Next for Knesset: Bill To Probe ‘Leftist’ NGOs
J.J. Goldberg July 12, 2011
Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu party, flush from its victory in the boycott law debate, plans to bring another gag-rule bill to the Knesset floor for final vote next week, Ynet reports. The bill would create a Knesset investigative committee to examine the funding of “leftist” NGOs that “delegitimize” the Israeli army. Members of the Likud are trying to convince the party to hold off to let the passions over the boycott law cool down, but so far Yisrael Beiteinu is adamant, Ynet reports.
The Anti-Defamation League, by the way, became the first major national Jewish organization to criticize the boycott law. ADL issued a public statement today saying it is “concerned that this law may unduly impinge on the basic democratic rights of Israelis to freedom of speech and freedom of expression.” Also on record: the smaller but feistier Labor Zionist organization Ameinu, which called the bill “merely the latest round of the battle that the current government of Israel is waging against the democratic foundations of the State of Israel.”
A Yisrael Beiteinu lawmaker, Alex Miller, appears to be the first individual to sue under the boycott law, the Jerusalem Post reports. He announced today that he plans to sue lawmaker Ahmed Tibi of the United Arab List for a one-minute speech Tibi made to the Knesset Tuesday morning in which he protested the new law and said his party “calls on the public to break this law, boycott settlements, their products, and Ariel, take apart Ariel and send away its residents. They have no right to live on occupied land.” Does parliamentary immunity figure in here? Does Miller care?
Miller lives in Ariel, a city of 30,000 that sits, unlike most other urban settlement blocs, deep in the heart of the West Bank, providing the biggest single headache to negotiators drawing maps of prospective Israeli-Palestinian compromise.
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