Brussels, 07/01/2011 (Agence Europe) - On Tuesday 4 January the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, voted by a large majority to open an investigation into the sources of funding of civil society organisations, the best known of which are Peace Now, B'Tselem and Shovrim Shtika. The purpose of the investigation, according to information published in the press, is to determine if the groups receive funding from foreign countries, or even from terrorist organisations. “It is the right … of the Israeli public to know that the majority of the false testimonies that were written in the Goldstone Report were handed over by these organisations, the same ones that handed over the names of IDF officers and encouraged legal actions against them, and their representatives have even been wandering for years in Israeli schools and tell the youth to evade military service”, said Faina Kirschenbaum, an Israel Beiteinu party MP, who proposed the move along with her Likud colleague Danny Danon.
Publicly, the EU has said that it aids these organisations, as it does organisations in all Mediterranean countries. It recently allocated €183,000 (80% of the total required) for the “Enhancing the Role of Israeli Civil Society in the Internationalisation of Israeli International Human Rights Commitments and in the Work of the UN Treaty Monitoring Bodies” project. Based in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the project will run from March 2011 to March 2014. A further programme, “Fostering the Next Generation of Human Rights leadership in Israel”, which received €191,000 of EU funding, has just come to an end. More than a dozen civil society projects have received European financial support. Most have concentrated on trying to bring Israelis and Palestinians closer together. (F.B./transl.rt)