By Dr. Dan Steinbock             

In early 2023, the most far-right cabinet in Israel’s history launched its war for “judicial reforms” to replace democracy with autocracy. In fall 2023, it began an obliteration war against Gaza. Now it is readying to decimate the last human rights defenders in Israel.

In view of the Israeli Prime Minister, amid his own corruption trial, the truth about the Israeli-occupied territories seems to be equivalent to treason. Hence, his determination to destroy B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories.

The effort to decimate the last defenders of human rights in Israel cries for effective external intervention.      

Why are Netanyahu’s autocrats after B’Tselem?     

B’Tselem evolved in early 1989, when it was established by a group of Israeli lawyers, academics and doctors with the support of 10 members of Knesset, the Israeli parliament. The name comes from Genesis 1:27, which deems that all mankind was created “b’tselem elohim” (in the image of God); in line with the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

As Jewish far-right extremism was spreading in Israel, B’Tselem reflected an effort to replace nascent Jewish supremacism doctrines with the original, universalistic spirit of social justice that had marked Judaism for centuries.

It was founded after two years of the First Intifada, the Palestinian uprising in the occupied territories and in Israel. After two decades of futile struggle for decolonization and increasing Israeli repression, Palestinians resorted to protests, then civil disobedience and eventually violence.

Instead of taking a hard look at the causes of the uprising, the hard-right Likud government – led by Yitzhak Shamir, Netanyahu’s one-time mentor and ex-leader of the violent pre-state Stern group – deployed 80,000 soldiers in response, which started with live rounds against peaceful demonstrators.

The brutal repression resulted in over 330 Palestinian deaths (and 12 Israelis killed) in just the first 13 months. The objective of the newly-established B’Tselem became to document human rights violations in both Gaza and the West Bank. Amid a vicious cycle of violence, it sought to serve as the nation’s voice of conscience.

Today, it is led by human rights activist Yuli Novak who had to leave Israel in 2022 due to mounting death threats, and chaired by Orly Noy, left-wing Mizrahi activist and editor of +972 magazine. Despite mounting threats from the government, the Messianic far-right and the settler extremists, B’Tselem has insistently recorded human rights violations in the occupied territories earning the regard of rights organizations and awards worldwide. 

In early 2021, the NGO released a report describing Israel as an “apartheid” regime, which the Netanyahu cabinets have fervently rejected. Yet, the NGO simply codified, with abundant evidence, Israel’s apartheid rule that had worsened over time. Several Israeli military, intelligence and political leaders had used the same characterization since the 2000s.

B’Tselem warned that Israeli governance was no longer about democracy plus occupation. It had morphed into “a regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea” – that is, apartheid. And the kind of military excess that led to the genocidal atrocities in Gaza.

How is the Netanyahu cabinet undermining B’Tselem?    

Recently, the Knesset passed a preliminary reading of two bills. They are an integral part of a broader shift from democracy to autocracy. The ultimate objective is to eliminate human rights (and other rights) groups from Israel, including B’Tselem, and to marginalize the autocratic harsh-right’s critics.

In its efforts, the Netanyahu cabinet is relying on two proposed laws involving NGO taxation and the ICC. In the former case, the proposal slaps an 80% tax on donations from foreign countries, the UN and many international foundations supporting human rights. This will effectively cut off the NGOs’ funding. The proposal was approved in a preliminary reading.

The second bill, which has now also passed a preliminary reading, seeks to criminalize any cooperation with the International Criminal Court (ICC). It could be seen as the Israeli version of the US Trump administration’s sanctions to undermine the ICC, its activities and members.

With its diffuse language, the Israeli ICC bill can be exploited to criminalize not only active assistance to the court but the release of any information indicating the government or senior Israeli officials are committing war crimes or crimes against humanity. According to Israeli scholars of international law, “the definitions in this dangerous bill are so broad that even someone sharing on social media a photo or video of a soldier documenting themselves committing what appears to be a war crime could face imprisonment.” More precisely, half a decade in jail.

If the “ICC law” criminalizes the work of B’Tselem and other human rights NGOs by making human rights defense a punishable offense, the “NGO taxation law” is intended to drain the meager financial resources of these NGOs.

Whose “foreign subversion”?              

