Punitive tax on donations will silence Israel’s conscience, say critics

For Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right coalition, a new tax regime that could undermine the viability of left-leaning civil society organisations is about rooting out illegitimate foreign influence. Critics say it is about silencing dissent.

But for Tal Applebaum, a volunteer physician at Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (PHR-I), which runs a clinic for asylum seekers in Jaffa, the essence of the NGO is helping the weakest and most vulnerable people in Israel.

The small clinic, marked with a modest sign in four languages on a quiet residential street, treats about a thousand patients a year, many of whom come back multiple times. The patients, adults who have fled Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia and other lands, are denied medical care by the Israeli state because of their limbo-like status.

Applebaum and PHR-I fill the void left by the government. “Society must take care of the weak,” she says. “This is the least one can do if he has the time, it’s basic,” she adds, in reference to her own efforts.

Applebaum, a retired Tel Aviv family doctor interviewed during a break, works in a cramped examination room, a stethoscope and blood pressure cuff at the ready on her desk. What the room lacks in space, she makes up for in empathy.

“Life is tough for those who aren’t privileged,” she explains. “I’m privileged and I feel I have to share what I have.”

Although this approach is consistent with the highest values of Judaism, the Netanyahu coalition apparently doesn’t embrace it. PHR-I’s clinic is now threatened as a result of legislation introduced by Ariel Kellner of Likud that passed preliminary reading two weeks ago.

The new law would impose an 80% tax on foreign government funding for civil society organisations, and would bar organisations that receive the majority of their funds through foreign state entities from petitioning Israeli courts.

In practice, that would make it impossible for PHR-I and similar non-profits to continue receiving the foreign funding that sustains them or to be active in the Israeli court system where they fight government and army actions they see as abusive and illegal.

Among the other groups threatened are Peace Now, Ir Amim, which focuses on East Jerusalem, Gisha, which presses against the odds for meeting the humanitarian needs of Gaza’s population, B’tselem, the largest Israeli human rights organization combatting the occupation and what it views as apartheid, HaMoked, which fights in the courts against alleged violations of the rights of Palestinians, and Bimkom, which focuses on planning rights, to name a few.

Taken together, such groups are seen by their supporters as the collective conscience of Israel and a last bastion of humanism in a country where Jewish supremacism has gained considerable traction.

Although Applebaum is aided by a translator, cultural and linguistic gaps sometimes give her the feeling that she is unable to help cure as much as she would like. “I see a lot of diseases. But the most difficult part to understand is what is not said during the visit, the problem that makes the patient come again and again.

“There is a cultural difference with Ethiopian patients. If they say they have pain somewhere, they can mean something else. They may think that they have a demon in their abdomen and that I can take it out.”

The explanatory notes to Kellner’s bill essentially cast the NGOs as foreign agents meddling in Israeli affairs. The NGOs counter that issues they address such as the occupation are by definition international and that the donor countries are European democracies.

The bill, which imposes an 80% tax on NGOs that receive foreign government funding, would not apply to NGOs that also receive funding from the Israeli government or to those granted exemptions by the finance minister. In practice this means that right-wing organisations would not be touched.

“The purpose of this bill is to reduce the indirect influence of foreign governments and political entities on the state of Israel,” says the explanatory notes to the bill.

The foreign agent argument was also used by Vladmir Putin to eliminate NGOs that differed with the regime’s views in Russia.

Critics of the legislation see it as an integral part of a drive to silence freedom of expression, debate and critical voices while engineering a shift to an autocratic system of government. Most of the groups have advocacy arms that have taken on added importance in recent years with the decline and even disappearance of left-wing parties in the Knesset. If not for the field research of the left-wing NGOs, many dark deeds would be unmonitored and unreported.

For example, last week, PHR-I published a report on detention and alleged torture on a wide scale of Gaza doctors and medical personnel. The IDF says its soldiers uphold international law.

PHR-I is simultaneously taking court action to overturn a government halting of medical care previously accorded to children of asylum seekers. It says the cutback violates Israel’s commitments under the UN Convention on Rights of the Child.

In East Jerusalem, Peace Now and Ir Amim are helping Palestinians in the neighbourhood of Silwan combat being evicted as part of the far-right Ateret Cohanim organisation’s drive to expand the Jewish presence in the area.

Although some of the low-income Palestinian families trace their own presence back more than 60 years, discriminatory Israeli laws effectively allow settlers to “reclaim” property in East Jerusalem that was in Jewish hands before 1948 while preventing Palestinians from doing the same in West Jerusalem.

This has led to a series of cruel, court-endorsed evictions, with residents bracing for a likely decision this week that could dispossess two more families, the Odehs and the Shuweikis. All told, 18 homes housing a total of about 700 people are in danger, according to Zuheir Rajabi, a community leader who is himself facing eviction proceedings.

“Peace Now helps us a lot,” Rajabi says. “They stand by us legally and bring people on visits to see what is happening here. They are with us on cases from start to finish. On a psychological level, they always give us the feeling they are with us.”

“If they stop the Israelis who help us defend our homes, it’s a big problem,” Rajabi says. “It will make things much harder for us and increase the danger.”

But Ateret Cohanim executive director Daniel Luria says stopping the work of Peace Now, Ir Amim and other foreign government-funded NGOs is a step that is long overdue. “How can any Israeli government allow the funding of all these anti-Israel, anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist activities?” he asked. “I don’t want the German government deciding which Jews should live or not live in an old synagogue in the heart of Jerusalem.”

Hagit Ofran, director of Peace Now’s settlement monitoring unit, says that if the bill becomes law “it will shut us down”.

“We won’t be able to get donations from the countries that support us. No donor will give to us when there is 80% tax. This will shut down all the organisations that the state doesn’t like.” Other NGO staffers stressed that any tax would stop the funding because the foreign government donations are conditional on being tax exempt.

In the PHR-I clinic, Applebaum is defiant when asked about the legislation. Even if the clinic is harmed, it will keep going in some form, she vows. “We will still be here even if we don’t have medicine to give. The most important thing is caring, the fact that someone can speak about what he suffers from. Even if what we can do is very small, we’ll still be here.”