Holland funds radical left NGO to trash Israel’s High Court

The Dutch government paid the radical left NGO to issue a report alleging that Israel’s high court collaborates with the government to suppress Palestinian rights.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

An extreme-left organization was paid €176,000 by the Dutch government to smear Israel’s High Court of Justice as a legal fig leaf for Israel’s “occupation” of Judea and Samaria, Israel Hayom reported Monday.

B’Tselem, a Jerusalem-based human rights NGO, was given specific instructions by Amsterdam to write a report that would attack court decisions enabling the destruction of illegally built Palestinian homes and buildings.

The contract, which was uncovered by the NGO Monitor watchdog, says in part: “As a test case, B’Tselem will publish a report on the role of the Supreme Court in the expulsion of the Palestinian communities, mainly in the Jordan Valley, in the southern Hebron hills and in the Ma’aleh Adumim area. B’Tselem will regularly refer to the Supreme Court as one of the main mechanisms that enable the ongoing occupation and the violation of human rights by granting judicial legitimacy to Israeli policy.”

Last week, B’Tselem dutifully published “Ostensible Justice – The High Court Judges’ Responsibility for the Demolition of Palestinian Homes and Their Dispossession.”

The report criticized the judges for relating to Israel’s building planning policy as “legal and proper” and for almost always being “focused on the technical question” of whether the petitioners have building permits.

It claimed that by ruling in favor of the state in thousands of cases, the court “ignored the purpose of Israeli policy,” which is to “promot[e] and expand Israeli control of land throughout the West Bank.” This, B’Tselem charged, shows that the court is guilty of providing legal cover to selective Israeli adherence to international law.

The agreement between the Dutch government and B’Tselem has been valid since January 2018, according to Israel Hayom, although it was only signed in May. NGO Monitor learned about it in November, said senior researcher Shaun Sachs, when it received documentation of money given to several Israeli organizations by the Dutch representation in Ramallah.

“Now, when the harsh language used by B’Tselem against Supreme Court justices is revealed, the question arises whether a foreign government should cooperate with a campaign to accuse the Supreme Court justices of war crimes,” he stated.

B’Tselem is one of many far-left organizations that were found to be breaking the NGO Transparency Law. As of late January, it had yet to fulfill the legal requirement to report how much money it received from foreign political entities for 2017.