Old battles between Israel’s right and left are playing out inside of the government and on the streets of Tel Aviv, amid a Knesset discussion on sanctioning left-wing groups. The NGO transparency bill proposed last November by right-wing minister of Justice Ayelet Shaked would require organizations that receive funds from foreign donors to disclose the sources on materials presented to the government.
In practice the bill exclusively affects left-wing and human rights groups. Right-wing groups too are funded by foreign entities, but they typically receive financial backing from private individuals. There is no reporting requirement on these endowments.
“The logic behind this law as we see it, or the impact won’t be to raise transparency into our funding because our funding is totally transparent,” said Yuli Novak, the director of Breaking the Silence, an organization that collects the testimonies of former soldiers who served in the occupied Palestinian territories. “It’s about delegitimizing our work, because the transparency is already there.”
In December, Breaking the Silence emerged as the focus of the left-right Israeli fight. The group was banned from speaking in schools—“which is a total spin because we weren’t even working there,” said Novak—and denounced by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the Knesset floor. He said Novak’s group “slanders soldiers worldwide and works to tie the hands of the state of Israel when it defends itself, which defames the state of Israel.”
Then came the revelation that two undercover right-wing activists had infiltrated Breaking the Silence, secretly recording meetings and social gatherings with the group’s leaders. Novak was astonished. The rift between the right and left seemed to cross a tipping point.
“People I thought were my friends actually recorded me in private houses, in private meetings, so this is a new method that we didn’t know went this far,” she said.
In January the pro-settler group Ad Kan announced it had planted these activists inside of the left-wing groups in order to “expose” them as acting against the state’s interest. So far two leftwing Israelis and one Palestinian have been arrested in the fall out. Another right-wing group, Im Tirtzu, called left-wing artists “foreign agents” in a similar video release, then defended its reel with a positive comparison to Joseph McCarthy–” you can’t help but be in his favor,” tweeted Im Tirtzu’s founder Avishai Ivri.
“It’s not only about this law, it’s about the campaign that has taken place over the past two months against Breaking the Silence and other human rights organizations,” said Novak, “It makes it harder for us to do our work, to interview soldiers and show the public what is really happening in the territories.”
Many of the organizations affected by the bill—The New Israel Fund, Peace Now, and Breaking the Silence—have U.S. partners, and all of these organizations are granted monies from foreign governments, predominately allies of Israel in Europe and North America. In its original reading the legislation called for representatives from these groups to wear special badges when inside of Knesset, which caused a political storm due to the the association with Nazi ordered star-badges on Jews in Europe.
The badges provision, the most controversial element of the bill, was dropped in committee; but the NGO transparency bill is moving along in Knesset. It is expected to face the first of three votes next week.
A rival transparency bill was introduced by the opposition Zionist Camp’s Tzipi Livni at the beginning of February. It would require reporting for both left and right groups by requiring private disclosures, too. The religious newspaper Hamodia reported that the bill failed by a close vote, even though 90-percent of NGO funding comes from private sources.
“The goal of delegitimization is to eventually make it more and more difficult for us to function. So I have no doubt if this [bill] doesn’t work that some people will try to think of something else,” said Rabbi Arik Ascherman, head of Rabbis for Human Rights, one of the many left-wing organizations affected by the transparency bill.
“It’s a process that started with the first war in Gaza [2008],” Ascherman said. “Up until then if people didn’t agree with us, they still had respect for us.”
Ascherman spoke Friday as he packed up his informational booth at a Tel Aviv event intended to show the left is still active in spite of the legislation. The event was titled, “Blacklisted: a show with a glimmer of hope.” Rabbis for Human Rights and 40 other human rights groups held a music festival inside of the upscale port shopping district on the Mediterranean Sea. Around 1,000 turned up.
“We are proud Israelis and we are proud of what we do, and I do hope that sends a message to our fellow Israelis,” Ascherman said, “The bottom line is only peace organizations and human rights organizations are getting money from foreign governments. Everybody gets money from individual donors from foundation, so it’s a cheap shot to only attack our sources of funding.”
