Last Friday, the Israeli defense minister Benny Gantz announced the designation of six Palestinian organizations as terrorist groups due to their deep entanglements with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which has been committing murderous attacks since 1968. Both the EU and several European states have provided funds to the recently proscribed organizations. A decade ago, pro-Israel activists even supplied the European Union with information, for a long time ignored, about the links between these groups and the PFLP. Members of one group—the Union of Agricultural Work Committees—murdered the seventeen-year-old Rina Shnerb in 2019. Jonathan Tobin writes:
These Palestinian NGOs are being described by their allies and apologists abroad, as well as newspapers like the New York Times, as well as the State Department spokesman Ned Price, as “civil-society organizations.” This language depicts them as ordinary philanthropic groups who work to improve the lives of disadvantaged people. And that is the way they are treated by an international network of human-rights organizations, in addition to newspapers like the Times that regard their members as credible sources for articles skewed towards bolstering the “apartheid state” lie about Israel.
What even many who count themselves as friends of Israel don’t understand is that the purpose of those groups that claim to promote human rights is, at least with respect to the Middle East, not philanthropic. Well-meaning Americans hear the words “civil society” and “human rights” and make unfounded assumptions.
The problem doesn’t stop with these NGOs that help promote the work of Palestinian groups. The heart of the international human-rights scam that is now just a thinly disguised cover for Jew-hatred is the United Nations and its Human Rights Council, which lends a façade of legitimacy to these efforts to libel the Jewish state.
It’s long past time for those who care about human rights to reject the scam being perpetrated on a gullible world by those who parade under that banner.
Read more on JNS: https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-human-rights-scam-at-the-heart-of-the-ngo-controversy/