In view of the Israeli Prime Minister, amid his own corruption trial, the truth about the Israeli-occupied territories seems to be equivalent to treason. Hence, his determination to destroy B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories.

The effort to decimate the last defenders of human rights in Israel cries for effective external intervention.

Why are Netanyahu’s autocrats after B’Tselem?

B’Tselem evolved in early 1989, when it was established by a group of Israeli lawyers, academics and doctors with the support of 10 members of Knesset, the Israeli parliament. The name comes from Genesis 1:27, which deems that all mankind was created “b’tselem elohim” (in the image of God); in line with the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

As Jewish far-right extremism was spreading in Israel, B’Tselem reflected an effort to replace nascent Jewish supremacism doctrines with the original, universalistic spirit of social justice that had marked Judaism for centuries.

It was founded after two years of the First Intifada, the Palestinian uprising in the occupied territories and in Israel. After two decades of futile struggle for decolonization and increasing Israeli repression, Palestinians resorted to protests, then civil disobedience and eventually violence.

Instead of taking a hard look at the causes of the uprising, the hard-right Likud government – led by Yitzhak Shamir, Netanyahu’s one-time mentor and ex-leader of the violent pre-state Stern group – deployed 80,000 soldiers in response, which started with live rounds against peaceful demonstrators.

The brutal repression resulted in over 330 Palestinian deaths (and 12 Israelis killed) in just the first 13 months. The objective of the newly-established B’Tselem became to document human rights violations in both Gaza and the West Bank. Amid a vicious cycle of violence, it sought to serve as the nation’s voice of conscience.

Today, it is led by human rights activist Yuli Novak who had to leave Israel in 2022 due to mounting death threats, and chaired by Orly Noy, left-wing Mizrahi activist and editor of +972 magazine. Despite mounting threats from the government, the Messianic far-right and the settler extremists, B’Tselem has insistently recorded human rights violations in the occupied territories earning the regard of rights organizations and awards worldwide.

In early 2021, the NGO released a report describing Israel as an “apartheid” regime, which the Netanyahu cabinets have fervently rejected. Yet, the NGO simply codified, with abundant evidence, Israel’s apartheid rule that had worsened over time. Several Israeli military, intelligence and political leaders had used the same characterization since the 2000s.

B’Tselem warned that Israeli governance was no longer about democracy plus occupation. It had morphed into “a regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea” – that is, apartheid. And the kind of military excess that led to the genocidal atrocities in Gaza.

How is the Netanyahu cabinet undermining B’Tselem?   

Recently, the Knesset passed a preliminary reading of two bills. They are an integral part of a broader shift from democracy to autocracy. The ultimate objective is to eliminate human rights (and other rights) groups from Israel, including B’Tselem, and to marginalize the autocratic harsh-right’s critics.

In its efforts, the Netanyahu cabinet is relying on two proposed laws involving NGO taxation and the ICC. In the former case, the proposal slaps an 80% tax on donations from foreign countries, the UN and many international foundations supporting human rights. This will effectively cut off the NGOs’ funding. The proposal was approved in a preliminary reading.

The second bill, which has now also passed a preliminary reading, seeks to criminalize any cooperation with the International Criminal Court (ICC). It could be seen as the Israeli version of the US Trump administration’s sanctions to undermine the ICC, its activities and members.

With its diffuse language, the Israeli ICC bill can be exploited to criminalize not only active assistance to the court but the release of any information indicating the government or senior Israeli officials are committing war crimes or crimes against humanity. According to Israeli scholars of international law, “the definitions in this dangerous bill are so broad that even someone sharing on social media a photo or video of a soldier documenting themselves committing what appears to be a war crime could face imprisonment.” More precisely, half a decade in jail.

If the “ICC law” criminalizes the work of B’Tselem and other human rights NGOs by making human rights defense a punishable offense, the “NGO taxation law” is intended to drain the meager financial resources of these NGOs.

Whose “foreign subversion”?            

B’Tselem is an independent, non-partisan organization. It is funded by donations: grants from European and North American foundations that support human rights activity worldwide, and contributions by private individuals in Israel and abroad. These donors do not represent the kind of “subversion” that the Likud governments attribute to human rights NGOs. Nor do they possess major financial resources. Even right-wing NGO critics estimate B’Tselem’s annual funding at most about $3 million per year.

Things are very different behind the donors of the Kohelet Policy Forum, led by neoconservatives with US-Israeli dual citizenship, and its many spinoffs. These have served as the Netanyahu cabinets’ thinktanks and authored many of their policies, including the “judicial reforms.” Totaling several million dollars, Kohelet in particular benefited from multi-million-dollar donations made anonymously and sent through the U.S. nonprofit, American Friends of Kohelet Policy Forum (AF-KPF).

