NAZARETH // The Israeli government and its right-wing supporters
have been waging a “McCarthyite” campaign against human-rights groups by blaming
them for the barrage of international criticism that followed Israel’s attack on
Gaza a year ago, critics say.
In a sign of the growing backlash against the human-rights
community, the cabinet backed a bill last week that, if passed, will jail senior
officials from the country’s peace-related organisations should they fail to
meet tough new registration conditions.
The measure is a response to claims by right-wing lobbyists that
Israel’s human-rights advocates supplied much of the damaging evidence of war
crimes cited by Judge Richard Goldstone in his UN-commissioned report into
Israel’s Operation Cast Lead.
Human-rights groups funded by foreign donors, such as the
European Union, would be required to register as political bodies and meet other
demands for “transparency”.
Popular support for the clampdown was revealed in a poll
published last week showing that 57 per cent of Israeli Jews believed
“national-security” issues should trump human rights.
In a related move, right-wing groups have launched a campaign of
vilification against Naomi Chazan, the Israeli head of an American Jewish donor
body called the New Israel Fund (NIF) that channels money to Israeli social
justice groups. The NIF is accused of funding the Israeli organisations Mr
Goldstone consulted for his report.
Billboard posters around Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and a newspaper
advertising campaign, show a caricature of Ms Chazan with a horn growing from
her forehead under the title “Naomi-Goldstone-Chazan”.
“We are seeing the evaporation of the last freedoms of speech and
organisation in Israel,” said Amal Jamal, head of politics at Tel Aviv
University and the director of Ilam, a media-rights organisation that would be
targeted by the new legislation. The Israeli political system, he added, was
being transformed into a “totalitarian democracy”.
Leading the charge against human-rights groups – most of which
are officially described as “non-governmental organisations” – has been a
self-styled “watchdog group” known as NGO Monitor. Its activities have won
support from the government following the international censure faced by Israel
for its attack on Gaza.
The bill, approved by a ministerial committee last week, is the
product of a conference staged in the parliament in December by Gerald
Steinberg, NGO Monitor’s director, and a settler-backed organisation known as
the Institute of Zionist Strategies.
A professor at Bar Ilan University, Prof Steinberg presented a
report to MPs and ministers that referred to peace groups as “Trojan horses” and
argued for imposing constraints on funding from European governments and the NIF.
In a statement at the time, Prof Steinberg said: “For over a
decade European governments have been manipulating Israeli politics and
promoting demonisation by funding a narrow group of favored non-governmental
organisations.”
He has reserved special criticism for advocacy groups for the
country’s Arab minority and for Jewish groups opposing the occupation, accusing
both of promoting an image of Israel as an “apartheid” state that carries out
“war crimes” and “ethnic cleansing”.
According to his report, 16 Israeli peace NGOs received US$8
million (Dh29m) in European funding in the previous three years.
Pressure has been building in the government for action. This
month Yuli Edelstein, the diaspora affairs minister and a member of prime
minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, told reporters the cabinet had been
“concerned for a time with a number of groups under the guise of NGOs that are
funded by foreign agents”.
One of the MPs who participated in December’s conference, Zeev
Elkin, also of Likud, initiated the legislation.
Although the bill will need to pass a vote of the parliament,
backing from the government has dramatically increased its chances of success.
According to the legislation, human-rights groups will have to
satisfy a long list of new conditions. They include: registering as political
bodies; submitting ID numbers and addresses for all activists; providing
detailed accounts of all donations from overseas and the purposes to which they
will be put; and declaring the support of foreign countries every time an
activist makes a speech or the organisation stages an event.
Senior officials in NGOs that fail to meet the requirements face
up to a year in jail.
Hagai Elad, head of the Association of
Civil Rights in Israel, the country’s largest human-rights law centre, said
there was “a very hostile political climate” and that freedoms were being
attacked “one step at a time”.
“These are classic McCarthy techniques, portraying our
organisations as enemies of the state and suggesting that we are aiding Hamas
and terror groups.”
He added that NGOs were heavily regulated under Israeli law.
“Which leaves me with a troubling question: given that we are already
transparent, what is the real motivation behind this legislation?”
Caught in the middle of the campaign against the NGOs has been Ms
Chazan, a former dovish MP.
Maariv, a populist newspaper, published a
report last month by a right-wing group called Im Tirtzu that blamed Ms Chazan
and the NIF for funding human-rights groups responsible for 90 per cent of the
criticisms of Israel contained in the Goldstone Report that were from
non-official sources.
A counter-report last week suggested that in reality only about 4
per cent of the citations were from NIF-funded groups, and many were unrelated
to the Gaza operation.
But the attack on Ms Chazan has rapidly gained traction, with
commentators denouncing her in the media and the derogatory billboard posters
springing up across the country.
The campaign against the NIF was backed this month by a petition
signed by a long list of former generals, including Giora Eiland, the previous
head of the National Security Council, and Doron Almog, a recent chief of the
army’s southern command.
Ms Chazan has also been sacked by the right-wing Jerusalem Post
newspaper after 14 years serving as one of its few liberal columnists, while an
article accusing Ms Chazan of “serving the agenda of Iran and Hamas” was
distributed to foreign journalists by the Government Press Office.
Ms Chazan said: “They’re using me to attack, in the most blatant
way, the basic principles of democracy.”
NIF has pointed out that Im Tirtzu’s
funders include Christians United for Israel, a group led by pastor John Hagee,
who made the headlines in the US presidential race in 2008 when in a speech
supporting contender John McCain he said “Hitler was fulfilling God’s will”.
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