News from Peace Now's (Israel) Settlement Watch:

94% of the donations of 9 well-known right-wing NGOs are nontransparent

 In light of the NGO bill, a Peace Now study examining the funding sources and transparency of 9 right-wing pro-settler NGOs finds that 94% of the donations to these organizations in the years 2006-2013 were nontransparent, meaning that there is no possibility to identify their original donor. The study also finds that the majority of the funding to the organizations examined originated from private individuals abroad, arriving mainly through U.S. organizations with a tax-deductible donations status. Many other millions of shekels originated from Israeli taxpayers' money through government ministries and an local municipalities. 

Unable to deliver real solutions to the ongoing violence, Israeli governments have been trying for years to blame the messengers rather than take responsibility for their own policies. Last week, this practice was taken to the next level when a ministerial committee approved the NGO bill, proposed legislation targeting specifically peace and human rights organizations.

Under the pretense of increasing transparency on donations received from foreign governments, the bill’s actual intention is to delegitimize any organization that criticizes the government's policies. According to the proposed legislation, members of left-leaning organizations, who already submit quarterly reports on donations from foreign governments, will be obligated to wear special badges and to identify themselves as “foreign agents.”

If the proposed legislation is truly aimed at increasing transparency, it must require all NGOs to expose their funding sources, instead of denouncing left-wing organizations, which are already held to higher transparency standards.

Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked is trying to sell the argument that her pending “NGO transparency” bill is no different than a U.S. law called the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA. In reality, the two pieces of legislation are worlds apart in intent and effect, and the differences go to the heart of the problems with Shaked’s bill.

First, FARA applies to all foreign funding – governmental and private – of U.S. persons or organizations, ensuring transparency about any foreign donor’s efforts to sway U.S. policy. The Shaked bill applies only to funding from foreign governments – funding that is already transparent under existing Israeli law. The measure does not apply to funding from nongovernmental foreign sources.

This distinction is neither accidental nor trivial. Israel’s progressive nongovernmental organizations are the main recipients of funding from foreign governments that support the progressive, democratic values embodied by these NGOs. Shaked, who has made clear her desire to quash dissent, has crafted her bill to target only these NGOs while permitting those that promote agendas more in line with her own views to continue to operate as always. The discrimination implicit in this bill is so clear that even Israeli Knesset member Michael Oren, a former U.S. ambassador, has criticized its “one-sided exposure, which ignores the funding sources of extreme-right nonprofits.”

The strength of organizations working to end the occupation and their supporters is greater than we think.

One day the occupation will end. It will probably happen in one fell swoop. And when it happens, it will suddenly emerge that everyone was against it. That the politicians had actually worked to end it, that the journalists strove indefatigably to expose its injustices, that the cultural institutions condemned it courageously and that Israeli academia was a center of persistent resistance, from which the struggle drew ideological and moral backing. In short, everyone was part of the Resistance.