Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked is a clever and skillful politician who knows how to use the media to her advantage. That is why when two Hebrew University professors posted defamatory remarks about her on Facebook in protest of her transparency law, she was able to use it to her own advantage. She suddenly went from the target of stinging criticism to the victim of a violent public assault.

The way that these two professors chose to protest Shaked and her law is indicative of their flawed sense of discretion. The language that they used was intolerable. A lecturer of political science cannot allow himself to call the justice minister “neo-Nazi scum,” as Ofir Cassif did, when he accused Shaked of contributing to “turning Israel fascist.” Cassif wrote this while sharing another Facebook post, this one by the Amiram Goldblum a professor for the Jerusalem-based university’s School of Pharmacology, declaring that Shaked’s “hands were bloodied.” Goldblum went on to claim that the Belgian Jewish businessman Serge Muller, who contributed to Shaked’s campaign in HaBayit HaYehudi’s primaries, “sold guns to murderers in Sierra Leone and the drug cartel in Colombia.”

On Dec. 27, the Ministerial Committee on Legislation approved Shaked's proposed law requiring representatives of nongovernmental organizations that rely on funding from foreign governments to wear a special tag noting the source of their funding whenever they visit the Knesset. Shaked’s bill would require NGOs that receive more than half their funding from overseas to note this in all their reports intended for or available to the public. Furthermore, whenever they approach an elected official or participate in a discussion in which minutes are taken, the representatives of these organizations would be required to state that they receive funding from a foreign state. Failure to meet any of these conditions would result in a fine of 29,000 shekels (about $7,500).

These NGOs claim that the sole purpose of this law is to obstruct their activities. The organizations that stand to be hurt if this law passes include Breaking the Silence and B’Tselem, which scrutinize and at times criticize either the Israeli side or failures to protect Palestinians' human rights.