The Adalah Scam: An anti-Israel list that is racist, as well as an exercise in cultural and political appropriation - by David Collier

...Why are European charities and government agencies funding an NGO that is clearly out to make everything worse for everybody? And why is anyone listening to them? Those are the questions that really needs to be answered.

David Collier..
Across the Great Divide..
04 July '18..

Adalah is a name you may not recognise. They are an Israeli NGO and are responsible for one of the most important ‘scams’ of the delegitimisation campaign against Israel.

Adalah created a database of laws that they claim ‘discriminate’ against the Arab citizens of Israel. There are currently sixty-six laws listed.

Whenever you hear the claim that Israel is a ‘racist state’ or that it is an ‘Apartheid state’, it is the Adalah database that underpins the claim.

So I went through each of the sixty-six ‘discriminatory laws’ and have just published a report on my findings. This is what I discovered:

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Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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Israel's pressing need to restore the balance between the Knesset and the Court - by Vic Rosenthal

...A balance between the powers of the various branches of government is important to protect minority and majority rights. A comparison with the Supreme Court in the US will be helpful in understanding just how unbalanced the situation in Israel is.

Vic Rosenthal..
Abu Yehuda..
27 April '18..
Link: http://abuyehuda.com/2018/04/restoring-the-balance-between-the-knesset-and-the-court/

A hot potato today in Israel’s Knesset is the so-called chok hahitgabrut (literally, “the overriding law”) which would provide a way for the Knesset to pass a law over the objections of the Supreme Court. Various versions of such a law have been considered, which require larger or smaller majorities in the Knesset to override a Court decision to throw out a law. Another approach would be to require more than a simple majority of justices of the Court in order to reject a law passed by the Knesset. The precise form the law might take is still up in the air.

The issue that is presently driving the controversy is a series of Court decisions that have made it impossible for the government to deport any of the 38,000 African migrants that entered the country illegally since the early 2000s. Those who want such a law say that the unelected Court rides roughshod over the views of the majority of the citizens, which are expressed by the votes of their representatives in the Knesset. That’s undemocratic, they say. Opponents argue that in a liberal democracy it is necessary to protect minority rights, which is what the Court has done.

Critics of the Court have been complaining for a long time that it is biased leftward, and that it sticks its nose where it shouldn’t, like the proposed deal regulating the concession for the natural gas recently discovered off Israel’s shores; or the ownership of property in Judea and Samaria, decisions that forced the demolition of communities and the removal of people from their homes.

But the intricacies of the gas deal were understood by only a small percentage of Israelis, and the inhabitants of the razed settlement of Amona did not find a lot of empathy in the general population, many of whom thought of them as extremists. The migrant question, on the other hand, resonates more broadly. It pits the residents of South Tel Aviv – who say that the migrants who are concentrated in their neighborhoods have brought crime, dirt and fear to them – against a coalition of organizations that claim to be defending the human rights of the migrants. In fact, many of these groups are funded by unfriendly foreign governments, or groups with a political motive to embarrass our government (e.g., the Israel Religious Action Center).

A balance between the powers of the various branches of government is important to protect minority and majority rights. A comparison with the Supreme Court in the US will be helpful in understanding just how unbalanced the situation in Israel is.

The political storm over African infiltrators, migrants, asylum seekers or refugees in Israel - by Vic Rosenthal

...The government and a majority of Israeli citizens believe that absorbing the migrants and inviting more will strain the fabric of their society dangerously. At the end of the day, they are the ones that live and work here, defend their nation, and pay the price of whatever happens in this tiny country. They are the ones who get to decide – and not the representatives of the EU, Amnesty International, the Union for Reform Judaism, or the New Israel Fund’s donors.

Vic Rosenthal..
Abu Yehuda..
08 April '18..
Link: http://abuyehuda.com/2018/04/the-political-storm-over-african-migrants/

Before you can discuss solutions to the problem of the African infiltrators, migrants, asylum seekers or refugees in Israel – call them what you want – you should know the facts. You are strongly encouraged to read about them here; but in summary there are about 38,000 people from various countries in Africa who crossed our Egyptian border illegally and want to stay in Israel. The government has tried to find a way to deport them that will be both effective and humane, but so far has been stymied at every turn.

