"Just Security" Article Raises Alarm At Israeli Suppression Of Palestinian Human Rights Groups--
Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz has retailed his own version of "The Big Lie". He has issued a declaration categorizing the leading human rights organizations which represent the Palestinian people as "Terrorist Groups", while producing no evidence. He has accused them of being fronts and financial conduits for the obscure and small PFLP, (Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine) while refusing to document the allegation.
This policy was exposed today in an article published by "Just Security", which is run by former intelligence officials, diplomats, international law experts and foreign policy veterans in the US Establishment. (Link here)
This action has been challenged by Israeli human rights groups, the UN, and other international organizations. One of the groups now classified as terrorist is named "Al Haq" which has decades of standing and a reputation for being a solid human rights advocate. Their being lumped into this category is the equivalent of declaring the NAACP in the US to be a terror group.
The counterterrorism law passed by the Netanyahu/Religious hardliners in Israel in 2016 was the basis for this declaration. As the article in "Just Security" linked here identifies, the law itself is deeply flawed.
It is an outrage not unlike the operations of Trump and Barr last year, in which they branded as terrorists the Black Lives Matter led coalition of groups and organizations which staged protests around the US demanding Justice for George Floyd, who were accused of Sedition, Treason, etc. Anyone who wanted police reform was declared "Antifa", which Trump used to justify deploying Federal Law Enforcement Troops from multiple agencies to violently suppress the protests. This is the process which Gantz' declaration just set into motion in Israel.
Some people celebrated the apparent downfall of Netanyahu as a new beginning for a hopefully more moderate Israeli government coalition. Not me.
The Ultra-Religious and racist Israeli Right Wing is just as homicidal, psychotic and destructive as Trump's hard core of End Times fundamentalists whose goal is to bring about race war and the Apocalypse. This faction of Israeli politics believes Jordan is Palestine, and their goal is a forced mass deportation of Palestinians from the West Bank into the Jordanian Desert, itself a Crime against humanity should they ever succeed.
The appropriate response would be for international human rights groups to declare the ultra-religious right wing parties of Israel, (including elements of Likud) to be a terror organization. There certainly is evidence of it, between bulldozed homes, vigilante murders and assaults, and government sanctioned extra judicial assassinations.
Just because I'm Jewish doesn't obligate me to condone or ignore atrocious policies based on lies to be carried out in the name of "security", and Jewish survival. I won't sit back and watch racist religious fanatics who believe the Old Testament is Israel's property deed which gives them the right of eminent domain. I'll not go along to get along as Israeli thugs masquerading as Rabbis try to turn the West Bank into a modern day Warsaw Ghetto, which these kinds of declarations open the door to.
I'm perfectly aware of the circumstances surrounding the founding of the State of Israel, and unquestionably defend their right to exist. Why, I ask, does defending that right to exist depend upon maintaining a brutal authoritarian political leadership, which asserts its power through lies to its own people? We had this here for four years. Is that what Israelis and Palestinians really need to co-exist?
