s wanted toes the line of the organization’s ideology.
It’s not by chance that Kohelet is so popular yet maintains a very low profile. Operating behind the scenes is a strategic decision. Most of the work is done far from the eyes of the media: in the corridors of the Knesset, in government ministries and by the organization’s aligning itself with petitions to the courts. By and large, it’s through personal contact with elected officials that Kohelet succeeds in getting its ideas translated into laws.
“We are in daily contact with those who make the decisions [elected officials], and our influence lies in quiet things that you don’t hear about,” Koppel said in an interview with the independent podcast of writer and public speaker Roi Yozevitch. “All kinds of catastrophes that we prevented, those are the truly important things.” Or, as he put it at the conservatism conference, “He who wields the pen, wields the power.”
Formative Knesset experience
Moshe Koppel wasn’t always a settler from the town of Efrat, south of Jerusalem. He was born in 1956 in Manhattan to a family connected with the Gur Hasidic sect – but not in the sense familiar in Israel. He grew up among Holocaust survivors who had distanced themselves from the sect to some degree. He would later relate that “they remained faithful to the prewar way of life, but gave up the beard and the streimel” – the fur hat worn by Hasidic men.
The Kohelet Policy Forum's Jerusalem office, this week.Credit: Emil Salman
Religion was not at the center of his higher education. He studied mathematics and computer sciences, obtaining a PhD at the age of 23 from New York University. After spending a year as a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, Koppel landed in Israel. It was 1980.
Initially he lived in Jerusalem, before moving in 1996 to Efrat, in the Etzion Bloc in the West Bank. In the meantime, he began climbing the local academic ladder, joining the faculty of the computer science department of Bar-Ilan University, in Ramat Gan. There he specialized in developing “author-attribution” algorithms – which analyze texts and are capable of extracting from them considerable information about their authors, including, it has been claimed, their gender. Nor did he neglect his spiritual sources, writing articles and books about themes related to Judaism.
Attempts to categorize Koppel based on his place of residence or the color of his kippa will be off the mark. He is religiously observant, part of the religious Zionist community, but also independent in his thinking. Like many American immigrants to Israel, his interpretation of Judaism doesn’t quite fit any religious slot in Israel. In his written work he’s prone to quote philosophers, sociologists, writers, poets, even John Lennon and Eminem. All of it undergoes a highly logical synthesis refracted through the prism of his worldview.
Koppel entered the world of Israeli politics at the beginning of the 2000s. Initially he hooked up with Dr. Yitzhak Klein, a political scientist who today heads Kohelet’s department of policy research. Together the two established a nonprofit called the Israel Policy Center for a Jewish Democratic State. That initiative was short-lived. The springboard for Koppel presented itself in 2004, when he started to learn how the Knesset works from the inside. As a member of Likud’s Central Committee, he met MK Michael Eitan, who was at the time chairman of the Knesset’s Constitution, Law and Justice Committee. Eitan, who was trying to formulate a text for an Israeli constitution that would be acceptable to all sectors of society, suggested to Koppel that he exercise his civic right to attend the committee’s hearings. “Somehow there was good chemistry between us,” Eitan says, recalling that first meeting.
MK Michael Eitan in 2011.Credit: Emil Salman
In interviews, Koppel often describes his “entry into the Knesset” as a spontaneous initiative. He, too, believed in the paramount importance of framing a constitution that would enshrine the state’s Jewish identity. In the committee, taking part in discussions with MKs and legal experts, he gained unrivaled firsthand experience in the political arena. Through the day-to-day operation of the parliament he learned how the wheels of legislation turn and how they’re greased. He discovered up-close how lobbyists operate, most of whom at the time were from left-wing civil society organizations; how bills are worded; how compromises are arrived at; and how to influence MKs. The experience would prove invaluable in his future endeavors.