The position of the government is that only a small number deserve refugee status, and the rest are illegal immigrants who should leave the country one way or another. The majority of Israelis (66% of Jews and 50% of Arabs) agree.

Initially, illegal migrants faced detention (they were allowed to work during the day, but required to return to a detention facility in the evening) or even imprisonment, in order to encourage them to leave. But Israel’s Supreme Court declared this policy illegal.

Since the majority of them cannot be deported to their home countries – for example, because they will be prosecuted for draft evasion (Eritrea) or for travelling to Israel with which a state of war exists (Sudan) – an agreement was reached with “third countries” (Rwanda and possibly Uganda) to accept them. The migrants and the destination countries would both receive payments, and the migrants’ exit would be “of their own free will,” even though both carrots and sticks would be deployed to encourage them.

Naturally, the migrants would prefer to stay in Israel. Their case was taken up by the Israeli Left, along with numerous international and foreign organizations such as Amnesty International, the European Union, the New Israel Fund, the Union for Reform Judaism (in the USA) and others. The Supreme Court froze the plan, and massive international pressure was applied to the government of Rwanda, which – embarrassed by what was portrayed as “enabling anti-black racism” – backed out.

Western European Governments and the Racism of Human Rights Organizations They Fund - by Judith Bergman

“Human Rights” organizations funded by Western European governments to fight for the human rights of Arabs, disregard violations of those very rights, when the violators are the PA.

Judith Bergman..
MiDA..
27 February '18..
Link: http://en.mida.org.il/2018/02/27/racism-human-rights-organizations/

The numerous foreign funded “human rights” organizations who operate in Israel do not actually care about human rights. In fact, recent events have shown that they do not seem to care about human beings as such, either. Instead, they are what most Israelis have always suspected them of being, namely political actors, who have organized themselves cleverly in benign sounding “rights” organizations in order to better pursue their nefarious agendas of destroying the state of Israel through “Lawfare“.

Last summer, the Jerusalem District Court determined that the Palestinian Authority (PA) was responsible for the kidnapping, torture and murder of dozens of suspected Arab “collaborators” within Israel, several of them with Israeli citizenship, between 1995 and 2002. The court proceedings unveiled grueling testimonies of Arabs who had been subjected to the most heinous torture in the cellars of the PA’s detention centers.

The PA naturally denied all allegations, but the presiding judge ruled that the accumulation of evidence made it clear that the PA was guilty of severe torture, as well as murder. The torture included the so-called shabah position — widely used in PA prisons — in which the victim is hung from the ceiling for several hours and beaten all over his body.

According to the verdict, the torture also included electric shocks, the pouring of boiling plastic on the body, tearing out nails and breaking teeth, sterilization, sleep deprivation, food and drink deprivation, sexual assault and the rape of family members. The PA also asked doctors to worsen the conditions of the prisoners, such as injecting urine into the prisoners’ blood veins.

The verdict concluded that the PA is responsible for the torture and therefore liable for damages to the victims, whose lives it ruined. However, in order to realize the compensation, the victims need to provide medical evaluations of their conditions by medical experts, which is a very costly procedure.

According to a report by Israel Hayom, attorneys Barak Kedem and Aryeh Arbus turned to 15 human rights organizations to obtain their assistance in paying for the costly evaluations. “These are broken people in their bodies and souls, who…cannot afford to pay professional opinions, which cost thousands of shekels for every opinion,” the attorneys wrote in their plea to the 15 organizations.

Among the 15 organizations were Adalah, Amnesty International, B’Tselem, the New Israel Fund, Rabbis for Human Rights, Yesh Din, Physicians for Human Rights and the Committee for the Prevention of Torture. Only the last two offered assistance, whereas the rest either ignored the plea or responded negatively.

Adalah said that the organization “only helps the Palestinians who are suing the State of Israel”. Amnesty International said that “the organization does not have the professional tools to address the needs” of the victims, whereas Yesh Din expressed “feelings of anger and pain,” but explained that they could not help because they “represent victims of violations when they are harmed by Israeli authorities or Israeli citizens.”

Another example of unquestioning BBC amplification of politicised messaging - by Hadar Sela

...The BBC’s long-standing policy of uncritical amplification of politically motivated allegations against Israel from agenda-driven NGOs such as HRW and AI clearly does not serve its declared purpose of providing “impartial news and information” aimed at enhancing audience understanding of the complex topic of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Hadar Sela..
BBC Watch..
16 November '17..

