On Monday, a day after the Washington Post had warned that Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked was threatening democracy with her bill to force Israeli NGOs that are funded by foreign governments to identify themselves as such, the Knesset House Committee approved for its second and third readings in the Knesset plenum a bill requiring lobbyists to register for each Knesset committee whose meetings they attend, and enter their personal information and the entity they represent. The NGOs bill will come next, if all goes according to plan.
”Transparency is the legislature`s cornerstone,” said the committee`s chairman MK David Bitan (Likud). If approved by the Knesset plenum, the amendment to the law regarding lobbyists would forbid lobbyists from having an MK commit to voting a certain way. In addition, a former MK would not be able to work as a lobbyist in the year after their term in parliament ended. Knesset employees and parliamentary advisors would be able to work as lobbyists only after a six-month ”cooling-off” period. The bill further states that lobbyists are forbidden from using the services of the Knesset Research and Information Center.
MK Shelly Yachimovich (Zionist Camp, formerly Labor) said, ”Lobbying is a [useful] tool for those who can afford it, and therefore it creates inequality between the citizen and the tycoons. Lobbying also exposes us to inequality in the amount of information that flows to us. Those who interpret the information are those with the possibility to do so. The wealthy are being given another tool which the general public does not have.”
Now, for the NGOs bill to pass, MK Yachimovich will have to substitute “European governments” for “tycoons” and keep the rest of her pitch more or less intact.
Eight members of the House Committee voted in favor of bringing the bill up for a final vote in the plenum.
The Post editorial noted that “millions of dollars are also being sent to Israel to support right-wing causes such as settlement activity, but it comes largely from individual donors, not governments, so it would not be covered by the law.” And therein lies the difference — if there were a massive support for B’Tselem on the part of individual European citizens, no one would complain. The problem is that governments which are often hostile to Israel are using their money to bully Israeli officials with a swarm of anti-Israeli NGOs, quite against the spirit of Democracy.