Hot on the heels of US sanctions against the ICC Prosecutor, Israel's Deputy Defense Minister announced yesterday that he will sponsor an anti-ICC initiative in Israel too. 1/ https://twitter.com/reclaim_esther/status/1301223965663399937

I don't know where Avi Dichter exact thinking is at the moment, but I do know of his proposals to deal “international tribunals threat" in the past. You´ll need a bit of history to appreciate this thread. Keep on reading whilst I bring you back to when all started: 2009 2/

It is Sept. & the UN just published its Fact-Finding Mission report on the 2008-2009 Gaza war. Eventually, the UNGA will call for the convening of the Assembly of High Contracting Parties of the Geneva Conventions & on Israel to seriously investigate the report allegations 4/

It so happens, that in its 452 pages, the UN report quoted a **handful of times** a publicly available booklet of testimonies collected by the NGO @BtSIsrael from Israeli soldiers who had participated in the war. Needless to say, all hell broke loose. 3/

The following 2 years will be marked by anti-NGO smear campaigns in the public sphere. In parallel, anti-NGO bills are constantly introduced in the Knesset in an attempt to blame NGOs over the govt's failure to deal with the diplomatic fall-out of the report. Some examples 5/

Feb 2010: MK Elkin (Likud), then coalition whip, submits a proposal requiring human rights NGOs the disclosure of quarterly reports on *foreign state funding*. Passed in Feb 2011, this bill came to be the main building block for the 2016 Foreign Agent Law. 5.a/

March 2011: Likud backbencher, MK Hotovely, currently Israel´s UK Ambassador, proposes to cap donations of foreign governments to Israeli human rights organizations to a max. of 4,800 € 5.b/

November 2011: MK Kirshenbaum from Yisrael Beiteinu re-introduced a proposal to set a crippling 45% taxation rate on the donations by foreign governments to Israeli human rights NGOs - not after having tried set a Knesset probe on NGO funding 5.c/

Back to Ditcher, he too had ideas about how to stop with the indictment of Israeli officials for serious violations of international law in courts overseas. His proposal:

To outlaw human rights NGOs working on accountability issues in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. 6/

Given a) this track-record b) the ongoing campaigns to paint civil society organisations as supporters/affiliates of designated entities in the US and the EU, it does not require any great leap of paranoia to be concerned about where this could lead: More restrictions on NGOs. 7/

*This is public interest tweet dedicated to all European MEPP diplomats who downplayed our concerns with the threat that Israeli military occupation (coupled with rampant populism in the US) was posing to the international rule of law & its key institutions 8/