Peleg, head of Israel’s Im Tirtzu organization, exposes how foreign governments and political parties have employed Israeli non-governmental organizations (NGOs) for their own purposes. He estimates that Germany, the United States, the European Union, the United Nations, and others provided them with US$250 million in the decade 2012-21.
These funds, he shows, thwarted Israel’s war on terror, prevented Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria, impeded the deportation of illegal African migrants, diminished Israeli sovereignty in the Negev and Jerusalem, fomented religious incitement by Christians and Muslims against the Jewish state, and globally spread lies demonizing Israel.
Peleg finds that those foreign entities were often motivated not by moral values, but by economic, political, demographic, and security interests. Most striking was the effort to cancel Jerusalem’s agreement with Rwanda to accept Israel’s illegal migrants. Lawsuits paid for by foreign entities convinced Israel’s High Court of Justice that the agreement violated the freedoms and human rights of those migrants and that their lives were at risk in Rwanda. The Europeans then negotiated a similar agreement with that same Rwandan government to receive illegal African migrant workers from Libya, thereby avoiding their likely passage on to Europe.
Peleg offers solutions: enact a superseding clause that curbs the High Court’s judicial activism; tax contributions from Israeli NGOs that are funded by foreign governments and political parties; and diminish the NGOs’ standing in Israel’s courts.
State for Sale has great importance to anyone who values Israeli independence and believes that intra-Israeli disagreements should be resolved without foreign intervention.