Leaders of New Jersey Jewish federations are defending emergency allocations to Arab and Druze citizens of Israel who suffered or were threatened when Hizbullah rocket attacks crashed into the country’s North during the summer’s war in Lebanon.

Responding to allegations from a right-wing pro-Israel activist that Israeli Arabs are a “fifth column,” the fund-raisers say that their beneficiary agencies do not discriminate by race or religion, and that it is irresponsible to make generalizations about a population that numbers 1.2 million.

In his weekly e-mail to supporters, Howard Reiger, president and CEO of the United Jewish Communities, said the UJC Israel Emergency Campaign has allocated $92 million, out of $330 million so far raised by its members, North American federations, to assist Israelis. Of those allocations, “nearly 3 percent” were used to evacuate Israeli Arab and Druze children from the North, he said.

Max Kleinman, executive vice president of United Jewish Communities of MetroWest NJ, denied allegations by critics that the allocations to Israeli Arabs were considerably higher and inappropriate.

Those reports were “totally wrong, slanderous, and offensive,” said Kleinman.

Kleinman said the funds that were allocated were used to ensure that Arab and Druze children were “evacuated from the North to safe harbor” and were entirely appropriate.

“We have an imperative to help our neighbors — within reason,” he said. “We can’t use all of our resources, obviously. We have to allocate the bulk of our resources for Jewish needs, because nobody else is going to do it for Jews.

“On the other hand, it is the right thing to do. We are not an island unto ourselves. We need to work with other ethnic groups to build support for Israel and against terrorism. If you want to work with the moderate Muslim community you have to show sensitivity to what their needs are,” Kleinman added.

UJC MetroWest president Kenneth R. Heyman of Short Hills said, “Locally, I’m not aware of any specific complaints about the distribution of the IEC funds.”

Complaints about the allocations first surfaced in a mass e-mail sent by Helen Freedman, a past director of the right-wing Americans for a Safe Israel, a group that insists that Israel must retain “possession and control” of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Freedman’s e-mail claimed that as much as one-third of IEC allocations were going to Israeli Arabs. A subsequent article in the New York Jewish Week quoted leaders of the Orthodox Union, the National Council of Young Israel, and the Zionist Organization of America criticizing allocations to Israeli Arabs.

Heyman, who joined Kleinman in writing an op-ed column on the issue, told NJ Jewish News the questioning of the allocation “really was as a result of response on a national basis. Our concern was that local donors would read somewhere that all this money was being donated to non-Jewish Israelis. In reality, very little was going there. We don’t discriminate against them, and it would be wrong for us to do that.”

But Freedman, an AFSI board member, told NJJN she has “received many messages from people around the country” questioning the allocations. “I think this will shake UJC up,” she said. “They will have to be much more careful about how they allocate their funds.”

In her e-mail, dated Oct. 5, Freedman writes that IEC money was intended to “placate Arabs who are part of the plot to destroy Israel.”

“Most of the Israeli Arabs are a fifth column,” she told NJJN. “There are definitely Druze and Bedouins and other non-Jews who serve in the Israeli army. They are probably very loyal and should get help. But the vast majority of the Arabs in the Galilee are not loyal. They have Hizbullah flags flying from their city halls.”

Israel itself has pledged that aid for northern Israel would be distributed equitably among Jews and non-Jews — although some Israeli Arab observers have already complained that the non-Jewish residents of the North were being under-compensated for their losses.

For Morton Klein, executive director of the Zionist Organization of America, the issue is whether donors to the IEC were aware that some of the money would assist Israel’s Arab citizens.

“It is a case of truth in packaging, if I can call it that,” he said.

Klein said that until recently he had “been unaware that any monies had gone to Israeli Arabs. The federation people said, ‘Israel is a democracy, and it has to care for all of its citizens, so we’re proud of this.’ Yes, I agree,” he told NJJN. “It is Israel’s obligation as a government to provide for all of its citizens in a reasonably fair way, but it is not the obligation of any charitable donors like me to give money to any people except the ones I want it to go to. I want to give money to my Jewish brothers and sisters — not to Israeli Arabs.”

And yet, beginning with the launch of the IEC in August, UJC literature and reports about the campaign have made clear that the money would assist Jews, Arabs, and Druze. In a report dated Aug. 10 and posted that day to its Web site, UJC reports that “Jewish, Arab, and Druze children” were attending IEC-funded emergency summer camps.

A press release dated Sept. 18, announcing support for the campaign from the three major synagogue movements, including the Orthodox Union, states that the IEC was intended to meet “the short- and long-term humanitarian needs and economic support for all Israelis — Jewish, Arab, and Druze — victimized by the attacks.”

On Oct. 6, UJC added an update to its Web site’s information about the IEC, alluding directly to “e-mails criticizing” the allocations.

“Israel has never applied an ethnic or political litmus test to those in need, and the government today follows the same principle in its own rebuilding efforts,” the statement continued. “UJC/federations are enormously proud not only of the IEC’s broad goals, but of our far-reaching impact.”