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Op-ed: Justice minister Ayelet Shaked aims to label 'Israel haters' by making representatives of leftist NGOs wear badges during Knesset discussions. So what color will she choose for the leftist patch?Tami Arad
Published: 11.04.15, 14:01 / Israel Opinion
At the memorial rally for slain Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin the organizers hid the Left on the bench, or should I say under the bench. It's possible that they had heard about Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked's plan to label leftists, and sought to defend them before they are placed in a ghetto.
The idea sounds like black humor, but it's not far from reality. While Shaked has no intention of forcing all leftists to wear badges (perhaps at a later stage), according to the bill she is promoting, representatives of NGOs affiliated with the Left will be forced to wear badges when participating in Knesset discussions.
The goal of wearing badges is to declare that foreign countries are involved in the NGOs' activities. That will make it possible to mark Israel haters, the minister believes.
It will be interesting to see what color she chooses for the leftist patch. And when the Halacha laws take effect, one will also be allowed to stone leftists or find another punishment recommended in the Bible against traitors.
On the other side, representatives of right-wing NGOs that receive funds will not be required to wear badges. They receive most of their money from private funding - donations from rich Jews - or are sponsored by the state, directly from the Israeli taxpayer's pocket, without any need for public transparency. That's what is done for those the government wants to honor.
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Israeli
(4,148 posts)Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon, who promised to serve as the Supreme Court's gatekeeper, is silent. And Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks in a weak voice when he is pushed into a corner. The no. 1 rhetorician prefers to speak in luxurious auditoriums abroad, in English and on the material he masters: anti-Semitism, the Holocaust and Iranian nukes. He prefers to let Shaked deliver the democracy lesson.
The organizers of the Rabin memorial rally tried to escape the "leftist" label and put on a national state rally. But the nationality prevailing in the country is not the one they were aiming for. President Reuven Rivlin, who spoke as always with all his heart, is one and only - and therefore received violent reactions from the dominating street.
The nationality prevailing in the country these days nurtures hatred, violence and fear. The prime minister and his senior ministers are failing to condemn the brutalization on Facebook and are cooperating with lawmakers sent by the radical Right, who are harming the foundations of democracy without any pangs of conscience.
Yigal Amir was a lone murderer, but his ideological way has unfortunately struck roots. The skullcap Yesh Atid Chairman Yair Lapid was photographed with and Zionist Union Chairman Isaac Herzog's aggressive speeches are not working. Netanyahu is winning - or should I say, terror is winning.
"You have to decide," former US president Bill Clinton said. But the truth is that it's not up to us, because we depend on a democratic procedure which serves, among others, those seeking to kill democracy.
Source: http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4719708,00.html
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Israeli
(4,148 posts)By Naomi Chazan
Professor Naomi Chazan, former Deputy Speaker of the Knesset, is Dean of the School of Government and Society at the Academic College of Tel-Aviv-Yaffo
Israel has launched an all-out campaign against the publication of the European directives requiring the labeling of settlement products at precisely the same time that the Minister of Justice, Ayelet Shaked, has circulated the text of a government bill compelling representatives of nonprofit organizations receiving a majority of their funding from foreign governments (especially the United States and members of the European Union) to wear badges proclaiming their sources of support. How is it possible to justify opposition to marking products just as Israel is poised to tag in law some of its very own citizens? The truth is that it simply isn’t, and that is the best possible reason to stop this folly before it undermines what’s left of Israel’s human and democratic face.
Shaked’s new legislative initiative is the latest in a series of proposals raised during the past five years with a view to singling out, discrediting, delegitimizing, de-funding and ultimately destroying Israel’s human rights and civil rights community (and with it, the grassroots associations that keep alive the struggle for fair treatment and the dynamic of criticism so essential to democratic vibrancy). In early 2011, Avigdor Liberman sought to conduct a parliamentary probe of human rights organizations, arguing that “they are terrorist organizations that abet terror.” Although this initiative was voted down in the Knesset, neither Liberman’s party (Yisrael Beytenu) nor its allies on the right — especially Jewish Home and the Likud — have given up on their systematic efforts to constrain those groups dedicated to assuring Israel’s adherence to universal human norms.
Ayelet Shaked has been particularly active in this regard. Before her election to the Knesset she, along with the head of her party, Education Minister Naftali Bennett, founded and ran the MyIsrael social network which stood at the forefront of the campaign against human rights groups in the country. In the last Knesset, she authored two bills which sought to heavily tax organizations funded by foreign governments (both were voted down). Now she is giving formal governmental backing to a particularly pernicious version of anti-NGO legislation originally tabled by her party colleague, Member of Knesset Bezalel Smotrich (a variation was proposed by another member, Yinon Magal).