“Bismarck said that laws are like sausages – you don’t want to know how they’re made,” Koppel joked years later in the 2019 conservatism conference before an audience of hundreds, many of whom had been groomed in various Kohelet programs. By then he spoke as one in-the-know. “It doesn’t help to come to decision makers with ideas. If you’ve corralled an elected official and want to persuade them, don’t say, ‘It’s really worth your while to write [a law] about subject X,’” he advised his listeners. “That won’t lead to anything. You simply need to write the law. If you want a government decision, simply write a resolution for the government. Come with a text.”
He also emphasized another theme. “We need to do it all without taking credit,” he said. “The credit goes to the elected officials, and rightly so, because in the end they are the signatories to the law.” That approach is not uncommon to lobbyists. But specifically, Koppel’s sources of inspiration lie in activity that takes place far from Israel, within the conservative movement in the United States.
They’d rather be in Philadelphia
The Kohelet Policy Forum had its gestation as a spontaneous idea during a business meeting. Koppel had developed an algorithm for commercial use in capital market investments. There followed a meeting with a Jewish-American billionaire who had made his fortune in the stock market and showed an interest in the Israeli’s innovation. In a 2019 interview with the religious weekly B’Sheva, Koppel noted that it had emerged in the meeting that he and the businessman had something else in common besides moneymaking algorithms. Indeed, money was perceived as a paltry matter compared to the fate of the Jewish state.
They conversed for two years, Koppel related, “ostensibly about investments and algorithms, but in fact about the State of Israel.” At one point, he recalled, the billionaire said to him, “‘Moshe, you were at the [Knesset’s] Constitution Committee, you know how to do it – so do it. Send me a budget of how much you need and I’ll pay.’ I jotted something down and within a few days the money arrived. I collected the talented friends I’d met until then and we embarked on the path.” That was the genesis of the most successful project of the Israeli right in the past decade.
Who the philanthropic American Jew was and what part he played in setting up Kohelet and shaping its agenda are questions that were left unanswered in that interview and others. In fact, since the forum’s establishment in 2012, Koppel has kept mum when asked time and again about Kohelet funding sources. Not by his choice, he emphasized. “We are privately funded by American businesspeople who wish to remain anonymous,” he told the Jewish-American website Ami in 2019. “Most of them aren’t frum [Orthodox], but they’re very Jewish.”
Haaretz, however, has learned the names of the donors whose identities the Kohelet Policy Forum would prefer to keep secret.
Tracking the annual donations, which pass through several nonprofit groups in the United States, we discover that the money leads to two names: Jeffrey Yass and Arthur Dantchik. Neither are household names in Israel, or in the United States, for that matter – and not by chance. The two billionaires are strictly low-profile, even though they are among the biggest donors to the Republican Party, notably its Trumpian wing. They are also among the major donors to conservative and libertarian organizations in their home country that resemble Kohelet politically.
Jeffrey Yass at the World Series of Poker, 2013.Credit: Eddie Malluk / poker photo archive.com
The two men, who are business partners, were born into Jewish families in New York in 1957, although they only connected at what is now called Binghamton University, about three hours’ upstate. They didn’t rush to Wall Street after their studies, but tried their luck in Las Vegas. With an acute sense for mathematics and game theory, they thrived in the casinos, particularly in poker, and in betting on the horses. The Vegas experience served them well when they jointly founded a private investment house before turning 30.
Susquehanna International Group was based in Bala Cynwyd, an affluent suburb of Philadelphia. The choice to locate far from Wall Street exemplified their powerful desire for secrecy. “Stealthy and mysterious” is how Philadelphia magazine described the firm. Indeed, very little has been written about the pair of partners, who make a point of avoiding the limelight. As it happens, however, during the past two months, they found themselves in the headlines. Twice. In one case it was in a flattering business connection, relating to the immense profit they made from a small investment a decade earlier. The millions they gave a Chinese entrepreneur to invent the TikTok app are now worth $15 billion.