Yet his message fell flat on Israelis with opposing views. Outside the venue’s security checkpoint, a family of right-wing Israelis protested. They said the left-wing groups hurt Israel’s image abroad and “support terrorism” domestically.
Ah, the good old “Israeli left”!
They also serve who stand and equivocate.
Now that is very interesting, the decision about foreign NGOs!
When Russia decided to throw certain NGOs out the country and the rest must show who is financing them, we had a huge uproar in the west.
So Bibi watch out, the mouse will roar again!
Does that mean, that “left-wing and human rights groups” wouldn’t have problems, if they achieved their donations via a private middle-man???
“Right-wing groups too are funded by foreign entities, but they typically receive financial backing from private individuals – there is no reporting requirement on these endowments”.
I’ve commented on this issue before. The legality of this double standard is dubious, it looks to me as a scheme designed to favor not only the right-wing groups, but their ‘private donors’, as well.
Meaning: an Adelson or a Saban can donate a few millions to Israeli settlers to finance illegal settlement construction or purchase Palestinian homes from absentee owners (see the recent Hebron imbroglio), and those millions are not subject to disclosure. Meanwhile, the donors are writing them off as ‘charity’ on their tax returns, saving a bundle. Which should really be none of my business, except for the fact that the US Treasury is losing a few millions in taxes, and that DOES affect me, the dumb taxpayer.
I don’t begrudge tax-exempt money going to legitimate charities, but I sure resent it when it’s used to finance an illegal colonial enterprise and the dispossession of an indigenous people. Furthermore, it could be argued that, since (through a legal loophole) it’s basically ‘stolen’ from our national coffers, for all intents and purposes it does represent foreign government’s funds.
Israel is silly and angry and childishly lashing out against it’s own people because Jewish people like me in America know they are a useless confused unlikeable unfriendly friendless nuclear armed Apartheid state and a drag on the American taxpayer. They are in a post religious phase where their only religion is militarism. No Grateful Dead concerts happening there in Tel Aviv, they are not Kosher, and they invented the Kosher laws.
They have delegitimized themselves. Like cancer, their moral sickness is eating them from within. They attack themselves like an auto-immune disorder, first slowly going after specific cells, then dying a slow quiet death. I though it was the Palestinians that were the problem? Now its the leftists. It’s kind of like Pink Floyds record album The Wall, leftists , Jews, Homos, people who smoke, druggies, anyone differing in any way from the required norm, get up against the wall……………….. To an American Jew it looks like the insanity has reached a new crescendo, a civil war maybe is coming with the pro apartheid crew versus everyone else on earth, jew or non jew. Only pro apartheid Jews are good enough, so everyone else must leave Israel along with the Palestinians and Africans and Christians . Is that their idea of family fun? Sounds lke their plan.
So if I moved to Israel to study Judaism or Medicine Which I never ever would for any reason at all, would they tell me how to think? Sounds pretty strange to me. Like an Israeli re- education camp for foreign jews that believe in strange things like human rights which Israel gave up on a long time ago. Good luck with that. Israel sounds like the way Cambodia was during their civil war, with the right wing Israelis acting like the Khmer Rouge, demanding allegiance to a vegetable law.
What would the victms of the Holocaust say, sounds like the kind of oppression they faced, from the Nazis, prior to the ovens. . Israelis act like Nazis cause they were killed and tortured and think they have some kind of god given right to be totally obnoxious,but it is eroding. To those who think about your holocaust all day long I say go on home your mama’s calling you. We wanted the world to help us during the Holocaust, why wouldn’t Jews with a conscience want whatever international body that could to intervene to stop the abuse of the Palestinian people. Its like 1234, not very complicated until you make it. Contributions? Keep mumbling, you sound like and are close to being a fascist if you have not crossed the lie, go regulate someone elses brain, mine can’t be occupied with Zionist garbage. My Mother would not approve of me doing that. You are like the teacher in The Wall, and when he gets home at night his fat psychopathic wife beats him to the very heart of his soul. Check it all out, its in the movie. Mind control is fine but never works for long, too much LSD floating around.