Last NGO Standing: How Funding Restrictions Threaten the Independence and Political Sovereignty of Palestinian Civil Society

by Amjad Alqasis

Palestinian civil society organizations (CSOs) face growing difficulties in their work due to an environment of constraints, restrictions, and obstacles. They are compromised by the Palestinian Authority (PA), on the one hand, which adopts laws and policies to control these organizations and jeopardize their independence, and by Israel on the other, which continues to attack CSOs, especially human rights organizations, to undermine their credibility and dry up their funding sources. Restrictions are experienced differently depending on geographical location, type of organization, and the nature of their work. Israel does not tolerate any objection to its system of control and tries to silence international as well as Israeli and Palestinian CSOs who uphold international law and the rights of Palestinians.

Funding constraints in the Palestinian context include measures such as preventing engagement with the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Campaign, excising the right of return from official discourse, limiting the geographic scope of projects to the OPT, censoring terminology, and restricting projects solely to those of a humanitarian nature.

In the latest Israeli escalation of efforts to shut down critical Palestinian civil society voices, the Israeli Ministry of Defence, on 19 October 2021, issued an order declaring six Palestinian civil society organizations in the occupied Palestinian territory (OPT) “terrorist organizations.” Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, that work closely with many of these groups, criticized the designation, responding with the following: “this decision is an alarming escalation that threatens to shut down the work of Palestine’s most prominent civil society organizations. The decades-long failure of the international community to challenge grave Israeli human rights abuses and impose meaningful consequences for them has emboldened Israeli authorities to act in this brazen manner. How the international community responds will be a true test of its resolve to protect human rights defenders.”

Two Israeli strategies stand out: first, the demonization of non-government organizations (NGOs) that support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which is supported by efforts to influence European governments and parliaments to categorically withdraw financial support from organizations that support the BDS movement. The second is to defame Palestinian NGOs by alleging that they have links to terrorism, without providing meaningful evidence to support these claims. Accusations are instead based primarily on repetitive and misleading information, selective research, and guilt by association. This is discussed in reports by the UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in the Palestinian Territories occupied in 1967 which emphasize "an atmosphere of intimidation, threats and arrests of human rights defenders and civil society actors by Israel."

Israel attacks Palestinian CSOs by pressurizing the US, EU, and its member states to cut funding to Palestinian organizations. By lobbying governments and publishing reports through the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs – which was absorbed into the Ministry of Foreign Affairs – Israel propagates claims that these organizations are terrorists or have ties to terrorism, without any significant evidence.

In this vein, NGO-Monitor is increasingly growing influential in European parliaments, as parliamentarians fear being labelled ‘anti-Semitic’ or a ‘BDS supporter.’ This threatens to delegitimize the discourse on Palestinian rights and, moreover, respect for international law altogether.

For example, at the beginning of 2022, intense lobbying by NGO-Monitor and Israeli Ministries resulted in the Dutch government conducting an internal investigation of Israeli claims that the Palestinian Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC) supported terrorism. Even though it found no evidence to support Israeli accusations or any misuse of funding, it ceased all funding to the organization, concluding that ties to terrorism were present at the individual level between UAWC staff and board members, and groups listed in the European restricted lists. Israel hailed the move as a victory and urged other European governments to follow suit. This decision sets a grave precedent, as it dramatically lowers the bar of evidence from proofing organizational ties, mismanagement of funds, and fraud, to individual ties at the member and staff levels, without further explanation. The report has also not been made public, and the Dutch government has not revealed its sources on the claim of “individual ties”, which is likely based on Israeli intelligence and security reports.   

Additionally, the EU is constantly struggling to defend itself in the face of mounting accusations of “funding terrorism” levelled by Israeli officials, NGO-Monitor, and other pro-occupation groups, for providing financial support to human rights organizations that call for BDS. The EU Commission Vice-President, Mogherini, for instance, denied accusations of financing activities that support terrorism, assuring Israel that its funding was not used to support the boycott of Israel or BDS activities, and was certainly not used to finance terrorism.

This position is highly problematic because it indirectly links the BDS movement and terrorism, and thus tacitly accepts Israel’s framing. Moreover, it demonstrates that Israel is creating a state of anxiety among international partner organizations, by forcing them to defend and re-defend their involvement in the OPT. This has redirected time and focus away from much needed advocacy work in the OPT, and towards reacting to these allegations.