For some years now we have been documenting the BBC’s ‘quote and promote’ editorial policy regarding NGOs. The overwhelming majority of the NGOs given a platform in the BBC’s coverage of Israel come from one side of the political spectrum and some of them are even involved in lawfare campaigns against Israel.

However, the BBC serially fails to meet its own editorial guidelines on impartiality which stipulate that the “particular viewpoint” of contributors should be clarified and audiences hence remain unaware of the fact that the information they are receiving is not only consistently unbalanced but often politically motivated.

Another example of unquestioning BBC amplification of politicised messaging put out by campaigning NGOs was seen in the November 5th edition of BBC One’s ‘The Andrew Marr Show’ during an interview (available here) with the Israeli prime minister.

In his introduction to the interview, Marr inaccurately presented the Balfour Declaration as a personal document from its signatory rather than one stating the position of the British government of the time.

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What the European Union Wants Israelis Not to Know - by Evelyn Gordon

...Yet if an organization is an instrument of a foreign country’s foreign policy, it’s very hard to argue that it’s an objective “human rights organization,” as the organizations in question bill themselves. Rather, it’s an overtly political organization that seeks to pressure Israel into adopting the foreign government’s preferred policies. And making this known definitely could be “stigmatizing,” in the sense that Israelis might be less willing to trust an organization’s assertions once they realize it has a not-so-hidden policy agenda that could be influencing its reports.

AP Photo/Stefano Medici

Evelyn Gordon..
Commentary Magazine..
14 July '16..
Link: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/foreign-policy/middle-east/israel/eu-wants-israelis-not-know-breaking-the-silence/

In the three days since Israel passed a law mandating new reporting requirements for NGOs that are primarily funded by foreign governments, there’s one question I have yet to hear any of its critics answer. If, as they stridently claim, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with NGOs getting most of their funding from a foreign government, then why would simply being required to state this fact in all their publications exercise a “chilling effect” (the U.S. State Department) or “stigmatize” them (the New Israel Fund) or result in “constraining their activities” (the European Union)?

The obvious answer is that the critics know perfectly well it isn’t alright: An organization that gets most of its funding from a foreign government isn’t a “nongovernmental” organization at all, but an instrument of that government’s foreign policy. In fact, with regard to the EU, that’s explicit in its funding guidelines: For an Israeli organization that conducts activities in the territories to be eligible for EU funding, it must comply with EU foreign policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This, incidentally, also explains why 25 of the 27 organizations affected by the law are left-wing: The far-left is the only part of Israel’s political spectrum that shares Europe’s opinions on the conflict, and hence, that Europe is willing to fund.

Yet if an organization is an instrument of a foreign country’s foreign policy, it’s very hard to argue that it’s an objective “human rights organization,” as the organizations in question bill themselves. Rather, it’s an overtly political organization that seeks to pressure Israel into adopting the foreign government’s preferred policies. And making this known definitely could be “stigmatizing,” in the sense that Israelis might be less willing to trust an organization’s assertions once they realize it has a not-so-hidden policy agenda that could be influencing its reports.

That, however, is precisely why Israelis have a need and a right to know where these organizations’ funding is coming from–especially given this funding’s sheer scale. And it’s also why there’s nothing remotely undemocratic about the law, as explained in depth by legal scholar Eugene Kontorovich here.

Nevertheless, if this is really what the law’s critics fear, then they’re behind the times. In the years since the idea of legislating this law first arose, most of the organizations in question have made themselves so toxic that it’s hard to see how information about their foreign funding could make Israelis view them any more negatively. Thus the more likely impact of publicizing their funding sources won’t be to delegitimize the organizations, but to delegitimize their donors–which is precisely why Europe, which provides most of this funding, is so worried.

BBC News goes coy on lawfare NGOs it previously quoted and promoted - by Hadar Sela

...The BBC has never provided its funding public with a satisfactory explanation as to why it uncritically amplifies the agendas of organisations which make no secret of the fact that they are involved in a political campaign of lawfare against Israel or why it rejected complaints which challenged the BBC’s use of obviously politically partisan information from those sources.

Hadar Sela..
BBC Watch..
06 July '16..

