Barak Ravid of Axios learned from officials in both Jerusalem and Washington on Wednesday that United States Ambassador to Israel Tom Nides sent a letter to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu (Likud) last week urging him to slam the breaks on legislation that would limit the ability of Israeli nongovernmental organizations to receive funding from foreign governments.
The bill, initiated by lawmaker Ariel Kallner (Likud), stated that Israeli NGOs that receive money from foreign governments would not be recognized as nonprofit organizations and would therefore have to pay 65% tax on all donations received.
The bill was scheduled to be voted on last Sunday in the ministerial committee for legislation but the prime minister shelved it after the United States and several European governments expressed fierce opposition to the law.
Ravid was told that Nides and other US diplomats worked quietly for several weeks to stop the bill from becoming law.
According to Axios, many other Western states, including Britain, Germany, France and the Netherlands, had also lobbied against the bill.
Earlier this week, Israel’s Army Radio reported that Washington had presented Netanyahu with an ultimatum and made clear to him that if he is interested in US assistance in attaining a normalization agreement with Saudi Arabia, he would need to put a stop to the legislation.
The aggressive intervention by the United States and its allies into internal Israeli political issues should alert us to the fact that there’s something significant in the legislation they worked so hard to stop.
Like the Israeli Supreme Court that Washington has worked hard to protect from judicial reform legislation, local NGOs have long been a way for Western nations to influence Israeli society and advance their regional interests. The NGOs that would be most directly affected by Kallner’s bill are almost entire funded by foreign governments and are known to promote liberal Western values and advance a two-state policy for partitioning the country into two separate states.
This isn’t to say that that there aren’t Israelis who genuinely feel represented by foreign funded NGOs and our Supreme Court, but these Israelis – mostly Westernized elites – enjoy undemocratic power disproportionately greater than their actual numbers due to these institutions and their foreign support.
More importantly, the fact that a certain portion of the Israeli public identifies with these NGOs and their goals doesn’t change the fact that these organizations have been acting as agents of foreign governments and instruments of imperialist control for decades. Our political leaders therefore have a duty to protect Israeli society from foreign agendas by limiting their influence.
And if Israel is truly looking for a more powerful nation to broker an agreement with Saudi Arabia, perhaps China might be a better candidate.
I agree with the author, America is clearly trying to interfere with another sovereign nations’s (Israel) right to determine it’s own internal policies through democratic means
These NGO’s are not a good thing for Israel; America has SEVERE problems under it’s current leadership and should deal with it’s own problems before trying to impose it’s views on the Jewish People
Biden calls himself a Catholic; Catholic’s refer to Jews as their “older brothers “ – so where is the respect that a younger brother should show to an older brother ?