According to Margot Wallstrom, Sweden’s obtuse foreign minister, Israel has been conducting “extrajudicial executions” of Palestinian stabbers that are “disproportionate.”
Imagine shopping in one of the high-priced malls in Stockholm. A man who abhors Swedish people suddenly rams his knife into three of them. He runs from the police, who fire and kill him. That would be appropriate in Wallstrom’s moral universe — just not in Israel.
Even Sweden’s PM Stefan Lofven, who initially said the near daily stabbing attacks against Israelis don’t constitute terrorism, reversed himself and conceded that the knifings are terrorist acts.
Sweden has long been pro-Palestinian, but its anti-Israel vitriol now tops the chart. We can only hope that a good psychiatrist calls in to say, “My couch is open.”
In case anyone doubted that a simple exercise in good governance could be politicized in the extreme by partisans on both sides, look no further than a recent bill introduced in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset. The bill would require non-profits to disclose whether and to what extent they are funded by foreign, that is, non-Israeli, governments. By the reaction, you would think that democracy in Israel had just been destroyed.
It seems that by far the largest group of non-profits that receive foreign government funding are left-wing groups — just the type of groups that we also associated with being pro-good governance. Transparency, to us, is a sina qua non of good governance. But no, these groups claim that needing to disclose their funding source is tantamount to closing them down. This is the typical refuge of politicians and activists filled with special pleading who have something to hide. What an anti-transparency — that is, anti-democratic — position!
To be certain, the leftist protesters make a critical point: hypocrisy. Why, they ask, is transparency good for the goose but not for the gander? Why does the current right-wing government propose a transparency law that affects mostly the left, but not the right? It seems that the foreign funding sources of right-wing non-profits are not so much foreign governments as they are individuals and organizations. The appropriate response to one pro-transparency law is not to oppose it, but to add to it. Yes, let the current law requiring a full disclosure of foreign funding from governments pass. And yes, let a new law, requiring full disclosure of foreign funding from other sources, also pass — either under the current government or a future one.
What the objectors to the current law fail to understand is Transparency 101: transparency in government creates its own momentum. If the current law passes, the right will find it impossible to resist the application of the same standard to its own sources of foreign funding: full disclosure.
Like all political progress, transparency is not won in a day. The proposed current law is an important step in the right direction. The left should embrace it. It will end in an enhancement of Israeli democracy, not in its destruction, as the American ambassador to Israel claims.
One thing is certain: The American ambassador to Israel has no right to insert himself into the internal affairs of another country in a routine political dispute. Yet, he saw fit to initiate and deliver an official objection to the bill. If there is offensive partisanship in this whole dispute, it is the intervention of the American ambassador that takes the cake.
Copyright © 2016 by the Intermountain Jewish News
