Minister of Justice Ayelet Shaked of HaBayit HaYehudi scored a personal and electoral victory Nov. 1 when she released what she calls the "Transparency Law," a proposed piece of legislation intended to require Israeli nongovernmental organizations to reveal to the public whether they receive financial support from foreign states. Among the measures proposed to enforce this law is a requirement that representatives of these NGOs wear a special tag displaying the name of their organization when visiting the Knesset.

It was hardly by chance that Shaked chose to include the word “transparency” when coming up with a name for her new law. Borrowed from the social protest movement, the term has the positive connotation of orderly government among the public. In fact, it is little more than a cynical attempt to whitewash a law intended to further existing efforts to delegitimize left-wing NGOs — and the left in general — throughout Israel. Though the law makes no mention of the word “left” per se, it doesn’t have to. In Israel today, the situation is such that many left-wing NGOs that support finding ways to resolve the Palestinian issue receive funding from foreign governments, mainly from Western Europe and the United States. In contrast, right-wing NGOs usually tend to receive contributions from private individuals. These latter donations are not covered by the proposed law.

Since Shaked wants to brand left-wing groups with a “mark of Cain” of sorts, a far more appropriate name for her proposed piece of populist legislation could be the “Selection Law,” a reference to the way Jews were marked to distinguish them from other Europeans during World War II in Nazi camps. The justice minister never even considered postponing her efforts to advance this provocative and divisive piece of legislation so that it would not coincide with the 20th anniversary of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination on Nov. 4, 1995. Instead, she decided to fire it off like a poison dart, right at the heart of Israeli democracy. Even if the bill doesn’t eventually pass, the damage has already been done through the aggressive attacks against left-wing NGOs, provoked by the publication of the proposed law. Representatives of these NGOs were quick to condemn the law and to defend themselves on major media outlets, while the right is accusing them of one of the worst imaginable charges against public officials in the current climate: of being against “transparency.”

This is not the first time that Shaked has tried to advance legislation targeting left-wing organizations. She did it in the previous Knesset, when she was just a regular member of the parliament, proposing two similar laws together with Knesset member Robert Ilatov of the Yisrael Beitenu party (then in the coalition). The first of these laws was intended to impose a special tax on left-wing organizations funded by foreign governments. Fortunately, the law failed to get anywhere, due to the opposition of Knesset members from then-coalition parties Yesh Atid and Hatnua. Nevertheless, when that law failed, Shaked, who began her political career with HaBayit HaYehudi Chair Naftali Bennett as a co-founder of the extra-parliamentary right-wing “My Israel” movement, submitted a similar proposal again. This second proposal also failed, together with the previous government.