B’Tselem is an independent, non-partisan organization. It is funded by donations: grants from European and North American foundations that support human rights activity worldwide, and contributions by private individuals in Israel and abroad. These donors do not represent the kind of “subversion” that the Likud governments attribute to human rights NGOs. Nor do they possess major financial resources. Even right-wing NGO critics estimate B’Tselem’s annual funding at most about $3 million per year.

Things are very different behind the donors of the Kohelet Policy Forum, led by neoconservatives with US-Israeli dual citizenship, and its many spinoffs. These have served as the Netanyahu cabinets’ thinktanks and authored many of their policies, including the “judicial reforms.” Totaling several million dollars, Kohelet in particular benefited from multi-million-dollar donations made anonymously and sent through the U.S. nonprofit, American Friends of Kohelet Policy Forum (AF-KPF).

For years, these money flows originated mainly from two Jewish-American private equity billionaires and philanthropists, Arthur Dantchik and Jeffrey Yass, the co-founders of Susquehanna International Group (The Fall of Israel, Chapter 6).

With a net worth of $7.5 billion, Dantchik is an active supporter of neoconservative Israeli causes. And so is Yass, with net worth estimated at $29 billion. Between 2010 and 2020, his Claws Foundation gave more than $25 million to the Jerusalem-based Shalom Hartman Institute, the Kohelet and other right-wing causes. As the publicity-shy Dantchik and Yass began to suffer from Kohelet’s negative PR, they took distance, while other money flows offset the difference.

By 2021, more than 90% of Kohelet’s $7.2 million income came from the Central Fund of Israel, a family-run nonprofit that gave $55 million to more than 500 Israel-related causes. It was run by Marcus Brothers Textiles on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, which sponsors highly controversial settlement projects in the West Bank, while supporting the far-right activists’ ImTirtzu and Honenu, which is notorious for defending Jewish far-right extremists charged with violence against and killings of Palestinians.

Toward a unitary, autocratic Jewish state     

Given the present course, the ultimate demise of human rights in Israel is now a matter of time. The Netanyahu cabinet will decide when to bring the legislative proposals to hearings in the relevant parliamentary committees, to prepare them for final approval.

There is no doubt about the final objective: the creation of a state “from the river to the water,” but not the two-state model enacted almost eight decades ago. Nor the secular-democratic Jewish state with a vibrant Arab minority. The goal is a Jewish unitary state in which both the rule of law and democracy will be under erosion.

B’Tselem is the harsh-right’s scapegoat for its own international isolation, but only the first one. There is more to come. Under the watch of and military aid and financing by the Biden and Trump administrations, the protection of human rights in occupied territories will soon be treated as a punishable crime, while the economic resources of the remaining human rights defenders will be decimated.

In Gaza, the international community failed to halt the genocidal atrocities. If it fails to protect the last defenders of human rights in Israel, it is likely to become complicit in new atrocities in the West Bank.

The original version was published by Informed Comment on March 2, 2025.

About the Author

The author of The Fall of Israel (2025), Dr Dan Steinbock is the founder of Difference Group and has served at the India, China and America Institute (US), Shanghai Institute for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore). For more, see https://www.differencegroup.net/

By Dr. Dan Steinbock             

As Washington’s tariff wars are escalating, the stakes are increasingly global. Now red lights also blink over the US economic outlook.

Barely 2 weeks ago, US economy seemed resilient, but that was then. Although Trump tariffs have barely taken off, several indicators are now raising red flags.        

The Atlanta Fed’s GDP tracker indicates US economy is headed for a 1.5% contraction in the first quarter, despite 2.3% growth days earlier. That’s a sharp reversal from the fourth quarter, when GDP expanded by 2.3%.

Red lights over US economic prospects                   

New data suggests that in January US consumer spending fell for the first time in almost two years, while the goods trade deficit widened to a record high. As Reuters reported, “businesses front-loaded imports to avoid tariffs, setting up the economy for weak growth or even a contraction this quarter.”

Typically, the Atlanta Fed attributed the sudden change to fresh data on the US trade deficit, which drags on growth, and weaker consumer spending.

Not everything can be attributed to the cold weather that has been penalizing US demand. The Trump disruption has a key role externally (hyper-assertive trade policies that have barely started, coupled with aggressive geopolitics particularly in the Americas) and internally (efforts to dramatically reduce federal spending and downside workforce).

Combine dimming global prospects with demand destruction at home, amplified by the DOGE cuts of Elon Musk, and the outcome is predictable.

