Minister of Public Security, Strategic Affairs and Minister of Information Gilad Erdan (Likud) on Tuesday sent a letter to the Knesset counselor Eyal Yanun suggesting that, according to Knesset rules, the Ethics Committee must look into a trip to the UK by MK Yousef Jabareen (Hadash, a far-left political faction that includes the Israeli Communist Party and other leftist groups), because said trip is being funded by an extremist organization: the Middle East Monitor (MEMO), and the conference Jabareen is about to attend is organized by Friends of Al Aqsa.
We turned to Wikipedia for notes on MEMO’s reputation: Israeli scholar Ehud Rosen from the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs suggests MEMO generally “supports Islamist positions within Palestinian politics”; The Sunday Times’s Andrew Gilligan says MEMO promotes a strongly pro-Muslim Brotherhood and pro-Hamas viewpoint; Anshel Pfeffer (Ha’aretz) said MEMO was a “conspiracy theory-peddling anti-Israel organisation”; MEMO has been dubbed anti-Semitic by the UK Jewish group Community Security Trust; MEMO objected to appointing a Jew to be the UK’s ambassador to Israel; some MEMO staff are active in Interpal, a terror-supporting group on the US Treasury’s list of terrorist organizations; MEMO is sympathetic to Hamas, which runs their articles on its own website.
Erdan pointed in his letter to the amendment made six months ago in the Knesset’s house rules, according to which the Ethics Committee must consider not approving an MK’s travel abroad which is funded by elements who publicly call for a boycott of Israel.
The ministers cited his own ministry’s advisers who have concluded that “MEMO meets the above definition. It is an organization that supports boycotting the State of Israel, and MEMO senior officials have had a history of contacts with designated terrorist organizations.”
“Accordingly, I request that the Ethics Committee examine and consider not approving the travel funding by this body, whose purpose is to harm the State of Israel and delegitimize it,” Erdan wrote.