The second occasion was less favorable. It occurred in the wake of the attempted coup at the Capitol on January 6. The riots sparked criticism of Donald Trump’s loyalists in Congress, particularly Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley. Afterward, the criticism was extended to Trumpist donors, especially Yass, who is ranked sixth on the list compiled by Opensecrets.org of the major donors to all Republican candidates in 2020. Four years earlier he was the biggest donor to the libertarian candidate for president of the United States, Gary Johnson – Trump wasn’t enough of a libertarian for him.
Money, then, is no object. According to estimates of the Wall Street Journal in 2019, Susquehanna is worth $80 billion. (The company has 2,000 employees and branches across Europe and Asia, including in Israel.) But Yass and Dantchik do more than donate money to political candidates: They are also active in funding a network of conservative and libertarian research centers. The most prominent of them is the Cato Institute, founded by the billionaire brothers David (now deceased) and Charles Koch, the most influential donors to the Republican Party. Together, these various institutes were successful in providing legislators with the research and rationale to be able to water down public health insurance, prevent the expansion of public transportation, and block restrictions on weapons purchases, including in supermarkets. In many senses the structure and method of the American network very much resemble the modus operandi of the Kohelet Forum.
Yass and Dantchik’s activity in business, politics and research institutes encapsulates not only a conservative worldview but also a cohesive strategy that has been dubbed “poker philosophy,” which calls, basically, for betting on a wide number of possible winners in the expectation that one will provide a big payoff. The card game is very much present in the company, which also sometimes hosts tournaments in which Yass himself is the dealer. It’s not by chance that Philadelphia magazine placed Susquehanna on its “coolest companies” list.
Money trail
On paper, there’s no connection between Susquehanna and Kohelet, nor are Yass and Dantchik formally connected to the Israeli organization. Following the money in this case leads to a convoluted trail. The U.S.-based Tikvah Fund, of which Koppel is a board member, usually donates hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to Kohelet. However, the vast majority of the organization’s funding, to the tune of tens of millions of dollars, comes from a different nonprofit. Koppel has to date managed to maintain the donors’ privacy thanks to U.S. law, which lacks regulation that requires transparency.
In Kohelet’s first years, the money was channeled to the forum through the Central Fund of Israel, a U.S.-based nonprofit that acts as a discreet conduit for American donors to right-wing organizations here. In 2016, the fund was replaced in that role overnight by a new nonprofit called American Friends of Kohelet Policy Forum. A perusal of the organization’s papers turns up a successful attempt to blur the donors’ identity but nevertheless provides some insights.
The Friends organization was initially registered in Bala Cynwyd (Susquehanna’s base), with three directors listed. Two of them are married to Koppel’s siblings; the third, Amir Goldman, is Israeli-born. He moved to Bala Cynwyd in 2006 in order to establish a new investment fund for Yass and Dantchik. Previously he worked for the software firm owned by Nir Barkat and the Likud MK’s brother Eli. Goldman’s association with both Susquehanna and Kohelet could be written off as a coincidence, but tracing the source of the money suggests otherwise.
The funding of the American Friends of Kohelet is not on the public record, but an examination carried out in 2016 by the Democratic Bloc – an Israeli organization involved in advancing the cause of human rights in Israel and the territories – turned up one detail too many. A secretive American nonprofit organization – Kids Connect Charitable Fund – which donated most of the money to Kohelet’s Friends organization, did in fact reveal this in its papers in the United States. That organization is owned and managed by a private company called Sterling, which specializes in managing philanthropic nonprofits for individuals who wish to remain anonymous. Sterling’s managers are listed as directors in the secretive nonprofit alongside an attorney named Alan Dye.
Sterling and Kids Connect are both registered at the same address in the town of Reston, Virginia, outside Washington, D.C. Registered at the same address is the CLAWS Foundation, the principal donations arm of Yass and Dantchik. CLAWS has just three directors: Yass, Dantchik and attorney Alan Dye.
