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Gerald Steinberg of NGO Monitor Says New Law is ‘Symbolic’

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Professor Gerald Steinberg, founder and director of NGO said that the bill approved by the Ministerial Committee on Legislation earlier in the week was “more symbolic than anything else.

Professor Gerald Steinberg, founder and director of NGO Monitor with the mission statement “making NGOs accountable,” told Tazpit News Service (TPS) that the bill approved by the Ministerial Committee on Legislation earlier in the week was “more symbolic than anything else.”

Various NGOs have increasingly become the subject of scrutiny in Israel due to questions over their sources of income and suspicion about the real interests they claim to represent. Breaking the Silence, for example, an NGO which lectures international audiences about alleged Israeli war crimes, was recently banned by the Israeli government from entering Israeli schools or attending military processions.

The new piece of legislation seeks to scrutinize in greater depth the sources of funding for what appear to be Israeli-sponsored human rights organizations. The proposal calls for the construction of a system designed to “cope with the phenomenon of NGOs represented in Israel which are not transparent and which represent foreign interests operating under the guise of local organizations.”

Steinberg praised the bill and argued that it would allow Israel to reclaim its sovereignty by forcing European governments to bear greater responsibility and by making it more difficult for Europeans to manipulate Israeli politics with what he described as “a very small group of NGOs and a lot of money.”

Nevertheless, Steinberg said that the final bill approved by Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked lacked the teeth presented in the original proposal which had obligated any NGO representative addressing public officials to disclose wither in writing or verbally any support from foreign states.

Moreover, the proposal originally had called for all NGO employees to wear a tag identifying the NGO and its foreign supporters.

Steinberg pointed out the disparity between the proposal and the final draft. “The original bill was supposed to include a section that was the most visible and upsetting for the NGOs, which would require them to comply with rules such as wearing conspicuous tags when NGO representatives would deal with government officials. This would enable identification of the representatives as foreign agents.”

“But that has been dropped from the current text. There are efforts to reintroduce that part, but that was not the text that Ayelet Shaked approved yesterday,” he told TPS.

The bill has come under fire from Opposition and Zionist Union Chairman Isaac Herzog who denounced the legislation on Twitter as “a bullet between the eyes for Israel’s world standing. Our enemies can now send a big thank you to the government for placing us on the same level as dark regimes in the world.” Tzipi Livni similarly claimed that the law “is not a law intended for transparency but a law to label Israelis.”

While Steinberg acknowledged that the opposition’s role is largely to oppose the government’s views, he said that Herzog’s slogans were ill advised. “They are largely the same slogans written by the NGOs and they are not consistent,” he told TPS.  (TPS)

Alexander J. Apfel

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