Eleventh Plague Deadly to Israel

By John R. Houk
http://www.slantright.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=407
April 25, 2007

In contrast to other NGOs covering the Israel scene, B’Tselem (“In the Image of”) frankly admits to having an openly political agenda. It calls itself “the information center for human rights in the Occupied Territories” and proudly proclaims that it is in business to rally Israeli opposition to the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria and their country’s overall presence in these enclaves.

Business has never been better. NGO Monitor avers that one would be hard put to find a study on human rights in Israel by any U.S. government agency that was not “heavily influenced” by one or more B’Tselem reports. And B’Tselem turns them out by the carload. Its large, professionally trained staff of Hebrew and Arabic speaking “researchers” is the gold standard of the NGO trade and it has money coming out of its ears. Reading like a “Who’s Who” of the self-annointed Tikunai haOlam (“repairers of the universe”) priesthood, any partial recitation of B’Tselem’s donor list would include the Ford Foundation, the Commission of the European Communities, the International Commission of Jurists – Swedish Section, Switzerland’s Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, the Mertz Gilmore Foundation in the U.S., ICCO in the Netherlands, Christian Aid in the UK and Denmark’s Dan Church Aid.

Steinberg finds the heavy foreign government involvement in B’Tselem’s funding “particularly disturbing” in light of the organization’s “blatantly ideological” advocacy of Israeli abandonment of Judea and Samaria and their 120 Jewish communities behind a façade of concern for “human rights.” He regards efforts by these governments to sway public opinion in Israel as “subversive.”

The weight of B’Tselem’s powerful international support and big budget is compounded by its unparalleled access to the major participants in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- the Israeli government and its power centers, the Palestinian Authority, the IDF, the Palestinian refugees and the local and international aid agencies. Because of that access and because it is an Israeli NGO, B’Tselem’s reports and analyses, accurate or tendentious, are prized by the media, foreign government organs, the EU, the UN and delegitimizers of the Jewish State far and wide as proof-positive of Israel’s callous disregard for the human and national rights of the Arabs in its midst. “The roads regime, which is based on separation through discrimination,” reads one of these reports, “bears clear similarities to the apartheid regime that existed in South Africa until 1994. This policy, based on a racist premise that all Palestinians are security risks…[is in] violation of their human rights and of international law.” The “Durban Strategy” is alive and well at B’Tselem.

To its credit, B’Tselem has spoken out against Palestinian terrorist attacks on Israel, calling them “unjustifiable” and “war crimes.” Moreover, it has declared that Israel is not only entitled to take measures to defend its citizens from such attacks but “is required to do so.” In the same breath B’Tselem lists combatants as “victims” in its Palestinian casualty summaries, figures it knows are being freely employed to blackball Israel.

The configuring quality of B’Tselem’s influence on the world’s perception of Israel’s human rights record has begun ringing bells in circles normally oblivious to the nation’s image abroad. Nira Masharki, a high ranking attorney in the Office of the State Prosecutor, has condemned B’Tselem’s repeated claims of human rights violations to “attack the State of Israel and its security forces throughout the world.” And former High Court Justice Michael Chesin has identified the NGO as the prime mover in a “false flag” campaign to obtain automatic entry into Israel for Palestinians who marry Israeli Arabs. B’Tselem appears notably unimpressed.