Great news. Massachusetts Rep. Jim McGovern, a 25 year House veteran and co chair of the Human Rights Commission, issued a stiff letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken saying it is “urgent” matter for him to get past his “initial leeriness” and “firmly and unambiguously denounce” Israel’s hateful decree that six leading Palestinian human rights groups are “terrorist” organizations.

The NSO developments and the terrorist designations were two separate stories involving Israel, or so most people thought. However, just days ago we found out that they are very much connected.

I work for one of the leading Palestinian human rights organizations, Al-Haq, which was recently declared a “terrorist organization” by the Israeli regime along with five prominent civil society organizations in Palestine. Friends and acquaintances keep asking me how it feels to be a member of a “terrorist organization”. I always respond by saying: it seems like we’re doing something right.

The Israeli government is lobbying the Biden administration to get sanctions on the NSO Group removed. The push comes amid calls for a deeper investigation into how the company’s hacking technology ended up on the phones of Palestinian activists.

Six Palestinian human rights activists were targeted by spyware from the Israeli surveillance company NSO Group, a new report revealed on Monday, in the first reported instance of Palestinian activists being targeted by the surveillance company. The six activists are all members of the six Palestinian civil society organizations recently branded “terrorist organizations” by Israel’s Defense Minister Benny Gantz.

“The one thing that is common among these six organizations that have just been declared to be terrorist is that they have all been active, especially Al-Haq, in documenting and presenting dossiers to the International Criminal Court in the Hague regarding Israel’s violations of human rights,” and particularly of Israel’s onslaught on Gaza in 2014, led by Gantz, that killed more than 2200 Palestinians, the Palestinian-American lawyer Jonathan Kuttab, who co-founded Al-Haq said yesterday.

Israel’s declaration of six leading Palestinian human rights and civil society groups as “terrorist” organizations continues to have reverberations in Washington. Rep. Betty McCollum has introduced a resolution calling on the U.S. House of Representatives to condemn Israel’s announcement, and specifically called for the Biden administration to “publicly condemn this authoritarian and antidemocratic act of repression by the Government of Israel against prominent Palestinian civil society organizations.”

Ten globally recognized Christian organizations in Palestine “condemn and denounce in the strongest possible terms” Israel’s decision to designate six Palestinian groups, including leading human rights groups, as “terrorist organizations.”

Israel will not end its occupation and apartheid regime of its own free will. We call on those appalled by Israel’s apartheid and by its attempt to crush human rights organizations, to join us in supporting the organizations under attack and to support Palestinian civil society’s call for BDS.

For much of this year, Israel’s defenders have waged a successful battle to keep the word “apartheid” from entering the mainstream discourse. Israel just set that process back by smearing Palestinian human rights groups as terrorist organizations.