Willful blindness on the Palestinian NGO terror connection
Apparently, the Israeli Defence Ministry’s designation of six Palestinian NGOs (non-governmental organizations) as terror fronts is among the most pressing dangers to international security and stability.
Gerald M. Steinberg
At least, according to the European members of the United Nations Security Council.
Iran’s illicit nuclear program, China’s threats to invade Taiwan, and Putin’s threat to Ukraine are nothing compared to Israel’s determination that NGOs, exploiting the facades of human rights and civil society, have links to terror. In the United Nations, diplomats from France, Ireland and Norway, among others, made criticism of this Israeli policy a top priority—in part reflecting their own (unstated) roles as key donors to some of these groups.
This and similar moves are part of a general panic within the NGO industry, which has a great deal to lose if the Israeli government convinces officials and the wider public in these countries to take the links to terror seriously. The Palestinian NGOs are at the core of a powerful and unregulated lobby that receives tens of millions of euros from European governments annually to vilify Israel, and the allegations regarding the role of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) have repercussions for the entire network. (The PFLP is listed as a terror organization by Israel, the United States, the European Union, Canada and Australia.)
If the United States and key European governments agree that Al Haq, Defence for Children International-Palestine (DCIP) and the others are fronts for murderers, the credibility and financial support for NGO allies with whom they work on their campaigns of demonization (particularly the New Israel Fund network of NGOs) will also feel the heat.
As a result, representatives from the NGOs are doing round-the-clock interviews with sympathetic journalists, writing opinion essays on major media platforms and pumping out a social media barrage. Their claims are familiar and predictable—the Israeli move is dismissed as yet another attempt to prevent criticism of human rights violations and to close the “space in which Palestinian civil society is able to function.” These slogans are repeated at every opportunity; none of the NGO spokespeople, journalist-fans or ardent supporters among European and U.N. officials, or in Congress, mention the core issue of PFLP terror.
In this crucial political and public relations battlefield, the Israeli government has again been revealed as unprepared and is again being hammered. The critics ask why the Defence Ministry has produced no evidence, or, more accurately, no “new evidence.” Key allies in the United States and around the world, including those sympathetic to Israeli security concerns, were also taken by surprise by the October 22 designation announcement. They blame Israeli decision-makers and their senior staff members for not anticipating and preparing for the full-scale counter-attack in the NGO wars.
In part, this is another example of the compartmentalization that still dominates Israeli policy-making on such issues. The PFLP’s NGO network is viewed primarily through the lens of security and terrorism, and for many months, the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) gathered evidence and made arrests, followed by indictments and trials. This was accompanied by a number of legal reviews, including by the attorney general, ending with the formal designation by the Defence Ministry. And the classified Israeli intelligence was shared with counterparts in the United States and among some Europeans.
But, as both critics and allies point out, the absence of publicly available evidence to accompany and justify the designation left the propaganda arena undefended. Instead, the government pointed to information from earlier investigations of a number of NGO officials charged with leading the PFLP cell that murdered 17-year-old Rina Shnerb in August 2019. In addition, in May 2021, the ISA indicted and released detailed information regarding the PFLP terror-supporting activities involving officials of another NGO, the Health Workers Committees, including forging of receipts, salary reports and bank documents to inflate project costs in order to divert large sums of European funding.
These were immediately dismissed by NGO supporters, including the European officials that fund them, as “unconvincing,” or as “a few bad apples” in otherwise entirely reliable civil society organizations. Reinforcing the push-back, the NGO support industry, including many journalists, went to work to shift the focus away from the terror links and toward the usual anti-Israel conspiracy theories.
As part of this willful blindness, they also erased and ignored the extensive and systematic research on the PFLP terror links published by NGO Monitor, the independent research institute that I founded and lead. Based entirely on open sources, such as websites, YouTube videos and social media posts from the NGOs and the PFLP themselves (mostly in Arabic), researchers have identified 74 PFLP officials that hold positions in 13 NGOs, seven of which have been designated by the Israeli government. All of this carefully documented information is posted on numerous sites, and has been cited by members of parliaments, analysts and others.
When governments, such as the European U.N. Security Council members, and their NGO clients repeat the mantra that no evidence has been presented, they are being willfully misleading and worse. There is an abundance of readily verifiable information, even without the classified intelligence material, available to government officials and journalists who are interested in going beyond the simplistic slogans about NGOs.
As the Biden administration begins spending millions of dollars in taxpayer funds on Israeli and Palestinian groups, these events highlight the importance of detailed and open investigations before any funds are allocated, to prevent diversion to terror.
Gerald M. Steinberg is a professor of political science at Bar-Ilan University and president of the Institute for NGO Research.
This article first appeared in Israel Hayom.
