By Daniel Sokatch, NIF International CEO
It’s too awful. The Bibas kids, Ariel and Kfir. The elderly Oded Lifshitz. The confusion around Shiri Bibas’ body. Every one of us wanted to hope against hope that they were all, one day, going to come home alive. That Hamas had been lying. That they would be reunited with the people who love them. My heart — our collective hearts — break. And break and break.
And as we mourn their loss, as partners and parents and children and so many Israelis and people around the world mourn their losses, we know we have to stay strong. We have to stay strong for the hostage families, who we have supported since the beginning through the Hostage Families’ Forum, and we have to stay strong for the rest of our grantees, especially as threats to their crucial human rights work comes under threat at us at a fast and furious clip.
Threats are coming from the U.S. — President Trump issued an Executive Order on February 6 that would make it illegal to fund organizations that support the work of the ICC. Whatever you think of the ICC, human rights organizations’ job is to supply it with material upon request. This puts our grantees, and us, in a challenging position, one that we are taking very seriously.
Threats are also coming straight from the Israeli Knesset. This week, the Knesset introduced a highly dangerous bill that seeks to silence human rights NGOs. Its proponents claim to be protecting Israeli citizens from “foreign agents”, but that’s just a smokescreen. It is about silencing critics of the government. It is the next stage in the judicial coup.
The bill, which had been on the table in 2023 but was shelved due to international pressure (primarily from the Biden administration) would impose an 80% tax on donations to civil society organizations from foreign governments. These are not hostile powers. These are Israel’s allies — think Germany, Britain, the EU. Imagine: Physicians for Human Rights—Israel, one of the foremost human rights NGOs in the sector, whose opinions and statistics are quoted all over the globe, having to shutter its doors because foreign governments — like Sweden and Switzerland — can’t functionally fund it anymore.
The bill also stipulates that organizations that receive a majority of their funding from foreign governments can no longer seek justice in Israeli courts. And you won’t be surprised to learn that the bill includes ways for the government to exempt organizations that share its hardline agenda.
In short, this bill drastically shrinks Israel’s democratic space — it takes aim at organizations whose agenda and values are at odds with this current government. Our values. The values of free speech, equality, and giving people the power to organize, demand change for the better, and win.
This bill seeks to effectively shut down Israel’s human rights sector. This is not what democracy looks like. We are doing everything in our power to stop this bill from becoming law.
It feels like a decade ago that now-President Trump announced that America would “own” Gaza, that he would build the “Riviera of the Middle East.” But that happened. It happened just two weeks ago. As my NIF colleague and dear friend Shira Ben Sasson put it in a recent opinion piece, Trump “did what no Israeli prime minister has dared, and what the Israeli Supreme Court forbade: he gave public legitimacy to Kahanism.” Rabbi Meir Kahane’s central “innovation” was the idea of ‘transfer’, that the Israeli government could simply move Palestinians somewhere else. But don’t be fooled by the gentle euphemism: ‘transfer’ is a breach of international law — it’s ethnic cleansing — at best. And Trump, by putting this on the table (and doubling down), offered this as a “solution” to the “problem” of Gaza.
At NIF we know that this is a fantasy — a dangerous fantasy, but a fantasy nonetheless. Neither Palestinians nor Israelis are going anywhere. The fates of these two people are inextricably intertwined. The United States administration may have changed, but this fact has not.
Trump’s “transfer” idea holds out the possibility that someone else will solve their problems. It allows centrist Israelis and many American Jews — you and I probably know many of them — to indulge in magical thinking.
But we know now, perhaps now more clearly than ever, that no one is going to ‘save’ Israelis but themselves. And that is precisely why we invest in them, and echo their values. In Israeli activists, in Israeli organizations, in Israeli movements. We need you with us.