Besides the tens of millions of dollars that CLAWS donates every year to conservative and libertarian organizations in the United States, during the past decade it has also transferred funds to groups in Israel, including the Jerusalem-based Jewish Statesmanship Center, which provides training for aspiring conservative politicians and public figures in Israel. Its graduates include one MK – Sharren Haskel – and one of the members of its public council is Moshe Koppel.
Arthur Dantchik (far right) next to Amir Goldman on a trip to the Golan Heights in May 2018.
With Dantchik and Yass donating together, it’s impossible to know for certain which of them was the driving force behind Kohelet and whether it has already become a joint project. Yass is the more active of the two, especially in American politics, but both espouse a solidly libertarian approach. Dantchik, in contrast to Yass, is a frequent visitor to Israel, in order to keep close tabs on his investments, according to the Wall Street Journal. He has also made campaign donations on three occasions to Naftali Bennett (shortly after Bennett left the position of secretary of the Yesha Council of settlements and was seeking to become head of the political party Habayit Hayehudi). The donations to Bennett began in 2012, just like the donations to Kohelet, albeit in far more modest amounts.
Asked for comment on the political contributions he received from Yass, MK Naftali Bennett’s office provided Haaretz with the following response: “Naftali Bennett has always been and remains a right-wing man, whose positions support the free market, who forms his own opinions and works only for the interest of all Israeli citizens. Any other insinuation is nonsense.”
The identity of the person who made the match between Koppel and the billionaires in that first meeting remains unknown. Nor do we know which of the two met with him. But that’s also largely immaterial.
The other side of the connection
The financial connection with American conservatism is ideologically driven. Kohelet is committed to promoting a conservative and libertarian economic policy in Israel – and is having great success in implanting this philosophy in the right wing as a whole and in the religious Zionist movement in particular. For Koppel this constitutes a shift. For decades he wrote about his desire to enshrine Israel’s Jewish character in legislation. However, neither his writing nor his activist work manifested the economic ideas that would become the essence of the philosophy and work of Kohelet Forum, and through it of the right wing as a whole.
Kohelet Policy Forum building in Jerusalem. Credit: Emil Salman
When Kohelet sprang seemingly out of nowhere nine years ago, that economic agenda came as a surprise innovation to the founding group as well. The grafting of that economic addendum to the political-security outlook long rooted in the old National Religious Party – was perceived as artificial at the time. As an American import. An article about Kohelet in the right-wing newspaper Makor Rishon two years ago noted that even Koppel’s friends in the religious Zionist movement were at first taken aback by the addition to the agenda of “individual liberty and free-market principles.” The heads of Kohelet told the reporter that “this sphere [economic libertarianism] entered the list of goals ‘at the request of the donor.’”
However, a source in the Kohelet Forum who was present in those early, foundational meetings, has a different take on the organization’s establishment. “We took an interest in economic issues from the first minute, and one of the participants in that meeting is an economist who is a free-market advocate,” the source told Haaretz. “There was no need for any donor to request that Kohelet take an interest in the economy.”
Since then, the economic vision has become a key element of the forum’s outlook. Today Koppel espouses a sharp, comprehensive, clear-cut economic position, which pushes for government deregulation as much as it supports the settlement project. As such, the Kohelet Policy Forum is interweaving two right-wing threads in much the same way as happened in the American conservative movement in the 1980s: the conservative religious community standing with businesspeople and the wealthy class who oppose all restrictions and all forms of regulation. That approach mandates a wealth of activity aimed at annulling state welfare programs, reducing the power of workers organizations and eliminating regulation in every possible sphere, from controls on bread prices and day-care centers, to the realms of health and education.
That’s also the philosophy of the coalition that formed under U.S. President Ronald Reagan and that’s the kind of coalition that staffed the Trump administration.
Kohelet’s working method is also resonant of conservative American think tanks, which wielded a strong influence on the policy of the Trump government. But the Israeli organization is well adapted to the local situation, and is involved in a host of initiatives and proposals to strengthen religious-Zionist underpinnings of legislation and to bolster the settlement project.
