The bill is not yet law and may not become law. But it is nothing new. This proposed legislation comes in the wake of various attempts in the Knesset in recent years to undermine the NGO community. The current justice minister has a bill drafted that would result in the staff of NGOs that receive significant funds from foreign state entities being required to wear a tag when in the Knesset, identifying them as lobbyists of foreign entities. That prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu received 90% of his entire re-election campaign funding from the US is deemed irrelevant, as is the $200m donated to settler organisations from US organisations over the past five years. These pieces of legislation are aimed specifically at human rights organisations that shine a spotlight on the policy of occupation.
This discourse is not confined to parliamentary legislation or NGOs. Two weeks ago, Reuven Rivlin, the president of Israel, participated in a Ha’aretz-New Israel conference in New York. Ha’aretz is an Israeli paper, known to be on the left of the political spectrum, and the New Israel Fund is a diaspora-based organisation that funds many Israeli human rights organisations. Since his participation, Rivlin has been labelled a traitor. So bad is the incitement against him that the opposition leader, Yitzhak Herzog, felt the need to stand up in the Knesset and implore Netanyahu to speak out against it. Activists took to the streets outside Rivlin’s residence to support him against incitement.
Last week, the nationalist group Im Tirtzu released a short film aimed at winning support for the “plant” bill. It named and “shamed” four Israeli human rights activists as “plants”. So shocking was the film that Yuval Diskin, former head of Israel’s internal security service, spoke out against it. But Im Tirtzu is not the only organisation adopting measures of this kind.
Yoav Kisch, the parliamentarian behind the latest bill, distanced himself from the Im Tirtzu film. Netanyahu raised his objections to it. But, in the same breath, Kisch says he will pursue the bill with full force, and Netanyahu’s own party tries to outlaw the human rights community. The signals it sends to those baying for the president’s blood, and to the extremists inciting violence against NGO staffers, is not that shutting down debate is wholly unacceptable in a country that takes pride in its democratic character, but that if as elected leaders they can’t support the tactics, they certainly support the endgame...
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