Donald MacIntyre reports in The Independent: A right-wing proposal to investigate some of Israel’s best-known human rights organisations for “delegitimising” its military was approved by the country’s parliament yesterday amid left-wing charges of McCarthyism.
After a highly charged and noisy debate, the Knesset approved by 41 votes to 16 the plan for a parliamentary panel of inquiry into the funding of a series of organisations which have criticised and documented human rights abuses by Israeli authorities, mainly in the occupied Palestinian territories. The vote is a political victory for the hard-line nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu Party led by the country’s controversial Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, one of whose Knesset members, Faina Kirshenbaum, introduced the proposal and is likely to chair the panel.