International protest stalls Israeli government attempt to penalise not-for-profits

The bill would impose a 65 per cent tax on public advocacy groups that receive foreign government funding, typically left-wing civil society organisations.

International pressure has forced Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to stall a bill aimed at crippling Israeli left-wing organisations that challenge the legality and morality of army and settler practices in the occupied West Bank.

The bill would have imposed financial penalties on public advocacy by non-profit groups that receive donations from foreign governments, removing tax deductibility and hitting them with 65 per cent income tax.

An outcry from foreign governments including the US, France and Germany prompted the government to shelve the bill on Saturday night.

But leaders of these human rights groups believe the suspension of the plan to dry up most of their funding from Western governments marks only a tactical retreat. The cabinet’s aim, they say, remains to hinder them or eliminate them to remove an obstacle to the annexation project in the West Bank.

Ziv Stahl, head of Yesh Din, Israel’s leading watchdog group against settler violence, told The Jewish Independent that the decision is scant cause for relief. “We still have a lot to worry about. I’m not at all sure this has been taken off the agenda. It all depends on the international community,” she said.

She said if a similar bill were to pass, Yesh Din might be forced to close.

Supporters of weakening the NGOs say this is necessary to thwart foreign interference in Israeli democratic prerogatives. In remarks to The Jewish Independent, Amnon Lord, a right-wing columnist for Yisrael Hayom daily, charged that some of the NGOs are fomenting anti-Israel and antisemitic sentiment abroad and even providing justification for terrorist acts against Israel.

But Israel’s closest allies in Washington and European capitals view public advocacy organisations as essential for democracy. “We firmly believe that civil society should have the opportunity and space to operate and raise resources around the world,” state department spokesman Matthew Miller said last week.

The bill, proposed by Likud MK Ariel Kallner, punishes organisations that receive money from foreign governments, which are mostly left-wing, but not those that receive private foreign funding, more typically right-wing.

Kallner’s explanatory notes say foreign government money has been used “to flood the courts with legal processes with political characteristics.”

The foreign government money “attempts to change the policy of the government and local authorities. It constitutes harm to the basic characteristics of Israel as an independent state and harm to the sovereignty of its citizens.”

With the dramatic decline of left-wing political parties, the rights groups are perhaps the last bastion of left-wing humanism in Israel. They scrutinise every aspect of Israel’s authoritarian regime in the West Bank, ranging from land theft and illegal settlement activity to the open fire practices of the army to home demolitions.

“The main battle the human rights organisations are waging is against Jewish supremacism,” says Jessica Montell, director of East Jerusalem-based HaMoked, which is one of the most active groups in working the court system to combat abuses and infringements. “Settlers get preferential treatment, resources are used for settlers, not the Palestinians, Palestinians in Israel are discriminated against. The government is going after these organisations because they want to continue that [supremacist]agenda unhindered.”

Montell says the targeting of the human rights groups and the Netanyahu government’s controversial bid to weaken Israel’s judiciary are complementary and that both aim to enable “annexation and entrenching the occupation.”

“They don’t want criticism of their discriminatory, racist, annexationist policies,” she said.

Montell predicts that the government might now ratchet up its efforts to neuter NGOs in piecemeal fashion. She notes that legislation has already been tabled that would outlaw filming of soldiers in the West Bank and separately, criminalising the provision of information to the International Criminal Court.

HaMoked gets 65 per cent of its budget from foreign governments, including Germany and France, two of the European countries that along with the US strongly pressured Israel not to advance the bill.

B’tselem, Israel’s best known human rights organisation, is also mostly funded by foreign governments, including Denmark, the Netherlands and Switzerland. Its director, Hagai Elad, expects it and others to continue to come under pressure by the government, despite the backward step. There have been previous legislative efforts to harm funding, most of public opinion is against the rights groups, and Israel’s motives to undermine them remain the same, Elad says.

“Israel is used to impunity and it is concerned that with the professional work of human rights groups that impunity might erode. Then it could be held accountable for war crimes since it has no intention of stopping its behaviour.

“This is a strategic goal of the government. It can’t argue on the facts, so it tries to silence the messenger,” Elad said, adding that the group, which has three Palestinian field workers in the Gaza Strip and eight in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, will not be deterred or silenced.

Elad says that during the past year B’tselem’s actions included writing to the International Criminal Court prosecutor in the Hague that Palestinian communities in Masafer Yatta in the southern West Bank, are in danger of the war crime of forcible transfer, showing that settler violence is actually state violence, and “playing a leading role in framing the reality here as one of apartheid.” Israel vehemently rejects that it engages in apartheid, which is a crime against humanity under international law.

Lord, the right-wing columnist, terms groups that make the apartheid charge “engines of hatred”.

“A large part of the antisemitism in Europe and the US and also in England is because of the activities of extreme Left organisations that present Israel as an apartheid state or as severely oppressing Arabs and homosexuals or that it is a country headed to dictatorship. They give legitimisation to the most anti-Israel organisations in Western countries.”

Referring to Israel’s policy of withholding tax revenues it collects on behalf of the Palestinian Authority because the money could be used as stipends for families of those who attack Israeli targets, Lord said: “Sometimes we try to prevent money going from the PA to terrorists’ families. These groups don’t pull the trigger, but they create the justification for terrorism against Israel.”

Yehuda Shaul, a founder of the anti-occupation veterans group Breaking the Silence and now co-director of Ofek, the Israel Center for Public Affairs, warns: “The bottom line is that the Israeli government wants to cripple organisations that challenge its policy in the occupied territory. The only question is whether the international community will allow it.

“The broader picture is that this is part of a greater move to delegitimise civil society,” he adds. “The way the bill is written now the net is cast very wide. It will also include women, shared society and LGBTQ groups.”

Palestinian activist Issa Amr, who heads a group opposing the expansion of the settler presence in Hebron, is worried for the future of Breaking the Silence, with which he partners in human rights work in the biblical city.

 “They want to shut off any voice telling the international community what is going on and they don’t want the Israeli public to know what is going on,” he said.

“The Israeli right-wing managed to destroy the Israeli peace partner and now they are working to destroy the Israeli human rights partner,” Amr said. “For sure this will affect my work. Everything we do on the ground we do together with Breaking the Silence.”

Image: A B'tselem campaign to support residents of the East Jerusalem suburb of Batan al-Hawa, whom it says are facing expulsion and police abuse.

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