PALESTINIAN HUMAN RIGHTS NGOS WILL NOT BE SILENCED

[Israeli occupation claims, while refusing to reveal its alleged evidence, that the six human rights and civil society organizations would be connected to PFLP.]

Al-Haq strongly rejects the designation made by the Israeli Ministry of Defense, on 19 October 2021, of Al-Haq and five fellow Palestinian civil society organisations as “terror organisations,” under Israel’s domestic Anti-Terrorism Law, 2016 and calls for international solidarity and concrete measures to ensure its immediate rescission.

The baseless allegations represent an alarming and unjust escalation of attacks against the Palestinian people in their struggle for freedom, justice and the right to self-determination. Israel’s widespread and systematic smearing of Palestinian human rights NGOs and human rights defenders aims to delegitimize, oppress, silence and drain their work and resources. Further, the unlawful application of Israel’s domestic law to the occupied Palestinian territory (OPT) serves to entrench the maintenance of its settler-colonial and apartheid regime of institutionalised racial discrimination and domination over the Palestinian people as a whole.

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JARRAR AND MENG: UNRELENTING WOMEN WALK OUT OF JAIL

One of them, Khalida Jarrar, a 58-year-old Palestinian lawmaker, released after two years in Israeli prison, has been in jail at least four times, and knows that if she does not betray the hopes of her people, she will soon be back in prison.

Jarrar’s alleged crime is her insistence that just as the Israelis have a homeland and definable borders, so must her people, the Palestinians. Since the Israeli state cannot make the allegation of Jarrar being violent or planning violence stick, they simply accuse her of belonging to a terrorist organisation, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

Indeed, all organisations, including the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO), who seek self-determination for Palestinians are classified by Israel as “terrorist”.

What might have made Jarrar’s latest stint in jail more painful is that two months ago, she lost her 31-year- old daughter, Suha Ghassan Jarrar, a human rights activist with a Master of Science degree in Climate Change Science and Policy.

Israel rejected all pleas to allow Jarrar out for a furlough to enable her bury her daughter and return to detention. So, she had to watch the funeral on television.

This Sunday, on leaving prison, Jarrar visited her daughter’s graveside at the Ramallah Cemetery. She knelt down, broke down in tears and lamented: “They forbade me from participating in the funeral of my beloved daughter and from planting a kiss on my daughter’s forehead.

They denied me her farewell…The last time I hugged Suha was the night of my arrest in 2019.” Jarrar has been banned from leaving the country since 1998, after attending that year’s Human Rights Defenders’ Summit in Paris.

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UK GOVERNMENT DISMISSES LATEST ATTEMPT BY UK LAWYERS FOR ISRAEL TO HARM PALESTINIAN CIVIL SOCIETY

These attacks, generally referred to as “lawfare”, are mostly conducted by disinformation groups supporting Israel’s occupation and apartheid regime, such as: NGO Monitor, Regavim, Shurat HaDin, International Legal Forum, Lawfare Project, and UK Lawyers For Israel (UKLFI).

UKLFI in particular is a legal advocacy and campaigning organisation based in the UK that has been attempting to smear and disrupt the work of Palestinian human rights groups and their partners for years...

On 9 March 2020, UKLFI was required to issue a public apology after being sued in a defamation case (which was settled) for having accused DCI – Palestine of providing financial and material support to proscribed organisations...

PwC Palestine explained that it undertook thorough client acceptance checks as well as periodic continuance checks to comply with legal, regulatory and ethical obligations imposed by the Guidelines. Moreover, the respondent argued that “UKLFI’s allegations of links between PFLP and the 2 NGO charities are not well supported or evidenced.” On 24 September 2021 the UK NCP issued the final decision, concluding that the complaint was unfounded as PwC Palestine “had appropriate policies and procedures in place to obtain reasonable assurance that its clients were upholding appropriate legal, compliance and ethical standards and also conducted reasonable investigations following the allegations by UKLFI.”

Such a decision plays a crucial role in the struggle of global civil society against the phenomenon of shrinking civic space, as it exposes the groundlessness and unreliability of the accusations that lawfare actors such as UKLFI use to interrupt the activities of human rights organisations.

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PALESTINIANS CONTINUE TO OPPOSE UNRWA'S DEAL WITH THE US

Apart from asking the UNRWA to monitor the school curriculum and take stringent action against any violation of its “neutrality framework” by its staff, the framework agreement states that “no contribution by the United States shall be made to [UNRWA] except on the condition that [UNRWA] take all possible measures to assure that no part of United States contribution shall be used to furnish assistance to any refugee who is receiving military training as a member of the so-called Palestine Liberation Army or any other guerilla-type organisation or who has engaged in any act of terrorism.” 

A PFLP member was quoted by Al-Jazeera saying that “the agency’s mission is to keep the refugees’ mission alive and uphold their rights, not to eliminate them.”

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