The Kohelet Policy Forum (KPF) ( he, פורום קהלת) is an Israeli nonprofit
think tank
A think tank, or policy institute, is a research institute that performs research and advocacy concerning topics such as social policy, political strategy, economics, military, technology, and culture. Most think tanks are non-governmenta ...
. Founded in January 2012 by Professor
Moshe Koppel
Moshe Koppel is an American-Israeli computer scientist, Talmud scholar and political activist.
Koppel was born and raised in New York, where he received a traditional Jewish education. He studied at Yeshivat Har Etzion, received a B.A. from Yes ...
, who now serves as the Forum’s chairman, together with several Israeli academics such as
Avraham Diskin,
Avi Bell
Abraham (Avi) Bell is an Israeli Professor of Law at the University of San Diego School of Law and at Bar-Ilan University's Faculty of Law.
Bell received his B.A. and J.D. from the University of Chicago, and his S.J.D. from Harvard. He interned ...
,
Emmanuel Navon and
Yitzhak Klein, public figures, intellectuals and activists.
Mission
The KPF website states that the organization has three main goals: 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 pursuit of the first aim, the forum has promoted the
Basic Law proposal: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People. In addition it encourages democratic accountability and judicial responsibility, while discouraging unjust judicial activism and the undue legalization of the public realm. However, The KPF does not come out against the supreme court as an institution and has filed a friend of the court briefs in a number of appeals.
A dedicated unit within KPF, the Kohelet Economic Forum, is particularly focused on the pursuit of the third goal: broadening individual liberty and free-market principles. KEF, headed by former senior Treasury official Michael Sarel, has a staff of economists and has published dozens of detailed policy papers on economic policies in Israel.
Criticism
In July 2021,
Zehava Galon
Zehava Gal-On ( he, זֶהָבָה גַּלְאוֹן; born 4 January 1956) is an Israeli politician, serving as a member of the Knesset from 1999 to 2017. She was the chairwoman of the Meretz political party from 2012 to 2018 and again since ...
wrote in
Haaretz that the Kohelet Policy Forum “with foreign funding, is trying to turn Israel into a
fundamentalist
Fundamentalism is a tendency among certain groups and individuals that is characterized by the application of a strict literal interpretation to scriptures, dogmas, or ideologies, along with a strong belief in the importance of distinguishi ...
state under the guise of
liberalism
Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality and equality before the law."political rationalism, hostility to autocracy, cultural distaste for c ...
”.
Resources
KPF is a non-governmental organization which relies only on private donations and does not accept public funds from any government, domestic or foreign. The largest donations have been made anonymously, and amount to several million dollars sent through an American nonprofit organization called American Friends of Kohelet Policy Forum. An investigative article published at "
Haaretz" presented conjectures regarding the identity of some major donors, but neither KPF nor the individuals named in the article confirmed these conjectures. The Forum’s legislative research, policy papers, and other research based products
Jerusalem Post, Dr. Aviad Bakshi, the director of legal affairs at the Kohelet Policy Forum who argues that Arabic is not an official language in practice
/ref> are offered to Israeli decision makers for free.
References
External links
*
Think tanks based in Israel
Organizations based in Jerusalem
Non-profit organizations based in Israel
{{Israel-org-stub