This official support is being justified, at least on the surface, as a vital corollary of good government: transparency. According to its proponents, tagging certain NGO activists is no more than conforming to the minimal requirements of openness required of any self-respecting, duly elected, democratic government.
This somewhat disingenuous argument, however, doesn’t stand up to any factual or logical test. In the first instance, a law requiring full disclosure of foreign government funding already exists (passed in 2011, it requires all donations from foreign political entities to be reported immediately to the NGO Registrar and to be displayed prominently on websites). The new bill is tediously redundant and — except for the marking of NGO activists — totally superfluous. Second, it does not help to explain why more than one billion euros of European funding for Israeli research and development to universities and industries is permissible (and even highly desirable), while support for civil groups, no less significant for the promotion of a thriving society, is considered brash interference in Israel’s internal affairs.
In the same vein, what is now being dubbed the “Transparency Law” actually obscures: it distinguishes between private and public external funding: the former, which sustains right-wing organizations, institutions and parties, is not subject to any public oversight; the latter is being scrutinized in excruciating detail when it is channeled to organizations that do not meet with the approval of those in power.
No small measure of cynicism, if not downright hypocrisy, therefore accompanies what may be more appropriately called the “Tagging Law.” This is hardly mitigated by the claim that the demand that foreign agents visibly identify themselves is common to other democracies (a US law which requires those receiving funding from outside sources to register as foreign agents has been in effect for years). What proponents of the current Israeli initiative neglect to mention is that the American bill requires recipients of private as well as public external funding to declare themselves as such (or, for that matter, that the real model for the proposed Israeli legislation is a bill put into effect in Putin’s Russia barely two years ago to quash human rights advocates).
More serious attention, therefore, needs to be given to the deeper reasons presented by Justice Minister Shaked in an effort to explain the proposed curbs on NGO activity. One main justification suggests that tagging such organizations as B’Tselem, Adalah and Breaking the Silence is essential to safeguarding Israel’s democracy: “The blatant interference of foreign governments in internal matters of the State of Israel with money is an unprecedented, widespread phenomenon that violates all rules and norms in relations between democratic countries.”
Such a claim, these days, is at best spurious. Prime Minister Netanyahu certainly did not abstain from involvement in the American debate on the Iran deal (or, for that matter, on US electoral matters). Nor has his American benefactor, Sheldon Adelson, distanced himself from internal Israeli affairs.
This claim also exhibits a fundamental misunderstanding of the place of civil society in democracies. Civic associations perform essential democratic roles: they limit the power of the state; they give voice to the concerns of the weak, the dispossessed and the marginalized; they pluralize, by their very existence, the public landscape; and, perhaps most importantly, they constantly remind those in power that deep democracies have an ongoing obligation to promote the civil liberties of all their citizens. Working democracies support civil societies and, yes, do so internationally as well as domestically.
Since the democratic justification for circumscribing human rights organizations does not hold water, it is hardly surprising that Shaked has fallen back on nationalistic rationales: “Financial support from foreign countries to NGOs acting in the internal Israeli sphere destabilizes the sovereignty of the State of Israel and calls into question the authority of the government elected by the public.” But here too, the Minister’s logic fails her. She not only forgets that associations she supports benefit from far greater foreign funding than the groups she wishes to debunk. More to the point, she is utterly blind to the contribution that Israeli civic organizations continue to make to Israel’s fast waning global legitimacy.
So, given these contradictions, what then can possibly explain the present initiative? Clearly the answer lies squarely in the political domain: targeting human and civil rights groups — hardly proponents of the present government — is a way of placating the right margins of the ruling coalition and subduing rebellious voices in its ranks. This is yet another patently desperate move designed to maintain a faltering coalition at all costs.
Using power to silence opponents through legislation is, above all, a sign of governmental weakness. If the bill forcing civil society activists to wear badges actually passes, it will contribute directly to the present government’s determination to undermine Israel’s failing democratic order (although it won’t succeed in diminishing the ongoing determination of Israel’s homegrown democrats). It will also dishonor the memory of millions of Jews humiliated and later killed by the Jewish badge barely two generations ago. A country that claims to be a democratic state and the homeland of the Jewish people must not, under any circumstances, tag its own citizens; if it does, it cannot expect its products not to be labeled for dismissing the fundamental rights of those under its rule.
