Palestinians concerned about new Israeli NGO law
Palestinians working with B’Tselem and other human rights organizations are worried that the new Knesset law will restrict their work.
Susan Jaber says her life changed four years ago when she began volunteering with the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem. “When they gave me a camera and I began using it, the level of harassment and attacks by settlers and soldiers went down a lot,” Jaber told Al-Monitor.
Jaber, 39, lives in Hebron very close to the Ibrahimi Mosque and in the path of Jewish settlers who would be happy to see her leave. “Before we began filming and B’tselem was publishing videos of settlers’ harassment, our family was living in constant fear. We are now able to live a normal life. The cameras that we have are our strongest weapon,” Jaber, a mother of seven children, said. She pointed to the Facebook page showing her and other volunteers filming.
Like other Palestinian volunteers working with B’Tselem, Jaber has heard about the new Israeli law restricting the work of all Israeli nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), but she is not surprised by it. “It is normal that the occupiers do that, because they can see that B’Tselem is doing a good job documenting and exposing Israeli crimes,” she said.
Jaber, who said that B’Tselem is “working in a legal and proper way and is very serious about its documentation efforts,” vowed that she and her co-volunteers will “cooperate with B’Tselem until the last moment.”