New data is further reflecting the negative turn. Add to the mix the rising jobless claims, record-low home sales, regional banks’ deteriorating outlook, sinking consumer indicators, falling capital spending and climbing fears of tariff-driven inflation, and most ingredients for a perceived or real cost-of-living crisis are emerging.

A fleeting shock is unlikely when there is much more ahead. The White House has barely started its trade crusade against the world, and as targeted countries are now initiating their first retaliations, several new rounds of higher US tariffs and greater tit-for-tat reprisals will follow. 

Tariffs as economic coercion   

On February 1, President Trump imposed 25% tariffs and 10% duties on energy products on Canada and Mexico, and 10% tariffs on China. These countries are America’s greatest trade partners and the US has a trade deficit with each. The tripartite tariffs alone would cost an average US household over $1,200 a year.

Starting with the heated US exchanges with Colombia, the White House used US economic muscle hoping to push Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum into a US-controlled North American bloc against China.

After talks, levies against Canada and Mexico were delayed for 30 days; that is, until March 1. Last Thursday, President Donald Trump said his proposed 25% tariffs on Mexican and Canadian goods will take effect on Tuesday, along with an extra 10% duty on Chinese.

The proposed tariffs on Canada and Mexico would reduce long-run GDP by 0.3%, the imposed tariffs on China by 0.1%, and the proposed expansion of steel and aluminum tariffs by less than 0.05%, by some estimates. But as foreign retaliations kick in, including those by Canada and Mexico, so will these numbers worsen again.

A trade war between the US and its two largest trading partners will further penalize US income, hurt employment and accelerate inflation.

As Trump’s tariffs went into effect against China, Beijing announced a broad package of economic measures on February 10 targeting the US and more is about to follow. “If the U.S. insists on its own way,” China’s Ministry of Commerce responded, “China will take all necessary countermeasures to defend its legitimate rights and interests,” 

The likely multi-trillion-dollar costs of unwarranted tariffs      

Half a decade ago, Trump tariffs on imports from China accounted for $396 billion or more than 90% of the trade affected. Yet, the first round of the Trump tariffs with Canada, Mexico and China alone would cover far more trade in dollar value.

Trump’s four tranches of tariffs on Chinese goods in 2018-19 covered imports valued at $360 billion at the time. Today Canada and Mexico and China supply more than two-fifths of all US imports. New tariffs on the two countries plus additional tariffs on China could cover imports valued at over $1.3 trillion in 2023. That’s over 3.5 times more than half a decade ago.

It is just the opening salvo in a series of US tariff moves anticipated in the coming weeks.

Meanwhile, US tariff threats are shifting from steel and aluminum to computer chips and pharmaceuticals, the European Union and Japan; even the world. The US also has a major trade deficit with multiple trading economies, including Germany, South Korea and Vietnam, which are likely to be next in the firing line.

“Reciprocal tariffs” going far beyond tariffs

What will further compound economic uncertainty and market volatility are Trump’s reciprocal tariffs of trade destruction. The White House has tasked its economic team with devising plans for “reciprocal tariffs” on every country taxing US imports.

Starting with countries with the biggest trade surpluses and highest tariff rates first, the Trump administration’s first aim is to offset not just tariffs but also non-tariff measures, including vehicle safety rules (a shrewd way to impose American vehicle insecurity worldwide). The same goes for value-added taxes (VAT), even though VATs are faced by both US and other international companies in different countries.

Additionally, the Trump administration is going for what it deems as “burdensome” regulations, harmful “government subsidies” and flawed exchange rate policies. In the view of most countries, such actions impose on the world US-style deregulation, privatization and dollar manipulation.

The threatened coming waves of new tariffs will worsen trade tensions, lower investment, hit market pricing, distort trade flows, disrupt supply chains and undermine consumer confidence. And since tariff is a tax levied on imported goods and services, the Trump administration may be setting a stage to vicious circles of global stagflation.

We are in for a far costlier, global déjà vu all over again.

This update also draws from Dr Steinbock’s commentaries published by TRT World on Feb 12, China Daily on February 20, China-US Focus on Feb 21.

About the Author

Dr. Dan Steinbock is the founder of Difference Group and has served at the India, China and America Institute (US), Shanghai Institute for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore). For more, see https://www.differencegroup.net/