They are targeted for their role in opposing the Israeli occupation and human rights violations and, in the case of Al-Haq, likely targeted for their role in the ICC investigation.
[1] https://www.972mag.com/shin-bet-dossier-palestinian-ngos/
I mean, why wouldn’t you demand proof? Governments have a long and nasty history of conflating their political interests with security interests, just trusting their assertions seems extremely foolhardy.
More succinctly; “it would compromise means and methods” is a phenomenal way to cover up shaky or non-existent evidence.
Obviously banning an organization is much lower stakes than killing or jailing someone, and we should adjust accordingly. Still, if Israel (or any other country really) is going to run around and say that an organization or person is connected to terrorism, they should pony up enough evidence commensurate with the actions they propose so that we can discuss the matter. The pressure for any state to conflate political and security threats is high, and public scrutiny is part of what provides a counter balance.
This is particularly important if a country is demanding that the international community writ large take action against a given person or organization. Should not the citizens of the countries being asked to participate have the opportunity to see some evidence and discuss the matter?
Why does the opinion of multiple third parties carry more merit about the adversarial facts of a conflict than one of the participants to said conflict? Really?
EU is the modern equivalent of Soviet Union and it behaves like that. They do a ton of stuff wrong and they take decisions without any regard for the local culture and people. This has nothing to do with illegal access to other peoples devices.
Also, HRW statement should be taken with a grain of salt, since they have conflict of interest since he was appointed by Human Rights Watch (HRW) to its advisory board that oversees reporting on Arab-Israeli affairs In February 2011 (All after his convictions)
So having two accountants telling you it is "general knowledge" that these orgs are funneling money to PFLP are not statements in the void.
No proof there was any kind of torture also in your article. Only "may". Apply your own standard.
And the subject is definitely not innocent body that is solely targeted because of their role in the ICC investigation
You know who else this sort of indict applies to? Nelson Mandela and his involvement with the ANC.
Nevermind that I don't trust the Israeli legal system that existed in the 80s to give a fair shake to a Palestinian student activist.
Just looking through these comments I understand nothing of the narratives at play for either side. Most of them don't line up with history I can find at Wikipedia, or they'll partially match but then deviate significantly in some fanciful explanation.
There's more mud than honor in the Middle East, I guess you could say, and probably not because there's a shortage of the latter.
They don't. Sending a Police Riot control unit against a group of people throwing stones and molotovs does not qualify as being terrorized.
> accuses everyone that fights it as terrorists.
If they hurt bystanding civilians (and they do) or funnel money for it (and they do) there is nothing wrong with that.
> Maybe some are
They are, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and many more... not some and not maybe.
> please provide evidence for any terrorist accusations
They do.
Israel have problems. It should solve them. Hyperbolic discussion will never achieve it.
2)
> follow the history of the region
> terrorize their neighbors
Counter example:
2005: Israel unilateral dismantling of the 21 Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip
2007: Hamas takeover of Gaza
2007: Gaza Blockade
I do not think we see the history of the region in the same way.
As you mention Hamas, it gives me the opportunity to point out that Israel bankrolled Hamas founder Sheikh Yassin even prior to the founding of Hamas. This was admitted by former military governor of Gaza Yitzhak Segev and other Israeli government and military officials. Israel wanted to undermine secular political Palestinians and empower Islamist political Palestinians. Once successful, they bemoan that the Islamists they funded and worked to empower, have come to power.
Incidentally, the EU funded NGOs which Israel are spying on here are mostly secular (and even the militant groups which Israel is claiming the NGOs are affiliated with are secular as well).
Yes, prior to the founding of Hamas, Israel was fighting secular terrorist groups and gave support to other (less violent) Palestinian factions in hope that those other factions could gain control and bring peace. That backfired miserably. But it wasn't some sort of nefarious conspiracy like you are alleging.