On July 4th the BBC News website published a report titled “Israeli politician Tzipi Livni ‘summonsed by UK police’” on its Middle East page.Livni art

One coyly worded paragraph is of particular interest:

“Correspondents say pro-Palestinian activists have filed a series of complaints against Israeli officials, including Ms Livni, in recent years.”

Who those “correspondents” are is not made clear and of course the said “activists” are more accurately described as anti-Israel than “pro-Palestinian” but remarkably, the BBC chose not to identify them for its readers.

Fortunately, NGO Monitor has background information on that subject which includes the following:

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Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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How NGOs Became a Weapon in the War on Israel - Prof. Gerald Steinberg

...The intense rhetoric of the NIF reflects their genuine concern that, by highlighting the massive European funding for its associated NGO network, the organization will lose standing and influence on the Israeli center and center-Left. From this perspective, the stakes are even higher than the question of foreign funding for NGOs. They and their patrons believe the NGO bill threatens a political structure they have built up over almost four decades. For Israel itself, however, the stakes are even higher. In question is Israel’s right to reassert its national sovereignty in the face of foreign manipulation, demand transparency from unelected groups that campaign intensely against the policies of its elected government, and counter an international campaign of hate and defamation that potentially threatens Israel’s very existence.

Prof. Gerald Steinberg..
Tablet Magazine..
Issue 35 February '16..

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are very big business in Israel. Various NGOs—most of them from the Left and claiming to promote human rights and democracy—are very active in the Knesset, in filing lawsuits with the Supreme Court that seek to overturn government policies, and in the media. They receive hundreds of millions of shekels from large foundations and foreign governments—primarily European. While the activities of these NGOs are criticized by the Israeli Right, much of the mainstream Israeli media supports them. As a result, the “halo effect” that protects these NGOs from independent investigation is particularly strong.

But that halo was shattered recently when the popular Israeli television news program Uvda featured a hidden-camera expose of a little-known “peace group” known as Ta’ayush, led by activist Ezra Nawi. The footage showed Nawi, along with Nasser Nawaja, a Palestinian employee of the NGO B’Tselem, plotting against an Arab who was negotiating to sell private land in the West Bank to Jews. They were trying to lure the Palestinian into a trap where he would be captured by the Palestinian Authority’s security services. As Nawi coldly noted in the video, under PA law, the sale of Palestinian land to Israelis is punishable by death.

The broadcast became headline news and the fallout continued for weeks. Nawi was arrested at Ben-Gurion Airport when he tried to flee the country. A few days later, a follow-up program aired more hidden-camera footage, this time showing Nawi with officials from two other prominent “human rights” NGOs—Breaking the Silence (BtS) and Rabbis for Human Rights (RHR). Both groups were shown giving money to Nawi, who then handed out checks to Palestinians, apparently for taking part in violent demonstrations. RHR claimed that Nawi was paid for providing transportation services. BtS denounced everyone involved in the program as “Stasi,” a reference to the notorious East German intelligence service.

The report was particularly explosive because Nawi had been an iconic hero to the far-Left in Israel and beyond—a gay Sephardi peace activist and pacifist who embodied Western orientalist myths. Prominent leftists like Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein described him as “one of Israel’s most courageous human rights activists.” David Shulman, who writes highly critical articles on Israel in The New York Review of Books and happens to be a member of Ta’ayush, referred to Nawi as an Israeli Gandhi. In 2009, after Nawi was convicted of assault following a demonstration, he became the focus of an international campaign, including a sympathetic portrayal in Time magazine. The fiercely anti-Zionist Jewish Voice for Peace claimed to have collected 20,000 signatures on a petition to save him from jail. But in 37 minutes, the Channel 2 program destroyed Nawi’s image.

In a wider context, the timing of the reports was damaging to the entire NGO establishment in Israel. It came in the middle of an intense controversy over the role of Israeli NGOs in the worldwide campaign to demonize Israel through the use of terms such as “apartheid,” the rise of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement, and the use of “lawfare” to charge Israeli officials with war crimes and other supposed transgressions of international law.

Prior to the Uvda broadcasts, BtS and its patrons were the particular focus of growing anger among many Israelis on the Right, center, and even the center-Left. This anger followed a major jump in the visibility of BtS, which reflected the group’s million- dollar budget. BtS events in churches, universities, and national parliaments around the world featured “anonymous testimony” that alleged systematic immorality by IDF soldiers, with no corroborating evidence.

