24 February 2010
By Jonathan Cook
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 has 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 $8 million 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”.
Jonathan Cook is a
writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His
latest books are “Israel and the Clash of
Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the
Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing
Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed
Books). His website is
www.jkcook.net.
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