Source : http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/badges-and-labels/
6chars
(3,967 posts)as seen in this editorial which charges eagerly into Godwin territory.
Israeli
(4,148 posts)....but also the alternatives to it :
Why the 'hijacking' of Israeli democracy is a myth
We often hear that that Israeli democracy is being ‘hijacked’ by a group of right-wing extremists. Too bad the alternatives aren’t any more appealing.
Labor MK Stav Shaffir, darling of the “pro-Israel, pro-peace” crowd, recently implored progressive American Jews to do what liberal Zionists have been attempting for the better half of the past decade: reclaim the “real” Zionism from the extreme right wing’s ideological bastardizations.
Speaking to a conference of the Union for Reform Judaism in Florida last week, Shaffir tasked liberal American Jewry with explaining the “complexity” of Israel’s political map, namely that Benjamin Netanyahu and his proxies do not represent the views of all Israelis. “We have to explain this complexity [to Americans], and I believe it will be an ideological weapon for Israel’s defenders here,” Shaffir posited.
Shaffir is correct, sort of. Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing bloc is comprised of a mere 42 out of 120 seats in the country’s legislature. The alternative bloc, which nowadays takes great pains to call itself the “center” and not the “left,” actually grew in the latest elections.
So who are the politicians who represent the Other Israel? What are their ideologies and liberal credentials that progressives in America would find more palatable? Which could serve as an ideological weapon for Israel’s defenders?
Centrist Israeli political parties, to one of which Shaffir belongs, have been at the forefront of propagating some the more virulent forms of anti-Arab racism in recent years, often supporting — and in some cases even proposing — laws and policies one would commonly ascribe to the far right.
There is no better example than the man setting himself up to be Netanyahu’s primary challenger. Yair Lapid, whose Yesh Atid party ran on a centrist platform that emphasized improving the conditions of the middle class, has spent the better part of the last month running from one European news outlet to the next, assuming the role of Israel’s unofficial chief explainer, trying to convince the world that Palestinian violence is somehow intrinsic to Islam, having nothing to do with nearly five decades of foreign military occupation.
In his attempt to outflank Netanyahu from the right, Lapid has openly called for the extrajudicial killing of Palestinian attackers, proposed “removing the Palestinians from our lives,” and has even adopted the Right’s tried-and-true tactics of exploiting spilled blood for political gain — holding a press conference at the scene where Palestinians killed two Israelis just hours earlier.
After another terrorist attack, this time in Be’er Sheva, Lapid, who claims to unite the majority of Israelis in the political “center,” described Israel’s left wing as “traitorous” and the far right as “violent and lawbreaking.” In the same statement, Lapid reduced the Palestinians to “3.5 million Muslims stuck like a bone in our throat — [not] a partner but an enemy.”
Opposition leader Isaac Herzog, Lapid’s rival within the backbench, hasn’t fared much better in maintaining equanimity. In response to the recent stabbing attacks by Palestinians, the Zionist Union leader called to put the West Bank under “total lockdown,” echoed Netanyahu’s populist call to outlaw the northern branch of the Islamic Movement (a move opposed by Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, the Shin Bet), and called the European Union’s plan to accurately label consumer goods produced in West Bank settlements “a violent act of extremists” and “a prize for terror.”
Herzog, whose party has historically claimed the mantle of the Israeli Left, sought to oust Netanyahu with an election campaign rife with blatant anti-Arab racism. Herzog also supported the disqualification of Palestinian members of Knesset from running in the elections, and has stated that he would not want to live in a country run by a Palestinian. The opposition leader has been openly supportive of Netanyahu’s last two wars in Gaza, while at the same time deriding the prime minister for negotiating an end to 2014’s Protective Edge — because doing so entailed talking to Hamas.
The third self-declared alternative to Netanyahu, Tzipi Livni was not only a proponent and outspoken hardliner in all of Israel’s wars of the past decade, she has also had a direct hand in some of the more problematic laws proposed in recent years.
As justice minister in the previous Netanyahu government, Livni drafted and promoted populist legislation that would levy a 20-year prison sentence on people convicted of throwing stones under certain circumstances. Just last year she advanced her own version of the “Jewish Nation-State Law,” which would have constitutionally enshrined the supremacy of Jewish national rights over the individual rights of Israel’s Arab citizens. Despite giving the appearance of “softening” the legislation put forward by her more right-wing colleagues, should it have passed, Livni’s bill would have created the equivalent of a constitutional amendment relegating 20 percent of Israel’s citizens, non-Jews, to second-class citizenship.