Most recently, the EU unfroze funding in July 2022 for Al-Haq and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, which had been suspended due to an EU internal investigation into accusations of fraud and misuse of funding brought forward by Israel. The review of the European Anti-Fraud Office clarified that “no suspicions of irregularities and/or fraud” were found and that it “did not find sufficient ground to open an investigation.” This illustrates an important missed opportunity for the EU to criticize Israeli lawfare tactics and misinformation campaigns. By obfuscating the Palestinian context through administrative and legal jargon, the EU is falling short of its obligations to defend human rights organizations and activists from such attacks, and is instead leaving the door open for new Israeli allegations of the same nature to continue.

The Counterterrorism Clause

In 2019, the EU introduced a new counterterrorism clause under Annex 2 of its contracts (General Conditions) – to be applied globally – guaranteeing that no funding will directly or indirectly go to entities listed in the EU restrictive lists. Although no individual Palestinian is on the lists, Palestinian groups are listed. According to the EU representative office in East Jerusalem, “While the entities included in the EU restrictive list cannot benefit from EU funded activities, it is understood that a natural person affiliated to, sympathizing with, or supporting any of the entities mentioned in the lists is not excluded from benefitting.” Regardless, several Palestinian CSOs question the legal validity of this letter as it represents an opinion rather than a legally binding definition of the EU clause. As a result, they fear this clarification will not protect them in case of a legal confrontation with the EU regarding the implementation of projects.

As approximately 30 – 40 percent of EU aid is disbursed through NGOs, this clause may potentially create a situation where recipient organisations are forced to decide who can and cannot benefit from or participate in EU-funded projects. It is also important to note that USAID applied a similar clause in the early 2000s to impose stricter requirements on Palestinian CSOs. This led many Palestinian NGOs, especially human rights organisations, to stop cooperating with USAID.

Another concern is that signing the clause implicitly means agreeing with its contents, and accepting that a gross number of Palestinian political parties and movements are terrorists. This undermines and erases the Palestinian reality of foreign oppression and the right to resist. Furthermore, on an operational level, signing the clause may result in CSOs being seen as “traitors” or unprincipled, and thus may have severe implications for the legitimacy of CSOs within their respective constituencies. This will lead to difficulties finding partners and beneficiaries to implement activities or projects. However, the dilemma is that refusal to sign weakens the cause of these organizations, as they lose necessary financial support.

International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Definition

Another example of Israeli lobbying to silence criticism of Israel’s human rights record is evident in the misuse of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism. Seven of the eleven examples provided in the definition focus on and conflate criticism of the Israeli state with anti-Semitism. The US, several EU member-states, and others have recently adopted the IHRA definition as their official definition of anti-Semitism. For example, the EU Justice and Home Affairs Council adopted a declaration on the fight against anti-Semitism in which it encouraged all member states to endorse the IHRA definition. Furthermore, in 2021, the EU adopted a strategy to combat anti-Semitism with a €1.55 billion budget, using the IHRA definition as the benchmark to determine incidents of anti-Semitism, and encouraged local authorities, regions, cities, and other institutions and organisations throughout the EU to do the same. The strategy needs to be understood in the context of other EU programmes meant to achieve a global impact: coupled with Israeli efforts to frame legitimate criticism of and opposition to Israel’s occupation and widespread human rights violations as anti-Semitic, the strategy will have a devastating impact on human rights work and human rights defenders advocating for Palestinian rights.

These developments should come as no surprise: by the end of 2018, Israeli scholars had already begun to forewarn the definition’s misuse, and, in 2020, more than 120 Palestinian and Arab academics published a statement against the IHRA definition. Now, pro-occupation groups lobby for wider acceptance of the definition to further target and restrict funding for Palestinian CSOs. This could potentially result in the introduction of a new anti-Semitism clause in funding and partnership agreements, that acknowledges the IHRA definition and codifies and entrenches Israel’s framing.  In conjunction with the existing anti-terrorism clause, a future anti-Semitism clause would further diminish funding possibilities for most CSOs in the OPT.  

*  Amjad Alqasis holds an LL.M. in international public law and is a legal researcher and a member of the BADIL Network for Advocacy Support (NAS). He served as the international and legal advocacy coordinator and adviser of Al Haq Center for Applied International Law. He is a freelance human rights and advocacy adviser and has published several articles and research papers on various topics concerning the Palestinian-Israeli conflict