Second, molotov and rocks is protest, not a peaceful one but it still is. You have to understand these people have nothing else to lose, they’ve been beaten down with far more uneven military power.
I was listening to a podcast in which former Israeli soldiers were talking about how they were raiding palestinian houses at night and making arrests. They themselves thought it was wrong. How do you expect a generation that grows like that to behave, throw roses at the Israeli border?
The actual timeline is that in 2006, Hamas won the elections (hence the "takeover") despite Israel prohibiting them from campaigning and arresting their candidates.
Upon their election, Israel put them under sanction, prohibited them from traveling between the two parts of Palestine they had been elected to run, withheld governmental money owed to the PA, and sponsored a coup against their government (which pushed them out of the West Bank, hence Hamas' exclusive control of Gaza).
AFAIK, elections have not been permitted in the PA since then.
If you credit Israel for dismantling the settlements, I think it would make sense to also credit Israel for having built them. Selecting events can make any side seem like the good guys.
This is not meant as a pro-someone or anti-someone argument. You can use the same technique to argue for or against either side.
Molotov is not only a protest, it is a peaceful protest without weapon which is a human right.
> Hamas takeover of Gaza
You do know, that Hamas is an ally of Israel in Gaza, don't you?
Now how do you argue with someone who has the very basics of the conflict wrong.
Is it a police operation if it is conducted in occupied foreign territory or would that count as military action?
> They are, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and many more... not some and not maybe.
Is every Palestinian who voted for Hamas in the last elections permitted in Palestine in 2006 a terrorist as well?
No. But at the same time, If Hamas hides military equipment in a news building where other civilians work, then Hamas is committing a war crime.
And Israel has the right to attack this building while taking every action to minimize civilians bystanders casualties. As they did by giving 1hr notice.
Israel engages in illegal extrajudicial assassinations of civilians, and their occupation of Palestine is a war crime under the geneva convention.
No evidence has been presented that Hamas was actually hiding military equipment in this news building.
https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2021/06/israel-says-ham...
This is not true. Military occupation by itself is allowed, but puts certain restrictions on the occupying power. For example, it's forbidden to transfer own population into the occupied territory, which Israel does.
This kind of hides the fact, that a responsibility for war crimes is personal. Not everyone will be as lucky as Ariel Sharon who died before he was tried.
But sending an army unit with an order "break the village" which results in shock grenades being dropped into a cradle with the baby inside does qualify them as being terrorized.
Note: I'm Israeli and was working with people who got those orders and carried them out during their service.
It is also funny how often people forget why the riots start in the first place. So often it seems to be that the riots are precipitated by egregious abuse by settlers/army/police/Israeli policy. Abuse the people long enough and they will rage.
Did they find the original shooter, who "attacked" security vehicle?
Is it? The attempted murder of innocent people? Is that the sort of behaviour that should be accepted and tolerated? because it sounds like you are saying that.
In your opinion, what should a teenager do after witnessing extrajudicial execution of his relative by occupying army?
Solution is simple: end the occupation.
> which involves terrorists
Your terrorists are someone else's freedom fighters.
That is not an answer, might as well have just written "Free Palestine!"
I would be interested in hearing your real solution, instead of just repeating a slogan. Nobody has been able to figure it out for decades.
The moment we ditch colonial dreams and ideas of racial superiority (as a base for Zionism), there are two possible solutions: pull out settlements, pull out army or annex all the territories, give citizenship to all residents. In both cases, , start preparation for return of refugees and work out compensation (like Germany after WW2).
2) Searching google for "shock grenades on a girl israel" will show you first a Jewish Ultra-Orthodox girl getting hit around a corona protest last year:
https://twitter.com/almogbenzikri/status/1251004227956150273
So this is a police brutality issue, not a Palestine issue.
3) Based on your previous comments- "Hamas is an ally of Israel in Gaza" I'm thinking you are just out of the loop.
No, my colleague actually spent time in jail for military crimes.
