JNS
“We’ve always decided that we’re not going to be insular. We’re not going to be turtles in a shell,” Aviva Klompas told JNS.
Chassidic and Midrashic literature is full of stories of handsome rewards for the improbable charity of impoverished people. The Jewish state opted to adopt a global philanthropic posture even when it was very poor, and it did so before much wealthier countries and global bodies, according to a new book by Aviva Klompas, a former speechwriter for the Israeli mission to the United Nations.
“The history of how Israel starts in international development is an amazing, untold story, and that’s the whole reason I decided to write a book,” Klompas told JNS, of her new book Stand-Up Nation: Israeli Resilience in the Wake of Disaster.
“It’s a story of how Israel, as a developing nation when it is desperately poor, decides it’s going to found an international development agency, even before the United States, before Canada, before the United Nations has the U.N Development Programme,” she said.
In the early days of the modern Israeli state, Golda Meir, then the Israeli foreign minister, created MASHAV, Israel’s Agency for International Development Cooperation, in 1958.
“We’ve always decided that we’re not going to be insular. We’re not going to be turtles in a shell. That we’re going to turn outwards and engage in the world,” Klompas told JNS.
Israel dispatched specialists with broad expertise, from agriculture to infrastructure development, overseas, and MASHAV had a swift and major impact. In its first year, the organization welcomed 137 participants to courses in Israel and sent 80 Israeli experts abroad, according to Klompas. From 1958 until 1971, 4,341 experts served in the organization, with 2,763 deployed to Africa, she said.
Although some Israeli diplomats and Knesset members wanted to make Israeli aid overseas dependent on political support, Abba Eban, the Jewish state’s foreign minister from 1966 to 1974, was adamant that the act of giving had intrinsic value and should not be subject to conditions.
That principled approach bore fruit, and Israel soon had more embassies in Africa than any other country did, except the United States, according to Klompas. More recently, MASHAV has worked in 140 countries and trained hundreds of thousands of professionals worldwide, including from countries without diplomatic relations with the Jewish state, she added.
‘We’ll pass through this’
A Toronto native who lives in Boston, Klompas has visited Israel seven times since Oct. 7. She has devoted herself full-time to the nonprofit she co-founded in 2021, Boundless Israel, which focuses on education about Israel and combating Jew-hatred.
“Part of the work I do at Boundless has to do with messaging and public narrative,” she told JNS. “Boundless is not an advocacy organization. It’s a think-action tank. Under our work, we do opinion polling. So very much, we try to take a data-driven approach to messaging.”
She finished the book manuscript six weeks before Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror attack, which she said “changed everything dramatically for everybody.”
Klompas opted to reinterview the people with whom she’d spoken for the book and asked them to write postscripts for their chapters on humanitarian relief and international development. Many agreed to do so, she told JNS.
Shoshan Haran, founder of the Israeli nonprofit Fair Planet, probably had the “greatest impact,” according to Klompas, who said that the nonprofit “does remarkable work getting the world’s best seeds into the hands of the world’s poorest farmers,” including in Africa.
Hamas terrorists kidnapped Haran and members of her family from Kibbutz Be’eri on Oct. 7. Haran, her daughter and her grandchildren were released in November, after 50 days in captivity, but her son-in-law Tal Shoham remains a hostage in Gaza.
“As somebody that really appreciates history, I find it helpful to look backwards in order to give me comfort. I look at the context in which Israel started out,” Klompas told JNS. “It’s not so dissimilar from today. It’s fighting wars of survival against surrounding Arab nations. It’s misunderstood and isolated in the international community. It’s facing economic threats. It’s facing social threats.”
“The Jewish people—we have every right to participate and contribute to our communities, our societies and our countries, and I’m not accepting anything less than that,” she added. “We are more in control of what happens, and what our destiny, what our fate is than we may believe in this moment.”
“Somebody else is not writing our story,” she said. “Ultimately, we’re the authors of our story.”
From 2013 to 2015, Klompas helped Ron Prosor, then the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, write Israel’s story, as director of speechwriting for the Israeli mission. After her tenure in Turtle Bay, in Manhattan, Klompas founded and led Project Inspire, which educates young Americans about Israel’s social, environmental and economic development in Uganda, Kenya, Guatemala, India, Nepal and other low-income nations.
The young Americans saw “that the relationship that we have in North America with Israel is not the same relationship that countries in Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia have with Israel,” she said. “It is dramatically different and very often, that’s as a result of this long-standing record in international development.”
She also experienced new and surprising things in her travels. On a remote island on Lake Victoria in Uganda, Klompas visited an orphanage for children with HIV, where a group of teens sang “Hatikvah,” the Israeli national anthem, to her and the delegation. In a market in Kenya, she saw bracelets for sale with Kenyan and Israeli flags.
“Why can I walk into some remote school—truly in the middle of nowhere—and see an Israeli flag hanging? Because there is a different relationship that they have with Israel,” she said. “The world is so much bigger and broader than it feels right now. It feels very enclosed and very, very dark, and my sense is that we’ll pass through this, and we’ll get to this bigger place.”
New impact
In recent years, Klompas has noted Israeli humanitarian efforts—some of it official—make a large difference.
Israel swiftly dispatched a medical team to aid on the Turkey-Syria border region in early 2023—in harsh winter conditions and amid aftershocks—after an earthquake claimed more than 15,000 lives and injured tens of thousands. Seven years earlier, the Jewish state and others helped treat some 8,000 Syrians and 1,400 Syrian children who had chronic diseases in field clinics.
Israeli Flying Aid has sent aid during the genocide in Darfur, as it has done during quakes in Indonesia and a cyclone in Burma. IsraAID has conducted operations in 64 countries, including rescuing the Afghan female cycling and robotics teams and some of their family members from the Taliban and transporting them secretly to Tajikistan and then the United Arab Emirates, Klompas said.
Those rescued had no idea until after they had escaped that Israelis were responsible for their freedom. Yotam Polizer, the IsraAID CEO, still “gets a whole bunch of Shabbat Shalom messages from the Afghanis who are now living in other places,” she noted.
“Why are these individuals choosing to do work that’s very often dangerous?” she told JNS, noting that in some places, Israeli aid workers would be arrested at best, if not executed.
“Why are they choosing to do it?” she said. “The thesis of my book is that it’s because of their idealism, grounded in deep Jewish values, a pragmatism that says, ‘We can help others do well.’ We can help others lift up their communities, their families, their societies, their countries by sharing the technologies, the innovations and the knowledge that we have.”
“There’s the adventurism—that spirit that inclines people to go and travel to places that are off the beaten path,” she added. Then there’s what she calls the “chutzpah-ism,” or the “sheer audacity of believing that you can make a difference.”