Here again the America-Israel connection is more than theoretical or conceptual. Yass and Dantchik’s network of ties reaches to the top tiers of the Republican Party, and as such enabled access to the highest levels of the administration in Washington. Until the inauguration of President Joe Biden, that included the White House and the State Department. In this sense, they are similar to the late philanthropist Sheldon Adelson, only without the latter’s hankering for publicity. Yass, for example, is a longtime backer of Pompeo’s, who expressed support for the application of Israeli sovereignty in the West Bank, and also of Sen. Ted Cruz, who two years ago sponsored a bill bearing his name, aimed at enshrining in law the recognition by the Trump administration of Israeli sovereignty in the Golan Heights. That move came proximate to a meeting of Cruz with an Israeli delegation, led by Zvi Hauser, in 2018, when the latter headed the Coalition for the Israeli Golan. MK Hauser, who is running in the March 23 election on the New Hope slate, still appears on the Kohelet website as a member of the forum’s “team.”
Former U.S. president Donald Trump and former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.Credit: Drew Angerer / GETTY IMAGES NORT
From Washington to Jerusalem
In many ways, the success of the Kohelet Policy Forum is in its attention to the details. Under the inspiration of the American model, Koppel is working to cultivate in Israel a conservative civil society, packed with activists and organizations that operate intensively in every Knesset committee and sub-committee, even the smallest, and in providing amicus briefs in every relevant court case. Just last week, Kohelet’s executive director, Meir Rubin, tweeted that the institution’s directors are working on “hundreds of projects, some of which were established with the forum’s encouragement and support. That does not make them organizations that belong to the forum.” Indeed, taken all in all, this network of activity, done with measured coordination, reflects the importation – if not the cloning – of the ideology, and especially of the work patterns, of the conservative and libertarian movements in the United States.
In contrast to politicians, who tend to fashion their platforms on the basis of opinion polls, Kohelet espouses a fixed and clear ideology. For example, when the coronavirus crisis erupted, the forum’s activity mirrored that of conservative think tanks in the United States in trying to persuade politicians actually to reduce government spending. Position papers warned against extending sweeping aid to businesses suffering an existential crisis, in order “not to halt a healthy evolutionary process” that would bring about the extinction of businesses or whole industries that are not “efficient.” They also sought to introduce flexibility into the cost of employment benefits by reducing the minimum wage and eliminating pension allocations. Kohelet is a full-blown believer in giving market forces free reign.
Creating the alliance between the right-wing economic and nationalist ideologies has been a challenge for Koppel. Another way of defining it would be “his life enterprise.” As early as 2004, MK Michael Eitan, who later was invited by Koppel to become one of Kohelet’s first research fellows, perceived in this approach a combination of “sincere concern for the fate of the Jewish state” with “libertarian elements.”
Koppel’s worldview, on the other hand, sets forth an organic fusion of the new Israeli alliance between Jewish nationalism and libertarian economics. The method for advancing this agenda is simple: to get to MKs and ministers, offer them fully formed proposals, and at the same time to cultivate the next generation of politicians and activists. Koppel’s aspiration to advance a civil society replete with conservative organizations is already being realized, with Kohelet now spearheading this movement. The forum has outstripped every other right-wing organization in terms of budget (its income exceeded 22 million shekels in 2019 – about $6 million), scope of activity and influence. In addition to its network of subsidiary organizations, it also spends generously, for example, by paying higher-than-usual salaries for nonprofits. For example, Koppel’s monthly salary in 2019 was 80,000 shekels (about $23,000).
The United States saw a similar fusion of libertarianism and nationalism in the 1980s, but in Israel this alliance is younger. It has already gained a surprisingly broad hold among MKs, even if it is still a minority view among the general public. Two years ago, for example, Moshe Feiglin failed in his efforts to be elected to the Knesset as head of a libertarian party, though that may have been related to his messianic views, which include the call for construction of a new Temple in Jerusalem.