All three “centrist” alternatives to Benjamin Netanyahu have consistently supported the right-wing government’s policy of — at-times indefinitely — detaining African asylum seekers despite the fact that they have committed no crime (Lapid himself has actively supported such policies). As my colleague Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man pointed out late last year, Livni and Lapid even had an opportunity to ensure that a High Court order to release of imprisoned thousands of African asylum seekers was actually implemented. Instead, their last legislative act before heading to elections was to satiate the wave of populist, xenophobic sentiment and vote to circumvent the High Court ruling.
Conventional wisdom has it that public discourse in Israel has shifted demonstrably to the right over the past decade. That same wisdom tells us that an Israeli public hardened by the violence of the Second Intifada and years of rockets from Gaza have opted for increasingly hawkish, militaristic leaders. Identifying from where their electoral support comes, those leaders have in turn entrenched Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian people and territories, launched almost regular wars against Gaza, incited against the state’s Arab citizens, and introduced wave after wave of so-called “anti-democratic” legislation.
This view of Israeli politics, which at its core purports that Israeli democracy has been “hijacked” by a group of extremist right-wingers, has gained currency among liberals — both Israeli and American — ever since Benjamin Netanyahu took the reigns of government for a second time in 2009.
If the Right has in fact been hijacking Israeli democracy, it has enlisted some fairly furtive partners in crime — namely, the Israeli electorate and the broad range of politicians it has elected over the past six years. So, no, not all Israelis are represented by the right-wing policies of Benjamin Netanyahu and his government. But the alternative doesn’t look all that different.
Source: http://972mag.com/why-the-hijacking-of-israeli-democracy-is-a-myth/113746/
grossproffit
(5,591 posts)
Israeli
(4,148 posts)
Jefferson23
(30,099 posts)Israeli
(4,148 posts)Deporting cats? Mufti madness? Marking left-wingers? Has the right-wing in Israel finally gone insane? Not exactly.
Asher Schechter Nov 04, 2015
The Israeli right-wing has been on fire in the last ten days.
Last week, just as the global uproar over Benjamin Netanyahu’s mufti speech was dying down, Israel’s deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely declared that her "dream is to see the Israeli flag flying over Temple Mount.” She then called on the government to effectively break the status quo it has sworn to maintain.
A few days later, Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked revealed the first draft of her latest legislative masterpiece: A “transparency bill” that would require NGOs receiving international funding to report this fact. She would also require representatives of such groups to wear “identification tags” that note their foreign funding when they visit the Knesset. The bill is plainly, outspokenly directed against left-wing organizations.
Later this week, it was time for Agriculture Minister Uri Ariel to provide some much-needed levity.
Instead of neutering street cats, a government-financed custom that apparently, according to Ariel, contradicts Jewish Law, Ariel suggested an original solution: Israel should deport all its feral cats to another country.
All three incidents were greeted with widespread international condemnation. Meme creators mocked them mercilessly. People who didn’t see the humor saw these as further evidence of Israel’s transformation into a messianic, undemocratic ethnocracy.
Which seems like a fairly accurate response. Cat "transfer"? Identity badges to mark leftists? This is such a bold leap into slapstick that one has to wonder: Has the right-wing in Israel finally lost it? They don’t really think these insane ideas would work, do they?
They didn’t, and they don’t. The right-wing politicians making these preposterous proposals know they will never be executed. The point isn’t to see those proposals executed. The point is, simply put, to needle the left and provoke international denouncements in order to score political points with a hardline right-wing base that sees global outrage as a badge of honor.
Dear world, the Israeli right-wing is simply trolling you.
The value is in the response
Take Ayelet Shaked, for instance. She knows her ridiculous “leftist branding” bill will not pass as is. It has no chance of passing the Supreme Court. More importantly, it would cast a very negative light on Shaked herself, and on her political camp.
Left-wing NGOs may be affiliated with foreign donations, but the politicians who get the most foreign funding in Israel come from the right. Netanyahu, for instance, has received most of his campaign donations in his successful bid to retain leadership of the Likud from foreign donors. (He also enjoys the luxury of having a foreign benefactor, Sheldon Adelson, who is willing to finance an entire newspaper devoted to keeping him in power).
Shaked herself has received donations from foreign donors, among them a Belgian citizen named Serge Muller, who was arrested earlier this year by Interpol on charges related to money laundering and arms and drug trafficking.
