Many Israelis are concerned that the civil war raging in neighboring Syria will spill over into the Golan Heights. Some Israelis, however, are looking at the crisis from an entirely different angle.
Jerusalem native Moti Kahana heads a group of Israeli businessmen and American Jews who travel back and forth to Syrian refugee camps to provide humanitarian aid to victims of the bloody conflict.
“We are Jews and Israelis and we can’t sit still as women and children are being butchered nearby,” said Kahana, who lives in New Jersey but has family in Israel.
Kahana took part last week in the Washington Institute for Near East Policy’s annual conference, where he raised the flag of the Free Syrian Army in support of an opposition activist who was speaking.
“While I’m here to assist the Free Syria movement, my brother Steve is on reserve service at the Golan Heights, treating injured Syrians,” Kahana said.
“We said that the Holocaust will not happen again and I do not wish to compare, but people are dying next to us and we cannot sit still,” he added.
Since the group’s activity started two years ago, Kahana invested more than $100,000 of his personal funds, he said, and helped raise more than $500,000 from Jews in the United States. Some of the money is funneled to liberal organizations in Syria, he said.
Kahana says the organization started as a charity operated by him and a number of friends, but they could not foresee how long the conflict would run. “When we ran out of money we started raising funds from U.S. synagogues,” he said.
The group’s latest initiative is offering interest-free loans to women who wish to start their own businesses. The gender bias is no accident, he said, explaining that Syria’s “men are either engaged in the warfare or dead, and 70 percent of the refugees are women. Sadly, women began to engage in prostitution in order to survive.”
He said Israelis’ reactions to the initiative tend to be favorable, and the group enjoys some influential patrons, including a member of Knesset.
“These days, Syria looks worse than Gaza,” Kahana said. “Assad is destroying the Syrian people, but the people there are human beings like everyone else, who want to watch football and eat shwarma.”