The New NGO Law and Why the Israeli Left Fears It - by Matan Peleg

...Simply stated, democracies have the right, indeed the obligation, to protect themselves. The proposed Israeli law is just such a protection....The law applies to any NGO that receives foreign government funding. (The fact that the only NGOs receiving such funding are left-wing ones bears out the fear of why that money is being given in the first place. No money is being given to groups that support the state, only those that stand in active opposition to it.)

Matan Peleg..
The Algemeiner..
03 January '15..

The shrill reaction to the proposed NGO law in Israel is hardly unexpected. It is consistent with the reflexive reaction to any perceived incursion on the monopoly that the Israeli Left believes itself entitled to.

Whether it is holding themselves out as the only guardians of human rights, or the truest patriots because of their self-conceived courage in confronting the institutions of the state, the Left has long believed that it should be accorded great respect and unencumbered flexibility in how it conducts itself.

For a long time, the citizens of Israel fell into line and acted accordingly. But something tectonic has taken place in Israel, and the Left ignores this at its peril. What has changed is that there has been an awakening to the relationship that Left-wing NGOs, whose mission is to demean and de-legitimize the state of Israel, have with foreign governments — mostly in Europe.

That relationship is based on financing. Lots of it.

Israelis intuitively know that this threatens our self-determination and even sovereignty. Why? Because foreign governments are players seeking to change Israeli policy concerning the Palestinians, as they seek to further the Palestinian agenda.

Foreign governments can influence world bodies, other governments, trade relationships and a whole host of geopolitical issues that private donors to NGOs — no matter how wealthy or influential — cannot hope to match.

So when a law is proposed that would require an NGO receiving significant foreign funding to identify itself as working on behalf of that government, most Israelis believe this to be reasonable, justified and not an incursion on the operational freedom of NGOs.

Rather, the opinion of most Israelis matches that of the US Supreme Court, which has opined that “democracy is not a suicide pact.” Simply stated, democracies have the right, indeed the obligation, to protect themselves. The proposed Israeli law is just such a protection.

How the UN Human Rights Council report shot itself and human rights in the foot

...This latest UNHRC inquiry and report is only as reliable as its sources of information. When these are overwhelmingly unreliable political NGOs, as well as those who support and facilitate terrorism, any true champions of human rights cannot take its findings seriously.

It is unclear whether the Commission of Inquiry 
was aware of Gilbert’s views and was 
unconcerned by them, or whether it 
failed in its basic due diligence.

Gerald Steinberg..
i24 News..
30 June '15..

The report from the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) on the 2014 Gaza conflict has no surprises: it is another pseudo-legal and immoral case of Israel-bashing. Like the discredited Goldstone Report and virtually every other UN “inquiry” on Israel, political NGOs (non-governmental organizations) provide the basis of the investigation and findings. In the UN report, NGOs appear on almost every page: B’Tselem is cited 69 times; Amnesty International, 53; Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR), 50; and Human Rights Watch (HRW), 22. To anyone familiar with the political agendas of these NGOs, the UN’s latest “findings” – namely, condemnations of Israel – come as no surprise.

Like the NGO publications, the Commission of Inquiry report on the Gaza war is filled with unverifiable accusations based on the testimony of nameless witnesses. Although the Commission recognized that testimony from Gaza is unreliable, acknowledging “fears by Palestinian witnesses of reprisal by armed groups and local authorities,” in practice, the report relies extensively on such anonymous allegations. For instance, in the section discussing attacks on houses, witnesses are quoted on the most essential legal and moral questions, apparently without concern for intimidation or lying to prevent self-incrimination: “According to the witnesses, all of those killed were civilians”; “they insisted that there had been no military activity in the building.”

The latter claim is augmented by statements given by the same witness to PCHR, asserting “that no family member belongs to the ‘Palestinian resistance.’” Reading between the lines, we see that the eyewitnesses themselves were likely selected by NGOs, such as PCHR, and delivered to the UN investigators.

