Diaspora Jews Seeking More Influence in Israel : Dispute: Major donors want a shake-up of the Jewish Agency, which brings in 100,000 immigrants a year.

Israel is in the midst of a tough reworking of its relationship with the Jews worldwide who raise hundreds of millions of dollars for it each year but want a bigger voice here on how the money is spent.

At issue is who runs the Jewish Agency, the semi-governmental organization that now brings about 100,000 immigrants to Israel each year and in the process helps promote and guide the country’s development. But equally at stake is the long-term role of the Jewish Diaspora in decision-making here.

While each side is trying to avoid an open confrontation at this week’s session of the Jewish Agency’s assembly here, the behind-the-scenes battle has been bruising, because both fundamental issues and powerful positions are at stake, participants say.

American Jews, who raise the bulk of the $650 million that the Jewish Agency spends in its immigration and national development efforts, want to replace political appointees and patronage with professional managers in the agency. Together with other major donors from the Jewish Diaspora, they also want greater involvement in formulation of the agency’s programs and, thus, a larger role in planning Israel’s future.

“The old days of checkbook Zionism are gone; we expect to be involved deeply in the development of policies,” Mendel Kaplan, chairman of the agency’s board of governors, said in an interview in advance of the agency’s assembly meeting, which opened Monday.

“What is replacing the old way (of checkbook Zionism) is a very deep participation in Israeli society. We do not feel our responsibility to Israel ends with paying the bills. . . . But this (deeper involvement) does not sit well with some here because it means the end of ‘business as usual,’ of ‘jobs for the boys’ and of the highly partisan way that some decisions are taken,” Kaplan said.

Under a proposal that grew out of the board of governors’ dissatisfaction, agency departments would no longer be headed by politicians nominated by Israeli parties, a holdover from the era before Israel achieved independence and when the Jewish Agency functioned almost as a government here.

This would remove Uri Gordon, a veteran politician from the ruling Labor Party, as the head of the agency’s important immigration department, which he has headed for four years, and abolish a second post, the head of the youth immigration department, that was to go to another politician.

But Gordon, who has the pay and benefits of an Israeli government minister, including a chauffeur-driven car, waged an angry campaign against the move, denouncing “millionaires who have no intention of ever moving to Israel” but nevertheless want to set the country’s immigration policies.

Abolishing political appointments, Gordon wrote in a bitter attack on Kaplan and the “donor elite” in the newspaper Davar, would “turn the Jewish Agency into a group of clerks of Baron Kaplan.”

But the Diaspora’s proposals would require changes in the Jewish Agency’s constitution, supported in turn by two-thirds of the 398 members of the organization’s assembly, and the U.S. United Jewish Appeal and other fund-raising groups in the Diaspora have only half the assembly seats.

“We served notice that the current situation cannot continue, but we did not have the votes to change it,” said a leading American fund-raiser, who asked not to be quoted by name. “We also did not want to break up the Jewish Agency’s assembly, which occurs only once every four years, with such a divisive debate. We sought compromise.”

An agreement, announced Sunday night before the assembly’s opening, between Kaplan and Simcha Dinitz, the agency’s executive chairman, through the mediation of Max M. Fisher, the 85-year-old patriarch of the American Jewish community and the architect of the present Israeli-Diaspora alignment, provides for three months of negotiations; if the matter is settled then, there would be no further discussion over the next four years.

“We are moving into a showdown, and I think we will have the upper hand,” another prominent American said. “Avoidance of further confrontation depends on their (Israeli) satisfaction of our requirements. And we retain the option of renegotiating the basis on which we raise funds for them. This is really hardball, all the way.”

Yet the issue is one of such great sensitivity that few of those involved, including Dinitz and Gordon, would discuss it in on-the-record interviews with The Times; American, Canadian and European fund-raisers were sharp in their criticism but asked not to be quoted by name to avoid worsening the situation.

Gordon, in an interview this month with the Jerusalem Post, Israel’s right-wing, English-language newspaper, warned his compatriots against “entrusting their interests and futures to outsiders whose sole qualification for the power they demand for themselves is the size of their bank account.”

“There is something patently immoral about people who will not suffer the consequences of making fateful decisions for us,” Gordon said of the Diaspora Jews, warning that the proposed measures would “end, once and for all, the historical partnership between Zionists and Jewish community leaders worldwide.”

He described the Diaspora Jewish leaders as “not grass-roots community leaders (or) elected community representatives. Rather we are dealing with the wealthier philanthropists and those who control funds raised by others,” Gordon told the Post. “They essentially comprise a self-perpetuating, self-appointed oligarchy, who owe their position primarily, if not exclusively, to their checkbooks.”

Kaplan, a prominent South African industrialist, is furious with the Gordon attacks, as are most of the Diaspora leaders involved in raising funds for the Jewish Agency, according to their associates here. But Kaplan sought in an interview with The Times and discussions with other Diaspora leaders to hold the debate to “issues of principle.”

“We believe that two political appointees, the executive chairman and the treasurer, are sufficient and that the others simply cost the agency $4 million or so a year with no added benefit whatsoever,” Kaplan said.

Israel, moreover, has entered into “a bargain” with world Jewry, Kaplan continued, in which each side represents the other to different audiences and, consequently, has obligations to the other. “The Jews of the world also have a partnership in the Jewish Agency, a partnership in nation-building,” Kaplan said. “We bring not only money but all our skills--academic, professional, managerial, intellectual, entrepreneurial--and we expect to play a full role.”

Gordon rejected this concept entirely. “It might be a very tragicomic experiment indeed to allow millionaires who have not the slightest intention of ever coming on aliya (immigration to Israel) themselves to oversee the aliya of other Jews,” he told the Jerusalem Post. “It would be very interesting indeed to see how they fare--these millionaires, who do not speak a word of Hebrew, who spend only a few days a year here and who do not know the nitty-gritty of life in Israel.

“Unless, of course, along the way they decide that they can do it better and that the government itself has to be replaced,” Gordon added.

Other Israelis, less involved and less vitriolic, suggested that Israel as “a success story in its own right” is less and less dependent on fund raising by the Diaspora and that the American Jewish community consequently is now trying to secure a long-term role in Israeli policy-making.

“Forget Gordon and look at the issues, and you see a real power struggle,” a senior Israeli official said. “The Jewish Agency is a national institution, and its programs and policies shape the face and future of Israel. Should we allow non-Israelis--and American Jews or South African Jews or French Jews are not Israelis--to make key decisions? To my mind, the answer is no.”