NYU's Michael Steinhardt, Wall Street and Golan Heights Oil Connection: Part 11

NYU’s Land Grabbing Project and Steinhardt’s Cuomo Campaign Contribution

Coincidentally, besides being funded by a Wall Street speculator who has collaborated with an Israeli power elite that continues to gobble up and exploit Palestinian land in the West Bank for new settlements and Syrian land in the occupied Golan Heights for Genie Energy to exploit, the NYU Administration, itself, plans to continue to gobble up and exploit neighborhood land in Downtown Manhattan in a big way in the 21^st-century. As the Village Voice noted in a Feb. 20, 2013 article: 

“Some neighbors are still bitter about NYU's previous fits of expansion in the 1960s and again in the '90s; in both periods, the university earned its reputation as an insatiable beast swallowing entire neighborhoods. But the current proposal goes much, much further…Dubbed `NYU 2031,’" the plan calls for…new construction…in the two blocks bound on the south and north by Houston and 3rd streets and on the east and west by Mercer Street and LaGuardia Place. The construction would…entail the demolition of the historically significant 1959 Washington Square Village Garden…It would also renege on promises it made 50 years ago, when it built the existing residential towers, to not further crowd the area…”

Yet the Democratic Administration of former Democratic New York Governor Mario Cuomo—Andrew Cuomo—has apparently not been that eager to pass state legislation which would prohibit or block tax-exempt and “non-profit” NYU from gobbling up more land in New York state for private, institutional expansion purposes. Nor was New York Governor Cuomo II apparently that eager to criticize the militaristic, right-wing Netanyahu regime in Israel/Palestine for ordering an Israeli military attack on people in Gaza between July 7 and Aug. 26, 2014 that killed 1,662 Palestinian civilians, including 519 Palestinian children and 297 Palestinian women, according to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights.

One reason might be because NYU Trustee and “Birthright Israel” founder Steinhardt apparently made a big campaign contribution to Andrew Cuomo’s re-election campaign fund in 2014. As the New York Times observed in its July 15, 2014 issue, “Mr. Cuomo…drew individual donations from a variety of real estate, financial and entertainment elites, including $40,000 from Michael Steinhardt, a hedge fund expert…”

(end of part 11)

NYU's Michael Steinhardt, Wall Street and Golan Heights Oil Connection: Part 6

NYU Trustee Steinhardt’s `Birthright Israel’ Connection

Steinhardt also revealed in his 2001 autobiography other ways in which he has apparently historically collaborated with the militaristic Israeli establishment that has historically violated Palestinian human rights:

“…I also set up the Steinhardt Family Foundation in Jerusalem…I have derived the most satisfaction from my most ambitious…project `Birthright Israel…’ In the spring of 1997…I ran into Charles Bronfman…whose family controlled The Seagram Company…We agreed to each put up $5 million to start developing an organization called `Birthright Israel.’,,,

“By the summer of 1998, we had developed a plan that would fund `Birthright Israel.’ In Jerusalem,…Benjamin Netanyahu announced he would commit $20 million a year to the project…In addition, Charles and I would raise another $20 million a year on our own…Starting Jan. 1, 2000, 15,000 college-aged Jews would be brought to Israel…In 1999, Charles and I each wrote a check for $9 million…The kids…met Israeli politicians…A number of them took Jeep trips…through the Golan Heights…After seeing the topography…they were absolutely opposed to giving up the Golan Heights in any peace negotiations…”

According to a July 4, 2011 article by Kiera Feldman (no relation to this writer)  in The Nation  magazine, between 1999 and 2011 Steinhardt’s “Birthright Israel…spent almost $600 million to send more than 260,000 young diaspora Jews on free vacations” to Israel. The same article also noted that by 2011, “far-right Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson” was “the largest individual donor, having given Birthright $100 million over the” previous “five years,” while “the Israeli government provided Birthright $100 million during the program’s first decade; and in 2011 Israeli “Prime Minister Netanyahu…announced another $100 million in” Israeli “government funding” for NYU Administration funder Steinhardt’s project.

One reason the militaristic Netanyahu government was so eager to spend $100 million more to fund Steinhardt’s Birthright Israel project in 2011 was perhaps because “after the 2006 Lebanon war, Brandeis researchers found that Birthright alumni were more likely than other young American Jews to view Israel’s military conduct as justified,” according to The Nation magazine article. The same article also described Birthright Israel’s 2000 to 2011 U.S.-based funders in the following way:

“…Most of them just happen to share hawkish Israel politics. In 1998, during his first term as prime minister, Netanyahu gave the initial guarantee of Israeli government funding. By 2000…at least eight funders were trustees of AIPAC’s think-tank spinoff, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy—including Steinhardt and Bronfman. Casino magnate Adelson…once…broke with AIPAC—for not being conservative enough. Other notables: oil billionaire Lynn Schusterman,…thirty-five-year AIPAC veteran and the purse for many `pro-Israel’ youth initiatives such as the Israel on Campus Coalition,…; diamond baron and settlement construction impresario Lev Leviev; Slim-Fast billionaire 
S. Daniel Abraham, a member of the AIPAC board; and neoconservative philanthropist Roger Hertog, emeritus chair of the Manhattan Institute. Then there’s [now-deceased] donor Marc Rich, a founding Birthright board member, the billionaire oil trader controversially pardoned by President Clinton; throughout his business dealings, Rich gathered intelligence for the Mossad.

“Several Birthright donors, including family foundations operated by the Gottesmans, Grinspoons, Steinhardts and Schustermans, have also financially supported illegal Jewish settlements…”

But in an Apr. 29, 2013 article that was posted on The Electronic Intifada website, three non-Israeli Jews who launched the website Renounce Birthright called for an end to Steinhardt’s Birthright Israel program, because it is “based on the belief that Jews have a right to settle in modern-day Israel, to the exclusion of the indigenous Palestinians” and “operates under the premise that all Jewish people have an exclusive `right’ to Palestinian land;” while “a Palestinian refugee population of nearly 7 million people is to this day excluded from returning to their lands by Israeli state discrimination.”

As a late September 2014 press release of the Loyola University Chicago Students for Justice in Palestine [SJP] chapter—that was issued after 15 Palestinian students lined up on Sept. 9, 2014 at a Birthright Israel table on Loyola University’s campus and asked if they, as Palestinians whose families were expelled from villages inside present-day Israel, could also register for a Birthright trip—also observed:

 “…Birthright Israel is an Israeli government-funded program that sponsors free trips to Israel exclusively for Jewish students…Any Jewish student worldwide can register for the program, while indigenous non-Jewish Palestinians are not only ineligible for the program, but often are denied the right to live in or even visit their homeland freely.”

(end of part 6)