Kohelet and Koppel are not messianic – they are pragmatic, realistic and systematic. Many members of the forum are religiously observant, but their doctrine is not religious in its essence. It’s a right-wing viewpoint that is founded on a basis of religious identity, with full support for the settlements; but to this is appended another viewpoint, equally determined, in favor of a free market and against state regulation of any sort, from the minimum wage to price controls on bread.
However, in the Israeli case there’s an obstacle, an ideological price. It’s called the Green Line. Beyond it the libertarians are forced to accept aggressive involvement by the “officials” they despise more than anything. In the territories, there’s government involvement on steroids – and as far as the Israeli right goes, it cannot be forgone.
But that isn’t the only compromise that’s required of members of this new hybrid alliance. The values of the old religious-Zionist movement, which are identified with the (no longer existing) National Religious Party, held assistance to the weak even outside their community to be a supreme value. There, too, a reform occurred. After Bennett’s election as leader of Habayit Hayehudi, the successor to the NRP, in 2012, the party’s constitution underwent a revision. The clause that called for the enactment of “social [legislation] ensuring decent living conditions” was replaced by a call for a “free economy.” Among many rabbis, that issue remains divisive, as Feiglin learned.
Such disputes are Koppel’s foe. “Scissors issues” is his term for issues that could “tear the base” in the emerging conservative movement. “The problem is that there are some issues about which we all know exactly what to do,” he remarked wryly to the conservative conference. “We will talk about religion and state, or abortions, or about a professional army, of the legalization of prostitution, or drugs – on all those issues probably everyone in this room probably knows what a conservative needs to do. The problem is that half of us think the opposite of what the other half think.”
Thus, Kohelet is bent on finding a common denominator for every issue, and not to stir up what is potentially divisive. In the end, the forum, like its founder, is pragmatic, working to achieve its goals step by step, from one law to the next, one court judgment after another, like the American conservative model.
Kohelet’s activity also recalls the poker philosophy of Yass and Dantchik (with no connection, apparently to the fact that MK Haskel tried to advance a “poker law” in Israel that would legalize tournaments for that game, and only that game). “The betting philosophy was pretty straightforward,” Philadelphia magazine wrote about Yass’ method to beat the odds. “Basically, if you bet enough money, covering a high enough percentage of possible winners, you’ll win often enough to come out ahead. Never mind that you’ll lose more often than you’ll win, because when you win, you can win big.”
It’s been 15 years since Koppel strode into the Knesset with the aim of enshrining Israel’s Jewish identity in law, came up with a first draft for what would become the nation-state law and emerged frustrated when his effort was unsuccessful. “The question is, what would have happened without the Kohelet Policy Forum,” Koppel said in the Yozevitch interview. “Would we have arrived at the same balance without superfluous efforts? I know the answer, because 10 years ago, there was no Kohelet Policy Forum.” When he attended sessions of Knesset committees, he recalled, “there were a thousand and one organizations there” from the left, but not one right-wing group. “So, in my opinion we brought about a better balance.”
Thanks to Kohelet, the nation-state law was enacted, and the right-wing civil society that he has cultivated has continued to score one achievement after another. Koppel, though, still prefers to preserve anonymity and to remain behind the scenes, taking minimum credit. However, in the conversation with the Ami website, he acknowledged, “I don’t want to sound arrogant, but in some sense we’re the brains of the Israeli right wing. Most of the things that go on in the Israeli right come out of our ‘beis midrash’” – our school of thought.
Asked to comment on their connections to donors, and the influence of the latter on the organization’s founding and philosophy, Kohelet Policy Forum made the following statement to Haaretz:
"The forum’s founders advocate freedom and competition even before a preliminary dialogue with any donors. The donors are updated about the forum’s goals from time to time, but are not involved in setting them. We will not comment on the identity of the forum’s donors, in order to respect their privacy. Similarly, whoever consults with us is free to talk about it as they wish, but we for our part strictly maintain the confidentiality of private conversations. We are not experts on relations between citizen and administration in the United States, but we welcome everyone who promotes the good of Israel in Israel and abroad."