A Recent Bill Encapsulates Everything That’s Wrong with the Knesset—but Not For the Supposed Reason

On June 15, the U.S.-based far-left New Israel Fund (NIF) distributed a press release decrying a proposal before Israel’s legislature to outlaw the filming of Israeli soldiers. Left-wing activists and journalists quickly joined in denouncing an authoritarian assault on freedom of speech by preventing news coverage of allegedly misbehaving troops; a major television channel aired a heated debate over the bill between an activist and a right-wing politician. Two days later NIF claimed that the bill had made it through the committee—the first of four votes required for such a bill to become law—and was on its way to making it through the Knesset. But, writes Haviv Rettig Gur, the entire episode was a sham:

[The parliamentarian] Robert Ilatov did, in fact, pen [such] a bill. . . . But he didn’t do so because he thought it might pass, or even because he wanted it to pass. As anyone with more than a [little] familiarity with Israeli politics . . . can attest, right-wing lawmakers use such bills to get their names in the newspaper in a nation where news events come at a fevered pace and no mere press release from a junior politician has much hope of getting noticed. The most effective way to get noticed, right-wing lawmakers have discovered, is to trigger the left into a public-relations campaign against them. . . .

The fact that his bill forbidding all filming of IDF soldiers had no hope of becoming the law of the land was the only reason Ilatov allowed himself to propose it in the first place. . . .

As for the bill that made it through the June 17 committee meeting, it no longer forbids filming IDF soldiers. Any filming, for it to become illegal under the stipulations of the new bill, would have to be part of an activist’s already-illegal efforts to obstruct the soldiers’ work. . . . Even now, with the bill so thoroughly gutted as to be unrecognizable, it is not at all clear it can pass in the Knesset. Even the Jewish Home party, the farthest right one gets in the current Knesset, isn’t eager to support it. . . .

[Yet] just about everyone got what they wanted [from the exercise]: the bill’s supporters got to pretend they were defending Israel’s soldiers, and in the bargain that they’re just illiberal enough to satisfy a right-wing base that dislikes liberal pearl-clutching. The NIF and [the Israeli human-rights group] B’Tselem dutifully supplied the pearl-clutching about “tyrants” and got to pretend in their turn that they alone stood athwart history, holding aloft the torch of transparency and liberty in a slowly darkening world. For organizations that fundraise among low-information foreign donors, it’s hard to imagine a better narrative. . . .

But there were losers, too, in this exercise. Israel as a whole, of course, was depicted by its own lawmakers as a nation that could seek to prevent citizens from filming misbehaving troops. [And] IDF soldiers [were] besmirched by the claim that their “morale” is so fragile and their behavior so troubling that photographing them should carry a ten-year prison term.

Read more at Times of Israel

More about: Israel & Zionism, Israeli politics, Knesset, New Israel Fund

Why South Africa Has Led the Legal War against Israel

South Africa filed suit with the International Court of Justice in December accusing Israel of genocide. More recently, it requested that the court order the Jewish state to allow humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip—something which, of course, Israel has been doing since the war began. Indeed, the country’s ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC) has had a long history of support for the Palestinian cause, but Orde Kittrie suggests that the current government, which is plagued by massive corruption, has more sinister motives for its fixation on accusing Israel of imagined crimes:

ANC-led South Africa has . . . repeatedly supported Hamas. In 2015 and 2018, the ANC and Hamas signed memoranda of understanding pledging cooperation against Israel. The Daily Maverick, a South African newspaper that previously won an international award for exposing ANC corruption, has reported claims that Iran “essentially paid the ANC to litigate against Israel in the ICJ.”

The ANC-led government says it is motivated by humanitarian principle. That’s contradicted by its support for Russia, and by [President Cyril] Ramaphosa’s warmly welcoming a visit in January by Mohamed Dagalo, the leader of the Sudanese-Arab Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia. Ramaphosa’s smiling, hand-holding welcome of Dagalo occurred two months after the RSF’s systematic massacre of hundreds of non-Arab Sudanese refugees in Darfur.

While the ANC has looted its own country and aided America’s enemies, the U.S. is insulating the party from the consequences of its corruption and mismanagement.

In Kittrie’s view, it is “time for Congress and the Biden administration to start helping South Africa’s people hold Ramaphosa accountable.”

Read more at The Hill

More about: International Law, Iran, South Africa