The NGOs cited by the UNHRC also lack expertise and access to crucial information. These shortcomings are exemplified by the “fact-finding mission” of the Israeli organization, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (PHR-I), produced in collaboration with the Palestinian NGOs Al-Mezan, Gaza Community Mental Health Program and the PCHR. The PHR-I investigators “did not have access to [relevant] UNRWA facilities…They could therefore investigate neither the public health impact of displacement in these facilities, nor the allegations made by the Israeli government regarding the abuse of such facilities for military purposes.” Similarly, they had “no access to evidence regarding the conduct of Palestinian armed combatants within Gaza.” Yet, the UNHRC deemed PHR-I’s investigation credible enough to cite its findings 16 times.

These and other unreliable claims are found throughout the report. But it is the prominence given to the notorious Mads Gilbert, a Norwegian doctor solicited as an “expert” on Gaza health, which discredits the UNHRC on a deeper level. Gilbert has a well-documented history of abusing his position as doctor to promote hate and conspiracy theories, and is known to have blamed the 9/11 terror attacks on the “policy that the West has led during the last decades,” asserting that “the oppressed also have a moral right to attack the USA with any weapon they can come up with.”

As a matter of fact, Israel is absolutely allowed to

...Perhaps, if the NGOs had instead devoted more energy to opposing terror and delegitimizing Hamas and other anti-human rights groups, the current environment that tolerates attacks against Israeli children –whether in Israel, the West Bank, or on the Syrian border – would not exist.

Gerald M. Steinberg..
Times of Israel..
23 June '14..

It seems as if no matter what Israel does, no matter how justified and consistent with international legal norms, human rights groups will accuse Israel of acting illegally.

Israel is in the midst of an extensive military operation in the West Bank to locate three kidnapped Israeli teenagers and to root out the terror infrastructure that facilitated this and other attacks against civilians. Both of these goals are entirely legal and consistent with Israel’s obligations to preserve the welfare of its citizens, its obligations under international human rights conventions and UN Security Council Resolution 1373 that requires States to “prevent and suppress terrorist acts.”

This should be obvious. But, apparently, it is not.

This week, eleven Israeli non-governmental organizations (NGOs), which receive massive amounts of funding from European government bodies (10 also receive significant funding from the New Israel Fund) enabling immoral propaganda campaigns, published a public letter accusing Israel of “unnecessary violation of basic rights and collective punishment.”

Unsurprisingly, many of these NGOs, including Adalah, HaMoked, and Yesh Din, did not release statements condemning Hamas for kidnapping the Israeli teens, nor the blatant assault on decency and human rights inherent in such a depraved act. (In fact, in a statement condemning Israel’s response, Gisha referred to the “alleged kidnapping.”) Those NGOs that did issue statements created an artificial balance by criticizing and/or blaming Israel, and predicting that any response would violate Palestinian human rights.

In accusing Israel of human rights violations, these NGOs invoke international legal terms, such as “collective punishment,” that have specific meanings beyond colloquial usage. Yet, most people are not familiar with the legal definitions, and instead accept at face value the claims of self-declared human rights defenders.

As a number of legal experts have shown, Israel’s operation to find the teens and to root out terror infrastructure is not collective punishment. In the context of international law, collective punishment means the imposition of specific criminal penalties on innocents, not measures that impact collaterally on the population at large. It is understood that civilians will be affected by searches for kidnap victims and perpetrators, both of whom may be located within civilian centers.

By the NGOs’ logic, Boston police were not just doing their jobs when they locked down surrounding areas in their search for the Marathon bombers – they committed collective punishment.

Similarly, the NGOs falsely label Israel’s restrictions of prisoner privileges as “collective punishment.” But denying privileges, such as watching the World Cup on TV, is not the same as violating rights. Once again, the NGOs are far afield from legal definitions and meanings.

Indeed, very little of what human rights NGOs say is grounded in the law or connected to the facts of the situation. The NGOs speculate that “The large number of raids and arrests over the last week raises concerns that some of these operations are not the result of pressing operational needs” – but they have no basis for such assertions. The NGOs and their officials are not military experts and are not qualified to address these questions. Furthermore, they cannot possibly know, as they lack the necessary access to military intelligence and strategic information.

The European-funded warfare on Israel’s courts

...it has become necessary to rethink the role of foreign-funded NGOs in the Israeli legal system. While I continue to believe in the legitimacy of NGOs in challenging government policy in domestic courts, when this process becomes a deliberate campaign of sabotage, this becomes anti-Israel lawfare, and needs to be treated as such....

Anne Herzberg..
Op-Ed Contributor/JPost..
01 March '14..