> 2) Searching google for
You get what you search for.
> you are just out of the loop
Or, what is more probable, you are just pushing Hasbara.
Pretty disingenuous for you to try and present OP in such a way.
The nature of hasbara has features which warrant distinguishing it from propaganda. For example it seemingly exclusively relies on astroturfing. That’s useful to know that there are organizations giving students fellowships [1] to promote these efforts. Another feature is in the objective. Unlike generic propaganda, the objective isn’t to promote domestic nationalism, counter competing ideologies, or to demotivate foreign adversaries. The objective is obfuscating the settler colonial nature of Israel and white-washing Israeli military war crimes.
To me, this warrants calling these efforts by what the Israelis call it.
There is one thing I want to clarify though. Hasbara is Hebrew for “explaining” - so when Israelis or any Hebrew speaker say hasbara it literally means “explaining” their point of view. Now more often or not, Israelis and Hebrew speakers actually complain that “our governments Hasbara/explanation was garbage” or “wow, we did a really poor job explaining ourselves there”.
When you put it into that context, you need to understand from an Israeli/Hebrew speaker point of view “hasbara” is not a bad thing at all - it’s a necessity regardless of if you are pro or anti Israel.
Unfortunately people who don’t understand Hebrew have turned a common Hebrew term into a derogatory attack against any Israeli or pro Israeli individual and this extremely problematic for so many reasons I won’t get into now.
Regardless, every time you accuse someone of “hasbara” you are actually just accusing them of explaining themselves or their point of view and since it is everyone’s right to be allowed to explain their point of view - you really aren’t accusing them of anything bad at all.
"you are just pushing Hasbara."
I'm Israeli, and I have never met an Israeli who would say that phrase, Especially in english, using the hebrew word like that. Something doesn't add up.. Are you russian or israeli arab or something? You had work partners in magav and they told you they put a stun grenade in a baby stroller? This seems pretty weird..
Secondly, you make the claim that they attained the evidence by torture - with no evidence of such.
The fact remains that two Palestinian accountants testified in court that these "charity" organizations were funneling money to the PFLP terrorist organization.
HRW and AI may not think that the evidence is strong enough, and maybe it isn't, but given the testimony, it seems much more reasonable that the Israeli gov't conduct espionage on them if they suspect there is possible terrorist financing happening.
Let's also remember that HRW and AI are hardly unbiased sources when it comes to the Israel/Palestine conflict. They have both repeatedly taken sides in that conflict.
This also wouldn't be the first case of a "human rights" organization in the middle east being used to funnel money that ends up in the hands of terrorists, so I think espionage on these organizations should be expected, and is likely ubiquitous, whether they use NSO tools or not.
2. I only mentioned that torture has been alleged. Shin Bet has a long-standing pattern of using torture and other inhuman or degrading treatment to obtain confessions.
3. These two disgraced accountants only provided assertions on general hypotheses, no concrete evidence. Such testimony isn't worth much. To quote +972 [see above]:
> An examination of the dossier’s “evidence,” however, along with an examination of the summaries of Abdat’s and Hamuda’s repeated interrogations, reveals that the accountants — who did not work for any of the six targeted organizations — based most of their accusations on general hypotheses, what they alleged was “common knowledge,” or information they claimed was widely “known.”
> More importantly, even Abdat’s and Hamuda’s unsubstantiated testimonies indicate, at most, that some of these organizations were involved in civic and public activities such as student events, helping the sick, and poetry classes that form part of the PFLP’s work as a movement in Palestinian society. A lawyer representing one of the accountants, Abdat, further alleges that his client may have been pressured to provide testimony following interrogation methods that could amount to torture or ill-treatment.
