First, FARA applies to all foreign funding \u2013 governmental and private \u2013 of U.S. persons or organizations, ensuring transparency about any foreign donor’s efforts to sway U.S. policy. The Shaked bill applies only<\/a> to funding from foreign governments \u2013 funding that is already transparent under existing Israeli law. The measure does not apply to funding from nongovernmental foreign sources.<\/p>\n This distinction is neither accidental nor trivial. Israel\u2019s progressive nongovernmental organizations are the main recipients of funding from foreign governments that support the progressive, democratic values embodied by these NGOs. Shaked, who has made clear her desire to quash dissent, has crafted her bill to target only these NGOs while permitting those that promote agendas more in line with her own views to continue to operate as always. The discrimination implicit in this bill is so clear that even Israeli Knesset member Michael Oren,\u00a0a former U.S. ambassador, has criticized<\/a> its \u201cone-sided exposure, which ignores the funding sources of extreme-right nonprofits.\u201d<\/p>\n Second, FARA makes no presumption that simply by receiving foreign funding, an American NGO ipso facto is a foreign agent and must register and report as such. FARA applies only in cases where the recipient of the foreign funding is actually acting as an agent of the foreign donor. Indeed, the phrase \u201cin the interests of such foreign principal\u201d appears eight times in the statute.<\/p>\n In contrast, under the Shaked bill, merely receiving major funding from a foreign government automatically brands any Israeli NGO a foreign agent. This is notwithstanding the fact that the affected NGOs are Israeli-founded and Israeli-run. Many of them have existed for decades, with well-established agendas and programs defined by their own missions and goals, not by the interests of their foreign donors.<\/p>\n Hypothetically, if today the European Union gave major funding to Planned Parenthood, the family planning group would not suddenly have to register under FARA as an agent of the EU. Why? Because to suggest that Planned Parenthood, whose mission and program date back decades, exists today to serve the interests of the EU would be absurd.<\/p>\n Equally absurd is arguing that Peace Now \u2013 established in 1978 by a group of 348 Israeli reserve officers and soldiers, and which has been challenging Israel\u2019s settlement enterprise ever since \u2013 serves interests that are not genuinely Israeli but rather are implanted by foreign governments.<\/p>\n Shaked\u2019s law argues exactly that \u2013 and by extension, it stigmatizes and delegitimizes all those working in Israel for progressive causes. That\u2019s why the American Jewish Committee said<\/a> Shaked\u2019s law poses a \u201crisk to Israel’s reputation as a confident and open society that has long been true democracy’s sole Middle East outpost.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s why several members of the German parliament have warned that the Shaked bill \u201cweakens us in our engagement as friends of Israel \u2013 which we have to defend against verbal attacks almost every day.\u201d<\/p>\n
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