For years, these money flows originated mainly from two Jewish-American private equity billionaires and philanthropists, Arthur Dantchik and Jeffrey Yass, the co-founders of Susquehanna International Group (The Fall of Israel, Chapter 6).

With a net worth of $7.5 billion, Dantchik is an active supporter of neoconservative Israeli causes. And so is Yass, with net worth estimated at $29 billion. Between 2010 and 2020, his Claws Foundation gave more than $25 million to the Jerusalem-based Shalom Hartman Institute, the Kohelet and other right-wing causes. As the publicity-shy Dantchik and Yass began to suffer from Kohelet’s negative PR, they took distance, while other money flows offset the difference.

By 2021, more than 90% of Kohelet’s $7.2 million income came from the Central Fund of Israel, a family-run nonprofit that gave $55 million to more than 500 Israel-related causes. It was run by Marcus Brothers Textiles on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, which sponsors highly controversial settlement projects in the West Bank, while supporting the far-right activists’ ImTirtzu and Honenu, which is notorious for defending Jewish far-right extremists charged with violence against and killings of Palestinians.

Toward a unitary, autocratic Jewish state     

Given the present course, the ultimate demise of human rights in Israel is now a matter of time. The Netanyahu cabinet will decide when to bring the legislative proposals to hearings in the relevant parliamentary committees, to prepare them for final approval.

There is no doubt about the final objective: the creation of a state “from the river to the water,” but not the two-state model enacted almost eight decades ago. Nor the secular-democratic Jewish state with a vibrant Arab minority. The goal is a Jewish unitary state in which both the rule of law and democracy will be under erosion.

B’Tselem is the harsh-right’s scapegoat for its own international isolation, but only the first one. There is more to come. Under the watch of and military aid and financing by the Biden and Trump administrations, the protection of human rights in occupied territories will soon be treated as a punishable crime, while the economic resources of the remaining human rights defenders will be decimated.

In Gaza, the international community failed to halt the genocidal atrocities. If it fails to protect the last defenders of human rights in Israel, it is likely to become complicit in new atrocities in the West Bank.

• Originally published by Informed Comment.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dan Steinbock.

Footage of the firing. Assassination attempt on Imran Khan. pic.twitter.com/fmSgI2E8jc

— Ihtisham Ul Haq (@iihtishamm) November 3, 2022

Soon after the reports came in, several photos started circulating on social media as visuals of the attack and its immediate aftermath. News24 shared two photos on Twitter with the caption, “Photos of Imran Khan have surfaced after he was shot. 9 people were injured in the attack, and 1 dead.” (Archive.)

The same visuals were shared by multiple Indian news outlets, including NDTV, Times Now Navbharat, ET Now Swadesh, Zee Salaam, News1India, Zee Delhi-NCR Haryana, and Inextlive.

Various Indian journalists shared the same visuals on Twitter. Among them are multimedia journalist Abhishek Tiwari, manager of India TV Jay Ram Patel, independent journalist Ashish Bhatt, Dainik Bhaskar correspondent Tarun Sharma, and News9 journalist Jacob Mathew.

International publications such as The New York Times, The Economist and The Guardian also used the same visual as the aftermath of the assassination attempt. The New York Times mentioned (Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, via Associated Press’ as photo credit while The Guardians credited Associated Press for the photo and said it was released by Khan’s party Tehreek-e-Insaf.

Fact-check

Photo 1

When Alt News performed a Google reverse image search on the first photo of Imran Khan laying on the ground with his arms up, we came across a tweet from 2014 by Imran Khan with the caption, ‘Night at the dharna [protest].’

Night at the dharna. pic.twitter.com/5ppIGJAs1S

— Imran Khan (@ImranKhanPTI) August 17, 2014

This photo was clicked in August of 2014 when Khan had challenged the then Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to resign after allegations of ‘electoral match-fixing’ were made against the latter. Khan and Tahirul Qadri of Pakistan Awami Tehreek had started separate rallies from Lahore and reached Islamabad after 35 hours of march. The now-viral photo was clicked during this journey where Imran Khan had camped for the night.

Photo 2

For the second photo in which we can see a bleeding Imran Khan being carried by his aides, we again performed a Google reverse image search and found various news reports. Among them was a Time of India fact-check from 2018 that carried the same image. This photo was in circulation in 2018 when claims were made on social media that the Pakistani leader was shot or beaten to death. Alt News had also done a fact-check on the same when it was in circulation in 2018.

The article mentions that the photo is from 2013 when Khan injured his head after falling off a forklift that was taking him onto a stage at an election rally in Lahore.

A video of the incident can also be found on Al Jazeera English’s YouTube channel.

To sum it up, almost decade-old photos were circulated by journalists and media organisations in the aftermath of the assassination attempt on former Pakistan PM Imran Khan on November 3.

The post Leading media outlets use old photos of Imran Khan claiming them to be of Nov 3 attack appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Kalim Ahmed.