Their reliability must also be questioned:
> Moreover, the summaries of Abdat and Hamuda’s interrogations reveal how poorly acquainted they were with the six organizations listed in Gantz’s declaration. For example, during his interrogation on March 31, Hamuda mentioned the six groups but erroneously noted that parliamentarian Khalida Jarrar is the director of Addameer, an organization that defends the rights of Palestinian political prisoners, despite the fact that she has not headed the organization since 2006 (Addameer’s current director is attorney Sahar Francis).
4. I'm not sure we should accuse AI and HRW as biased, simply for standing up for human rights in Israel, which, considering where the majority of violation lie and who the occupying power is, will necessarily focus on one player. After all, it is not the PA but the Israeli army that demolishes homes or holds people in indefinite "administrative" detention.
---
In short, it is up for the Israeli government to prove publicly - beyond a reasonable doubt - that these severe allegations of terrorism funding are true and that the designation as terrorist associations is justified. It is not up to those organizations and their defenders to prove a negative. Innocent until proven guilty is after all the foundation of state respecting the rule of law.
A designation based on secret "evidence", combined with the fact that even confidential dossiers don't offer a shred of evidence, doesn't make this look like a justified designation
[1] https://theintercept.com/2021/11/04/secret-israel-dossier-pa...
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/my-resignation-from-the-int...
https://theintercept.com/2020/10/29/glenn-greenwald-resigns-...
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-8-2019-00193...
This was based on testimony given in court by two Palestinian accountants that Al-Haq was funneling money to terrorism.
It should be noted that Al-Haq does not make disclose either the sources or destinations of donation money.
Not their own accountants
But I feel like there is no use continuing to argue this with you, so peace out.
If you dig a little deeper at what the actual accountant's lawyer said - he said his client was seated in a chair with his hands tied behind his back during his initial arrest. Inventing a new name ("The shabah position") doesn't make it torture.
Obviously the lawyer wants to protect his client from retribution from Al-Haq, so he will make outlandish accusations of "torture". I don't blame him - I'd be afraid of Al-Haq too after testifying against them.
...but remember that both accountants provided detailed testimony in an open court room - not from a torture chamber. Your claims torture are false.
Please, stop lying.
The established facts, that the Shin Bet tortures people and israeli courts accept anything extracted under torture as testimony, do not in any way make your attempt at attacking sources of information nor your claim that this is false any more valid.
Your insistence makes me wonder what kind of incentives you have to be perceiving to go out of your way to defend a bald-faced lie like this.
Can we go back to having an earnest discussion instead of a boring, hasbara-typical farce?
If someone disagrees with you, surely they must be getting paid. Whose payroll are you on?
> Can we go back to having an earnest discussion
Indeed.
I am sure you are aware, but there is an ongoing, well-funded and highly organised propaganda campaign with deep military integration.
https://old.reddit.com/r/WikiLeaks/comments/nher96/inside_is...
https://old.reddit.com/r/israelexposed/comments/n4etue/found...
https://old.reddit.com/r/israelexposed/comments/o5su74/the_i...
972mag is a magazine founded by Jewish journalists in Tel Aviv. When an Israeli magazine run by Jews condemns torture of Palestinians and is called a "Palestinian defense magazine", you have to wonder how provincial the thought process that would use that label is. Considering world opinion on the human rights of Palestinans who were tortured by Israel, which includes these journalists, and which includes their political pole within Jewish Israeli society, you have to wonder how isolated the group on the other side of all of this is.
That’s not actually a counter argument for torture here. Tons of torture victims will walk into court and say everything they said in the torture chamber; the threat of continued torture of them and their loved ones is quite the motivator. History is littered with examples of torture victims “confessing” in court, often to crimes that were laughably made up.
Using torture to force victims to testify against themselves or others in an open court room was routine in early USSR, for example, so I don't see how this changes anything.
He was only taken off the terrorist watch list in '08.
As for the violence the ANC perpetrated: It would definitely be considered terrorism today.
Were violent European revolutions against their monarchs all terroristic?
Honestly surprised to see so many apartheid apologists in these replies.