Shaked may be able to rationalize her foreign funding by distinguishing between private donors and foreign governments, but even the right-wing knows its a dicey distinction. Right wing organizations, think tanks and politicians are financed by foreign money just as much as the left, if not more so.
It’s also worth noting that right-wing MKs have tried and failed to pass similar legislations to penalize left-wing NGOs since 2011. Shaked’s version may just eventually make it, but it would have to go significant changes, and it most certainly will not include left-wing branding.
The same applies to Temple Mount provocations. Anybody with frontal lobe capacity understands what breaking the status quo in the region’s holiest site could cause (and the last four weeks of violence serve as a poignant reminder). Tzipi Hotovely and others may undermine the status quo with reckless publicity stunts, they may dream that some day they'll take control of the Mount, they may even try to “nudge” the status quo in their direction, but it’s a pretty safe bet to assume that no right-wing government will have the audacity to lead an outright change.
So what, then, is the value of these doomed proposals, if all they get their authors is status as international pariahs? The value is in the outrage itself.
Street cred and clownocracy
It's become practically a weekly routine in recent years. Some right-wing Israeli politician proposes a bill or makes a statement that both stupefies and enrages pretty much everyone outside of his political base. Within their camp, though, they are met with instant, uproarious approval. The bigger the outrage, the louder the applause.
Consider Netanyahu’s recent mufti comments, that were met with disdain abroad but seemed to make him even more popular with the right, or his “Arab voters are heading to the polls in droves” incitement, that was subject to much criticism, but got him reelected.
Last year’s “nation-state bill”, that attempted to remove the word “democratic” from Israel’s definition as a “Jewish democratic state”, caused global outrage, and was killed before reaching the Knesset. Still, the uproar made its initiators heroes of the new right.
More and more, right-wing politicians are actively courting controversy. Pressured to be more extreme by a radicalizing electorate, they realize they can easily build a brand by resorting to cheap stunts that bait liberal outrage.
More and more Israelis feel that “the world is against us”, that Israel is righteous, but will never be accepted, no matter what it does. Within the right-wing, there’s value in being despised.
The logic is painfully simple: If the world is against Israel (and ask any right-winger, he will tell you the entire world is against Israel), and you as a right-wing politician manage to incense the world, then you must be doing something right. Consequently, causing leftist outrage has become necessary “street cred” for any aspiring right-wing MK.
Does that mean we can ignore proposals such as Shaked’s NGO bill?
Quite the opposite. Even if they know their proposals are ludicrous and impossible to implement, they still accurately reflect the values they, and their voters, sincerely hold dear. Even if these are cynical politicians cynically pandering to their electorate to score cheap political points, their proposals and the applause they get for expressing them serve as a frightening window into the derangement that has taken hold of large swaths of Israel’s society.
The foundations of democracy can’t stay immune forever. In Israel, these were pretty shaky to begin with. If Israel continues down the path it is on, it will be in a situation similar to that of countries like it in the past: Ideas that were once considered ludicrous will become the norm. It will become a parody of a country, a clownocracy.
It’s getting harder and harder to argue we’re not already there.
Source: http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.684142
Jefferson23
(30,099 posts)they'll get their wacky ideas passed even though they know it won't happen.
At worst, it will be met with an Obama veto. The entire point is to keep
their hard line voters happy. It gets complicated b/c part of their power has indeed
made it difficult to get legislation accomplished and the establishment Republicans
are at wits end with them too. There seems to be significant fall out since polls
indicate Republican voters rate our congress job approval even worse than Democrats
do.
How Democrats will fair in turning that around in our favor is possible but I don't
yet see we have a firm strategy in place to make great advances..there is the issue
of gerrymandering here too.
There is much unrest in the US among our youth, our universities are seeing
more protests regarding racism, college debt, a lack of hope for their future.
Israeli
(4,148 posts)....and ours or our youth .
Jefferson23
(30,099 posts)for the results of the Iraq war. US Tea Party include wacky religious fundies
too, they hated the Iran deal..they hate a woman's right to an abortion.
They're pretty much against things, not for anything. They're always screaming
about immigrants. With the latest Paris attacks, they'll ratcheted up the rhetoric
even more.
They also deny the rise of ISIS from our invasion of Iraq...they're dumb as hell.
Israeli
(4,148 posts)since 1967 Jefferson......I wish I could blame it all on our " wacky religious fundies " but we are all part and parcel of it .
Jefferson23
(30,099 posts)Especially when it comes to foreign policy.