When I first introduced the concept of “lawfare” against Israel in 2008, focusing on attempts by NGOs (non-governmental organizations) to have Israeli officials arrested abroad for alleged war crimes, people would frequently ask why I did not include the myriad of litigation brought by NGOs in Israeli courts. My typical response was that it was legitimate for NGOs to challenge government policy in domestic courts, and this did not constitute anti-Israel lawfare.

However, I am rethinking this position.

NGO Monitor has discovered massive funding provided by the UK, the EU and Norway to the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), which in turn is funneled to local NGOs in order to flood Israeli courts with hundreds of lawsuits.

Since 2011, these governments have provided the NRC with a staggering $20 million in taxpayer funds to wage legal warfare on Israel. This funding is directed toward the NRC’s “Information Counselling and Legal Assistance” (ICLA) project. According to documents examined by NGO Monitor from the British government, the aim of the project is to manipulate Israeli democracy to achieve “changes in Israeli policy and practice” and to provide “evidence and analysis to form the basis for international pressure on Israel.”

In practice, NRC has used its millions to finance a flood of lawsuits before Israeli courts and administrative bodies. The scope of NRC’s interference in the Israeli legal system is unprecedented. With its EU and European government financing, the NRC has funded at least 700 cases in Israeli courts. Documents show that NRC is responsible for 51 percent of all “house demolition” cases in Area C and 35% of all legal cases dealing with housing, land and property claims in east Jerusalem and Area C.

These cases have included some of the most controversial and contentious issues relating to the Arab-Israeli conflict, including Sheikh Jarrah, and deny pre-1948 Jewish property claims in east Jerusalem, the Cliff Hotel case, the route of the security barrier in the Cremisan Valley (near Bethlehem), and the validity of military orders.

The full list of lawsuits, and the NGO partners and lawyers bringing them, has been kept secret by both the NRC and its government funders, but NGO Monitor research has uncovered the involvement of some of the most active political advocacy NGOs involved in lawfare, including Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR), Yesh Din, St. Yves Society, as well as NGO attorney Michael Sfard.

Moreover, statements made by those associated with the program suggest another, more nefarious goal of the NRC lawfare project – one that is consistent with the campaign to delegitimize Israel, particularly in legal frameworks. In a public presentation, an NRC-affiliated lawyer commented that the strategy behind the project is to undertake “every possible legal measure to disrupt the Israeli judicial system... to increase the workload of the courts and the Supreme Court to such an extent that there will be a blockage.”

In other words, the objective is to sabotage the Israeli justice system. (It is notable that this very strategy was laid out in a 2010 report issued by leading lawfare NGO Al Haq).

Who is anti-democratic? Europe’s secret NGO wars

Dr. Gerald M. Steinberg..
Op-Ed Contributor/JPost..
14 July '13..

When is a non-governmental organization (NGO) actually an arm of state power and interest, masquerading as a non-political do-good civil society group? For starters, this absurd category, known as a GONGO – a governmental non-governmental organization – applies to the dozens of Israeli and Palestinian advocacy groups that are funded primarily by the European Union, its member states, as well as Norway and Switzerland.

For Europe, NGO funding is a major form of promoting state interests, with goal of changing Israeli policy through the political activities of these organizations.

In politics, as in nature, such hostile actions produce opposite reactions, and the impact of these Europe-funded political campaigns has alerted Israel’s democratically elected representatives in the Knesset.

These objections often take the form of proposed legislation that seeks to prevent such abuse. The latest draft would prohibit all foreign government grants above NIS 20,000 for political entities whose members or employees promote NGO political warfare against Israel. In particular, the proposal refers to NGOs that campaign for discriminatory boycotts, use false war crimes allegations to urge legal action in international courts, deny Israel’s legitimacy as a Jewish and democratic state, incite racism and support armed attacks or terrorism.

While more specific than similar legislation introduced (and withdrawn) last year, the definitions remain problematic, and the new proposal was immediately denounced as “anti-democratic.” Supporters, in turn, refer to the abuses of European soft power as anti-democratic and neo-colonial, in that they seek to use the power of unaccountable NGOs to impose their preferences on Israel.

NGOs vs. those who serve Israel by Caroline Glick

Caroline Glick..
Carolineglick.com..
10 May '13..

