Sometimes you need to leave home to appreciate the
family you left behind. I had that epiphany recently. Having worked for China Development Brief and China Labour Bulletin, two civil society
organizations that developed a reputation for independent and authoritative monitoring
and analysis about civil society and labor in China, I confess to taking their
importance for granted. Then, when I was invited recently on a fact-finding
mission to Israel and Palestine to meet with NGOs working on human rights and humanitarian
issues, it suddenly became clear to me.
The purpose of our mission was to investigate
restrictions on NGOs’ access to funding, a critical component of their freedom
of association rights. These NGOs play an important role in monitoring,
documenting and seeking to ameliorate violations of international human rights
and humanitarian law in Israel and Palestine. Over the last few years, like
their counterparts in many other countries, they began encountering greater
pushback by the Israeli government, including on issues such as funding. In
2016, an NGO Transparency Law was passed in the Knesset requiring Israeli NGOs
that received more than 50% of their funding from foreign governments, to
declare their foreign government funding sources on their publications and
websites, and in meetings with government officials. This law had the clever
but sinister effect of singling out Israeli human rights NGOs that rely heavily
on foreign government funding, while leaving untouched nationalist, right-wing
NGOs that also rely on foreign funding but from private donors.
In our meetings with these NGOs about the pushback
against their funding sources, one name came up again and again: an Israeli
civil society organization called NGO
Monitor. On the surface, NGO Monitor
comes across as the kind of organization that China Development Brief was meant
to be, an authoritative one-stop shop for foreigners interested in NGOs in that
country. Its objective,
as stated on its website, is “producing and distributing critical analysis and
reports on the activities of the international and local NGO networks, for the
benefit of government policy makers, journalists, philanthropic organizations
and the general public.”
On closer inspection, though, much
of its content takes a very critical and even hostile view of more progressive,
left-wing NGOs that monitor and call attention to human rights violations
against Palestinians. One common line of attack is to point out the reliance of
these NGOs on foreign government funding, particularly funding from European governments.
Labeling these NGOs as “foreign agents,” NGO Monitor along with other
nationalist, right-wing NGOs, with support from powerful politicians and officials, have over the last decade launched media and
lobbying campaigns to delegitimize the work of human rights NGOs in Israel and
Palestine. Their campaigns have worked. They led Israeli legislators to draft
the 2016 NGO Transparency Law, and pressured European governments to review
their funding commitments to human rights NGOs in Israel and Palestine.
The case of NGO Monitor shows how
important it is for independent, credible, progressive NGOs to claim and defend
the epistemological space and language for talking about NGOs in any country. It
is clear that NGO Monitor now occupies a vital space for civil society in Israel.
It has become an almost indispensable resource for those who want to better
understand the NGO space in Israel. Like CDB’s NGO database, it has a large database
of local and international NGOs working in Israel and Palestine. In fact, it
seems to have the only such database in the English language. When you type in
an Israeli NGO’s name, the first search result to come up is from NGO Monitor’s
database which presents profiles of that NGO’s funding sources and activities
written from the perspective of NGO Monitor.
The problem of course is that NGO
Monitor has a highly partisan agenda, one that is intent on dividing civil society,
and aligned with nationalist, right-wing NGOs and the current Netanyahu
government. What it and other right-wing
groups in Israel are doing is eerily familiar to the ideological warfare taking
place in President Trump’s America, and raises deeper concerns about their role
in undermining Israeli democracy. As Professor Amal Jamal notes in his report, The
Rise of Bad Civil Society in Israel, “bad civil society” organizations
like NGO Monitor, make
“use of democratic procedures to silence and delegitimize any critiques of
government policies, especially those voiced by [human rights organizations]…. “The
cooperation of ‘bad civil society’ with…government ministries and central
political parties feeds the public sphere with anti-democratic values and
norms, which undermines civil and democratic ideals and liberal freedoms and
brings the entire democratic system into question.”
At CDB and CLB, we spent hours
discussing and debating our positioning in Chinese civil society, knowing we
were one of the few go-to sources on civil society and labor for the
international community. We emphasized our independence from the government, and
our support for grassroots NGOs, workers and the progressive values they stood
for. But in the process of defending them, we ensured that our reporting and
analysis remained credible and impartial, and tried our best to use accurate
information, adopt a neutral tone, and avoid attacking other civil society
organizations.
Of course, any reporting in China
has to tread carefully in a restricted and censored space where there is less
room for different ideological positions. In a democratic and open society like
Israel’s, the space is more wide open for organizations to voice more critical
and extreme views. That makes NGO Monitor’s occupation of the English-language
space there that much more astonishing. Now, recognizing that they waited too
long to respond, human rights organizations in Israel and Palestine are
considering ways to fight back and reclaim some of that space by setting up a
more independent, impartial alternative to NGO Monitor.
Here’s where I had my epiphany. After seeing what
happened in Israel, the significance of CDB and CLB became clear to me. These
two NGOs occupied the civil society space in the early days back in the
mid-1990s, when there wasn’t much of a civil society in China, and they spent
the last 20 years or so defending that space with integrity on behalf of an
independent, progressive civil society. In doing so, they helped to build the
linguistic and epistemological infrastructure for understanding and talking
about civil society in China.
The Chinese government is now seeking to reclaim some
of that space with more assertive legislation and initiatives and, at some point in the future, as China’s society opens
up and discussion and debate become more ideological and contentious, other
groups on both the right and left will enter the fray. But I’m confident that
Chinese civil society is in a good position to deal with these challenges, in
part because of the contributions made by CDB and CLB.
