Editorial: Terrorizing Palestinian Civil Society: A Strategy for De-Palestinization and De-Legitimization

by BADIL's Staff

It is estimated that 117 of 197 countries are currently facing serious civic restrictions, indicating that civil society across the world has become the target of measures deliberately aimed at constraining their work. These developments shrink the space in which civil society organizations can operate. The issue of shrinking spaces is of particular relevance and urgency in Palestine, given the colonial context in which Palestinian civil society organizations (CSOs) operate.

Shrinking spaces in Palestine is characterized by an array of repressive laws, policies, and practices imposed by the Israeli colonial-apartheid system and the international donor community to restrict, criminalize, and delegitimize Palestinian civil society. This is achieved by increasingly controlling the activities of civil society and threatening their access to funding under the guise of counterterrorism, as well as discrediting CSOs in the eyes of donors and the wider international community. These actions are undertaken with the aim of erasing Palestinian identity and narrative, and to repress the struggle for self-determination. The right of the Palestinian people to resist Israeli colonialism by legitimate means, and the attainment of their inalienable rights of self-determination and return are protected under international law.

In Palestine, civil society organizations play a major role in the struggle for self-determination and in resisting Israel’s colonial rule. Palestinian CSOs work to oppose Israel’s pursuit of absolute control over Palestinian lives by empowering Palestinian rights-holders, building resilience, and exposing the nature of the colonial project’s policies. It is on account of this scrutiny that Israel has unrelentingly tried to delegitimize and ‘de-Palestinianize’ Palestinian CSOs. Such efforts demonstrate the importance of preserving a muscular and effective Palestinian civil society.

Israel, in its repression of Palestinian resistance, is no different than other colonial enterprises throughout history. A core feature of colonialism is that the colonized population is prevented from enjoying the liberties enjoyed by the colonizing society. Calls for freedom and self-determination, or even of the very right of a colonized people to exist, are construed by the colonial regime as existential threats. The colonizer thus works to delegitimize, silence, and violently repress the voices articulating those claims to legitimate resistance in the pursuit of self-determination. Israel’s attacks on Palestinian civil society should be understood as yet another example of this colonial logic.

By suppressing Palestinian CSOs’ work, along with that of human rights defenders (HRDs), Israel seeks to further entrench the colonial-apartheid reality it has created, and to quash any and all effective opposition to such a reality. The Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid prohibits the commission of acts undertaken for the purpose of establishing and maintaining a system of racial domination and oppression, including “[p]ersecution of organizations and persons by depriving them of fundamental rights and freedoms, because they oppose apartheid.”[1] Israel’s discriminatory policies that shrink space for Palestinian CSOs and HRDs should therefore be understood as constituent parts of Israel’s colonial-apartheid regime, and of its wider aim to forcibly transfer the Palestinian population out of Palestine.

Successive Israeli governments have put forward legislative programs to delegitimize Palestinian HRDs, to suppress Palestinian resistance, and to attempt to destroy the collective consciousness of Palestine. Included amongst these laws are the Nakba Law,[2] the (anti) boycott law,[3] the mandatory disclosure of foreign entity funding law,[4] the Counter-Terrorism Law,[5] the entry into Israel law,[6] and the Nation-State Law.[7] Yet these efforts are only one aspect of Israel’s campaign to silence Palestinians. The other more pervasive and damaging aspect is focused on lobbying the international donor community to impose unacceptable funding conditions on Palestinian CSOs. Israeli-led smear campaigns attack organizations advocating for Palestinian rights and for dismantling Israeli apartheid. The targets of delegitimization and defunding campaigns are Palestinian CSOs that promote a rights-based approach in pursuit of Palestinian liberation because these organizations present a threat to the Israeli colonial-apartheid regime and its founding racist ideology.

Such delegitimization campaigns against Palestinian CSOs, which offer effective and clear-sighted criticism of Israeli crimes, coerce the international donor community into inserting conditional clauses in their funding contracts. While it is not unusual in the non-profit sector for donors to impose conditions when issuing funds, these highly restrictive conditions essentially punish political engagement and the pursuit of the full spectrum of rights. Indeed, European policy designates virtually all Palestinian parties as terrorist entities, and places them on EU sanctions lists. This demonstrates that Israeli and European policies work in tandem to de-politicize Palestinian civil society work. Both contradict the interests of Palestinians and further decontextualize the Palestinian political struggle, presenting it instead as a humanitarian problem.