In 2010, Cpl. Eleanor Joseph became the first female Arab combat soldier in the IDF. Joseph, a Christian Arab told Ma'ariv that her good luck charm is a drawing of the Star of David with the caption: "I have no other land, even when my ground is burning." Her commander drew it for her.

Joseph explained, "It is a phrase that strengthens me. Every time I experience hardship, I read it. Because I was born here. The people I love live here: My parents, my friends. This is a Jewish state? Yes, it is. But it's also my country. I can't imagine living in any other place. I think every person should serve in the army. You live here? You make your home here? Then go defend your country. What does it matter that I'm an Arab?"

Joseph's story represents an incipient trend of integration among Israel's Arab community. Among other things, this is manifest in the consistently rising number of Israeli Arab students who elect to study in Hebrew-language schools and in the rising number of Israeli Arabs who elect to serve in national service, the civilian equivalent of military service.

A poll of Arab youth carried out in late 2007 made clear how widespread this integrationist impulse has become. Seventy-five percent of Arab youth aged 16 to 22 supported voluntary national service.

And yet, despite these sentiments and developments, Arab Israelis who seek to integrate into Israeli society and reject the separatist messages of their political leaders are forced to contend with extraordinary social pressures and even coercion to prevent them from acting in accordance with their wishes.

A study completed this week by Im Tirtzu exposes the vast array of NGOs generously funded by the supposedly pro-Israel New Israel Fund as well as by foreign governments which are running a campaign to oppose Cpl. Joseph and her comrades - Arabs and Jews alike. Since 1999, these groups have been conducting a campaign to undermine Arab integration into Israeli society specifically and to demoralize and reduce the social standing of those who serve in the IDF, national service and IDF reserves generally. The campaign is being carried out on a dual track of discouraging Israeli Arabs from serving in the IDF or national service, and of opposing government benefits to IDF veterans, reservists and those who undertook national service by claiming that these benefits unjustly discriminate against Israeli Arabs.

Im Tirtzu's report argues that the dual nature of the campaign, underwritten by the same funders, shows that the goal "is to prolong irredentism or non-integration of the Arab sector in order to encourage it to act as a sector demanding national recognition and advance the aim of transforming the State of Israel from a Jewish, democratic state into a bi-national state."

NGO "Lawfare": Exploitation of Courts in the Israeli-Arab Conflict

Anne Herzberg
NGO Monitor
Monograph Series 3
09 December '10

NGO "Lawfare": Exploitation of Courts in the Israeli-Arab Conflict - 2nd Expanded Edition

On December 9, 2010, NGO Monitor released an expanded edition of the “NGO Lawfare” monograph. The publication demonstrates and analyzes the ways in which non-governmental organizations (NGOs) using the language of human rights are exploiting European and US courts. These groups have initiated criminal and civil cases against Israeli officials for supposed “war crimes,” as part of lawfare – the use of legal frameworks to achieve political and military goals.

The monograph documents the central roles of groups such as the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR), Al Haq, and others in implementing strategies for the prosecution of Israelis. PCHR has repeatedly sought to have Israeli officials arrested for the July 2002 targeted killing of Hamas leader Salah Shehade, who had orchestrated terror attacks that killed and wounded hundreds. Al Haq has pursued judicially imposed boycotts and sanctions against Israel in the UK and Canada.

The report details EU funding for PCHR, which was provided in a non-transparent manner. PCHR used these funds for lawfare conferences and strategy sessions. [Click here for image of an EU-funded conference]

The updated monograph also documents the ongoing Goldstone process, in which NGOs have been lobbying Western government to support the implementation of the report’s unfounded recommendations, including cases against Israelis in the International Criminal Court (ICC).

NGO Monitor’s September 2008 Lawfare report was the first in-depth study of the role of NGOs in promoting the expansion of “universal jurisdiction” statutes worldwide; the creation of the lawfare strategy against Israel at the infamous 2001 Durban Conference; and the leading role NGOs have played in these cases. The updated report also documents funding from the EU, a number of European governments, the Ford Foundation, and George Soros’ Open Society Institute for the main NGOs promoting lawfare.

To read the Executive Summary in English, click here. [PDF]

To read the Executive Summary in Hebrew, click here. [PDF]

To read the PDF of the full report, click here.

See NGO Monitor's Lawfare Essentials page, with more information and updates on NGO lawfare

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