Foreign Policy: Designating human rights organizations as terrorist aims to silence critics of Israel

Foreign Policy, an American magazine, published a report in which it talked about the new method of repression practiced by the Israeli occupation government against its critics, which is the classification of human rights groups as terrorist organizations.

The magazine said that “the recent designation of six leading Palestinian human rights groups as terrorist organizations by Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz is the most recent and perhaps most high-profile step in a long-running campaign aimed at silencing critics of Israel’s human rights abuses around the globe. Because of a robust, global anti-terrorism financing regime, this designation will likely imperil any financial support provided to these human rights organizations, leaving them unable to do their valuable work.”

It added that “Over the last 20 years, as Israel further entrenched its military occupation and in response to the tireless reporting and advocacy of Palestinian, Israeli, and international human rights groups, international organizations and courts began to take unprecedented steps toward holding Israeli officials accountable.”

The magazine clarified that “ For example, in 2004, the International Court of Justice ruled Israel’s wall illegal; various international investigative commissions looked into war crimes during Israel’s successive wars in Gaza; the International Criminal Court has begun to look into war crimes charges; and this year Human Rights Watch reported that Israel is practicing apartheid and persecution, both crimes against humanity. Many global civil society actors, from labor unions to churches to student groups, responded to the Palestinian call for solidarity through the use of nonviolent economic boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) to hold Israel to account.”

The magazine mentioned that the Israeli government, and particularly its right-wing supporters, understood that global criticism of its abuses would make maintaining the occupation harder. Right-wing groups in Israel began to attack Israeli human rights organizations in the 2000s, and as the Netanyahu government came to power in 2009, they became targets of government policy. The organizations targeted were put under scrutiny, their funders were targeted, and they faced relentless smear campaigns in the Israeli media.

It added that “in 2015, the Israeli government decided to give an entire ministry the mandate to coordinate the international effort to repress global civil society actors. This ministry, which went by the name the Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy and has since been folded into the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, set its sights on repressing and silencing Israel’s critics around the globe.”

To get other governments to crack down on Palestinian rights advocacy and human rights organizations in Europe and North America, the Israeli government needed partners there. One of the key roles of the Strategic Affairs Ministry was to coordinate and empower—as its director for international cooperation, Jonathan Neuberger, put it—various networks of organizations operating in countries around the world. This included a network of some 170 pro-Israeli and Jewish organizations worldwide, with specific networks dedicated to social media and the legal arena.

The magazine confirmed that legislation is only one pathway that the Israeli government’s repression network employs. Lawfare, whereby legal action is brought against advocacy organizations in an effort to drain their resources or criminalize them, is another. The Strategic Affairs Ministry financed an organization called the International Legal Forum, which works to support lawfare efforts around the globe. It doesn’t matter if the allegations are entirely bogus, the point is to put human rights defenders themselves on the defensive, smear their reputations, attack or intimidate their donors, and dry up their time and resources in legal defense.

The magazine added that harassing legal actions have been filed against civil society organizations in recent years, including against groups such as the Carter Center, Oxfam, and the New Israel Fund, and can be linked directly back to the Israeli government’s coordinated repression network. Members of these networks will now seek to use this Israeli designation as the latest advocacy tool in their effort to convince European governments to shut out Palestinian human rights defenders.

It clarified that another tactic is to piggyback on or modify existing laws. Like anti-BDS legislation, this strategy seeks to use the coercive power of the state against dissenters. Unlike anti-BDS legislation, however, these efforts hope to sidestep free speech challenges.

The Magazine said that “Israeli officials are not shy about taking credit for this web of censorship. In 2019, the strategic affairs minister boasted before a gathering of network allies that repressive laws in dozens of U.S. states, France, and the United Kingdom and more than 50 lawsuits had been achieved “because of your commitment, dedication, and tireless efforts, together with those of my ministry and all of the relevant bodies in the Israeli government.”

The magazine pointed out that Israel’s recent terrorist designation of six Palestinian civil society organizations is just the latest step the government is taking to eliminate dissent from human rights groups. These groups have been at the forefront of advocacy demanding accountability for Israeli leaders behind these human rights violations. Gantz, the Israeli defense minister who declared the six organizations as terrorist front groups, may well have done so because their advocacy before the International Criminal Court may result in his prosecution for war crimes during the bombardments of Gaza that he presided over.

The magazine added that “this May, the Israeli government made a full-court press with European governments, putting forward an outrageous conspiracy charge to attack all six groups in one fell swoop, and called on the Europeans to essentially stop funding most major Palestinian human rights organizations. The Israeli government shared secret so-called evidence of its allegations, but the Europeans rejected it.”

It reported that after reviewing the file provided by the Israelis, the Dutch foreign minister announced that it did not provide “concrete evidence of links.” Similarly, in July, the Belgians conducted a review of the same allegations from the Israelis and concluded the file contained “no concrete material evidence of possible fraud.” The European Commission, on two occasions after the Israelis sent their allegations that Palestinian groups were diverting funds to outlawed organizations, said it had found “no substantiated evidence for such misuse or deviation.”

A major investigation into the leaked Israeli dossiers provided to European governments shows exactly why they weren’t buying the allegations. Several Israel-based journalists, from media outlets including +972 Magazine, the Intercept, Haaretz, and Local Call, who went through the documents provided by the Israeli Foreign Ministry and its Shin Bet intelligence agency to the Europeans, found they “failed to present any documents directly or indirectly linking the six organizations” and that the claims were based on selectively edited hearsay and attenuated guilt by association accusations. As the director-general of the Strategic Affairs Ministry once acknowledged, “We are not fighting with facts. We’re not fighting by telling the truth.”

Israeli occupation has long sought to portray itself as the only democracy in the Middle East, but its apartheid policies at home make a mockery of democracy, and its repression efforts targeting civil society groups and their foreign funders put it in league with autocratic regimes—providing ample reasons for Washington to exclude it from Biden’s upcoming Summit for Democracy.

At the end of its report, the magazine warned that authoritarians around the world seek to silence dissent beyond their borders in various ways. Some opt for bone saws or drops of polonium in tea. But Israel’s repression network seeks similar outcomes in more sophisticated ways designed to get the job done without garnering significant reputational damage in the process. U.S. and European officials should not let an ally carry out such repressive policies without consequences.