Although the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute was established by the Israeli government, which required the enactment of a special law, and received land in the heart of the capital estimated and hundreds of millions of shekels, it has since become affiliated with the Left.
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"Van Leer started out as a Zionist institution," Uri Cohen, sociologist and historian at Tel Aviv University, said. "Today, it affiliated with the far left, and has aggressive post-Zionist activity that lays the groundwork for endless attacks on the Israeli public, its roots, and culture."
Professor Gabriel Motzkin, who became director of the Van Leer institute in 2007, said that already then the intuition was left-wing, which he "tried to balance, but couldn't find a single right-wing or centrist researcher."
The challenge of finding such a figure among the people working for the institution persists. An Israel Hayom analysis revealed that of Van Leer's 27 research fellows, 19 are ardent leftists, most of whom are active in far left movements. This means that 70% of the institute's researchers hold left-wing views; 30% were unsure, and not a single person said to be a rightist.
The institute's budget, which stands at 24 million shekels yearly,
The institute receives most of its budget, which stands at 24 million shekels yearly, from a private Dutch foundation. Another NIS 100,000 comes from the Israeli government and NIS 200,000 from the German government.
Van Leer Jerusalem Institute said in a statement, we are "committed to a plurality of opinions and voices. The attempt to present the institute as promoting a one-dimensional political agenda distorts reality. Anyone familiar with the institute's activities knows that its goal is to challenge academic thinking and public discourse, and not to embrace the familiar contrasts, for example, between nationality and cosmopolitanism.
"The political outlooks of the institute's researchers are their personal business, and the attempt to divide is exactly what are working against," it said.
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