The delegitimization and de-politicization of Palestinian civil society started early in this century, with many funders limiting the scope of projects to those of a purely humanitarian nature. This negatively impacted projects that sought to highlight the full extent of Israel’s international crimes and the failure of the international community to fulfill their moral and legal responsibilities. Projects promoting ‘peace-building,’ for instance, came to be prioritized as funding recipients. This transition disregarded the needs and rights of the Palestinian people and ignored the root causes of their situation. Furthermore, in a move replicating Israeli policies of fragmentation, isolation, and segregation, the international donor community began to restrict the geographical scope of its work and donate to Palestinian beneficiaries in specific areas only.

The international donor community has also attempted to censor the language and terminology used by CSOs, requesting that terms such as ‘ongoing Nakba,’ ‘colonization,’ ‘colonial-apartheid regime,’ and ‘right of return’ be omitted from usage by recipient organizations. CSOs and projects that supported the call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS), as a legitimate form of resistance, increasingly found themselves rejected for funding, demonstrating donor acceptance of Israel’s criminalization of BDS.

While for many years Israel has shut down Palestinian CSOs based on political affiliation, recent changes in the policies of international donors have prompted an even more profound suppression of Palestinian civil society. As a result of these changes, often undertaken in the face of pressure from Israel and its allies, organizations struggle to receive international support and protection.

The latest Israeli designation of a number of Palestinian human rights organizations as ‘terrorist entities, followed by the forced closure of their offices, represents an escalation but it is not entirely unprecedented. It is instead just another episode in a long-running series of attacks. These attacks reflect the emboldening effect that restrictive policies and practices of the international donor community, especially those of the EU and its member states, have had on Israel’s suppression of Palestinian civil society. The EU’s conditional funding, for instance, forces Palestinian civil society to improperly assume a security role against its own people, by imposing on organizations ‘vetting’ and ‘screening’ procedures through which staff and constituents must be processed. Increased conditions placed on the recipients of grants has created an additional administrative burden on CSOs. The long-term effect of these practices is one that serves the broader Israeli campaign to erase the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people.

In sum, Israel targets Palestinian CSOs through laws and policies designed to strain or sever their relations with foreign funding partners, while the international donor community imposes political conditions on funding. Palestinian civil society is thus left unable to properly meet the needs, nor vindicate the rights, of the Palestinian people. All of these accumulated policies and practices are not only inconsistent with the principles of humanitarian action, but also with the Palestinian people’s basic and inalienable rights, as recognized under international law, including the right to self-determination, and the right to resist by any legitimate means foreign oppression, colonization and apartheid.

The conditionalization of aid by the international donor community, without proper consideration of the specific political context in which its recipient/partner organizations operate, inevitably results in the retreat of legal protections, and of civic space itself. The EU, as an influential actor in the region, and as one of the most significant financial supporters of Palestinian CSOs, is therefore failing to uphold its third-party international human rights obligations and those of its member states. Rather than working to support Palestinians in the pursuit of their rights, it instead has made itself complicit in Israel’s efforts to continuously shrink the space for Palestinian CSOs. Its actions further reinforce the current imbalance of powers and the colonial-apartheid regime imposed by Israel.

All these coercive policies imposed by both Israel and the international donor community entrench the Israeli colonial-apartheid system, and confine Palestinian civil society to act only in ways international donors deem appropriate. This will eventually create a neutral, non-confrontational, depoliticized, donor-oriented civil society. Such a civil society is incapable of addressing the root causes of the conflict and the ongoing colonial actions of Israel, and is unfit to vindicate Palestinian rights.

This issue of Al-Majdal deals with the delegitimization of Palestinian civil society through the abuse of counter-terrorism regulations. Providing a historic understanding of Palestinian civil society and its role in a colonial context, the issue analyses the tools and strategies used by both the colonial-apartheid regime and the international donor community to delegitimize civil society and depoliticize the Palestinian narrative. The impact of these strategies on the independence and political sovereignty of the Palestinian civil society is also addressed. Finally, it provides a legal analysis on civil society rights and freedoms in the context of colonial-apartheid rule, and calls for the decolonization of foreign funding.