Unfortunately the answer is something like "yes but we don't want to speak about that because it makes us feel uncomfortable" most of the time. Thing is western society has been doing well the past 20/30 years regarding civil-war like violence at a large scale and for a hard to fix issue, and no one wants to talk about how or why but everyone wants to believe days of violent civil uprising are long gone.
What's stupid is thinking that on a violent conflict only one side can be guilty of terrorism.
Why is the same charge not levied against the apartheid South African state, which refused to renounce violence after committing violence against its own black citizens (forcible imprisonment, beatings, etc.) for daring to marry a white person, against anyone who was caught in a white area of the country, etc. etc.?
If you are saying that the ANCs actions make them objectively terrorists, I would say that I've never seen the term terrorist used in an objective and consistent manner.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UMkhonto_we_Sizwe#1980s:_Bombi...
That's not a justification of apartheid, though. One can argue that apartheid and terrorism are both morally despicable. Or one may argue that terrorism is sometimes justifiable.
And there are many other historical examples of the same. E.g. Soviet partisans did a lot of things that would also be considered terrorism during WW2 - targeting not Germans or their pet militias, but civilians accused of collaboratinism (which could be very vaguely defined - e.g. teachers who refused to close down schools on occupied territories). Again, you could debate whether it was justified or not, especially in the context of much broader use of terrorist tactics by Germans themselves, but that's a separate conversation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_Council_of_Churc...
If you ran with a gang in your 20's, that doesn't give the government permanent access to a wire tap when you start doing social justice advocacy in your 40's.
The name for this is "allegations," specifically "unconfirmed allegations," AKA "random BS."
The US had an office in Jerusalem dealing with Palestinians that Trump closed down. Biden and Blinken began to reopen it but the Israeli government have refused permission for the US to reopen it.
This is following Israel's throwing Palestinians out of their homes in East Jerusalem back in May and replacing them with settlers, which was followed by a mass bombing of the Gaza strip by Israel, including the building in which the Associated Press had its office, a building Israel said it purposely targeted.
This amidst settlement of Palestine's West Bank by Israel which is opposed by multiple UN resolutions supported by an overwhelming majority of nations.
What's your definition?
I don't dispute even more could have been killed by Israel and more destroyed by Israel if the United Nations Security Council did not call for an ending to it and that if that did not happen "it wouldn't be a place anymore...not something anyone walks away from". People can go and look at the videotaped news reports from Gaza after the bombings and judge for themselves.
I also encourage you to look at Wikipedia's List of ongoing armed conflicts [1], which lists the Israeli–Palestinian conflict as a "Minor Conflict" given its scale in comparison to the other entries.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_armed_conflict...
Truly upside-down world.
Mass bombings tend to kill folks in the blast areas, but there are a lot of places that aren't directly in the blast. If you destroy one house with a bomb, the surrounding houses will likely have damage but still stand - and the residents will know.
The mass launches of artillery rockets against israeli cities was mass bombing, just less effective.
It's incredibly difficult to have sympathy with Israel when their politicians and military behave with such little regard for human rights and human life - I really wish they'd take the moral high ground and just fucking stop the evictions, abductions, torture, beatings and killing.
Why did you omit the reason for targeting?
"... because it was being used by the groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad and that terrorist attacks were directed from there"
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-has-received-mo...
I think it's obvious why he omitted it.
Israel is free not to release their evidence, and the rest of us are free to infer what we would like from the fact that a first world nation refuses to substantiate their reasoning for bombing a news outlet.
That would stand for pretty much any nation that considers itself to be free. If Germany bombed their AP HQ and refused to release any evidence of why, there would be some very stern questions as well.
that is a complete distortion of the facts. This was a perfectly legal eviction which made it's way through the court system over a number of years. The pa put a nationalist spin on it in order to distract from their failing election campaign and unfortunately, everyone fell for it. But it was never anything more than a rental dispute.