The Israeli Knesset, the “worst for democracy in the history of Israel”, is expected to to pass a bill making it a felony to support a boycott of settlement products . NGOs are covered by the bill, jeopardising their tax status.

Hospitals in Gaza are running out of medical stock, creating a ‘near catastrophe’ in care. Human rights groups urged to act, the Israeli blockade and the continuing stand-off between Hamas and Fatah are blamed

Palestinian civil society groups are preparing for a day of mass sit-ins on 15 March, to protest the widening split between Palestinian political and resistance factions as Israel’s illegal occupation grinds on. The Electronic Intifada reports.

NGO monitor has been the scourge of human-rights NGOs in Israel, accusing them indiscriminately of being anti-Israel, antisemitic, in the forefront of the campaign to delegitimise Israel and much else beside. It’s role in encouraging the Knesset to go the assault against these NGOs is also clear.
But who or what is NGO Monitor? The New Israel Fund poses some pertinent questions. Its posting is undated, and Yossi Alpher’s article was published in December 2009. But nothing has changed since; and the pernicious interventions of NGO Monitor need to be seen for what they are – an attempt to delegitimise criticism of Israel as such.

Ali Abunimah, co-founder of the Electronic Intifada, writes about “a well-coordinated, escalating Israeli government-endorsed effort to vilify individuals and cripple organisations that criticise Israel’s human rights record and call for it to respect Palestinian rights and international law…”

The threat to Israeli NGOs is shaping up with the demand, now likely to become law, that all Israeli non-profit associations, including NGOs, human-rights organisations and peace groups, as well as charitable corporations such as theatres and cultural organisations, report within 30 days to the Registrar of Associations on every sum of funding they receive from a foreign government or government-funded donors. Right-wing and settler groups, not funded by foreign governments but by private funds, will not be exposed to this increased scrutiny and bureaucratic harassment…

The Israeli NGO, Hamoked – the Centre for the Defence of the Individual, has just launched a new website, including a quiz on ‘What do you know about the occupation?’ [...]

Shir Hever argues that we are witnessing A DARK TIME IN ISRAEL: “a new trend has been developing rapidly in the past four years of extreme measures taken against political dissenters, particularly against citizens of Israel (as opposed to non-citizen Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, who were never permitted freedom of expression). This trend threatens to eliminate the relative safety of Israelis, and especially Israeli Jews, to voice their opposition to government’s policies…lines are being crossed, and there is no way of telling where it will stop [...]“

Ameeer Makhoul, a human-rights defender and General Director of Ittijah – The Union of Arab Community-Based Associations, a Palestinian-Israeli NGO network holding special consultative status at the UN, arrested, held incommunicado and barred from leaving Israel.

Israeli NGOs that provide evidence of Israeli complicity in war crimes are targeted and threatened with closure in proposed new Knesset bill…

Ben Caspit ups the ante in Maariv: “It is OK to attack the policy of the government of Israel in every place and in every way. It is possible and even commendable to hold vigils next to checkpoints in the territories and to make sure that the Palestinian population is treated properly. It is OK to think that Netanyahu’s rejectionist policy is leading us to disaster (I think words to that effect are written here weekly). It is allowed, in fact, to do everything. Except for undermining the foundations of the existence of the only Jewish state. It has a right to exist, it has a right to defend itself. A large number of the extremist organizations funded by the NIF do exactly that. In a very poisonous way, very skillfully and with generous funding by donors, most of whom are unaware of who and what they are funding [...]

Hassan Jabareen, General Director of Adalah, the Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel writes: “The Knesset is also currently debating a bill that would severely curtail the foreign funding of NGOs. What, then, is behind this attack? [...]

“The vicious, McCarthyite attack on the New Israel Fund (Nif), which uses philanthropic funds to foster and support Israeli non-profit, civil society organisations, did not come out of the blue. The ultra-nationalist group, Im Tirzu, which blamed Nif for the Goldstone report, falsely claiming, as Jonathan Freedland showed, that more than 90% of the report’s information came from groups funded by the Nif, was exploiting a climate of vilification of such groups created by the Netanyahu government since it came to power a year ago [...]

Jeremiah Haber writes: The Israeli government’s endorsement of proposed legislation “will require human rights NGOs in Israel (e.g., B’Tselem, Machsomwatch, Breaking the Silence, Adalah, etc.) to publicize contributions from foreign governments, not only in an annual report (they all do that anyway), but every single time they host an event, have a meeting, publish a report, issue a news release, whether they have received outside funding for that particular occasion or not [...]“

Yesterday [8th Feb], the leadership of the Kadima party decided not to support a proposed Committee of Parliamentary Inquiry into the New Israel Fund and the human rights organizations it supports [...]

The IDf has raided Ramallah to arrest international activists in violation of Oslo Accords [...]

We wanted to quickly update you on the prominent ad (attached) we published this morning on the front page of Ha’aretz, calling for a credible and independent Israeli investigation of operation Cast Lead. Today (Feb. 4) is the final day allotted for Israel (and Hamas) to respond to the Goldstone report [...]

Didi Remez writes on Coteret: Maariv, Israel’s third-largest newspaper, has been a primary instrument for the dissemination of the recently launched anti-NIF smear campaign. To its credit, however, the newspaper has hosted dissenting opinion on a daily basis… Merav David and… Maya Bengal (two senior reporters on the paper) published a particularly incisive criticism of the campaign and related Israeli policies in the paper yesterday [...]

The New Israel fund responds vigorously to the attack made on it ads in the Israeli press a few days ago (see http://jfjfp.com/?p=10007). The group behind these attacks turns out to be “funded by the same abundant money that flows to extremist settlers’ organizations, including a sizable contribution from John Hagee’s “Christians United for Israel” [...]

Canada is now wading in to attack critics of Israel: the Board of Directors of Rights & Democracy, a not-for-profit organization created by Canada’s parliament in 1988 to encourage and support human rights around the world, recently voted, with substantial objection, to repudiate grants given to Al Haq and Al Mezan Centre for Human Rights, two reputable and well-known Palestinian human rights organizations located respectively in the West Bank and in Gaza. The reason: “”their accusations against Israel’s human rights violations…”