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[Excerpts:]

"NGO Monitor, Israel’s most prominent watchdog of human rights groups and a longtime critic of many of them, publicly rejects the turn that criticism against those groups is taking. Gerald Steinberg, president of NGO Monitor, said that he finds Yisrael Beiteinu’s claim to be based on “very flimsy evidence.” Steinberg criticized the shift in the debate from research-based claims, like those of his group, to what he considers the populist and alarmist claims of Yisrael Beiteinu. Steinberg said that NGO Monitor has looked into the question of whether Jewish-run Israeli NGOs receive money from Arab governments and terrorist organizations, and has concluded that this is not the case. “My fear is that they will raise the issue of Arab money, it will be shown to be a red herring and people will say all the concern about NGOs was without basis,” he said. The real question, he asserted, was how, why and to what value European governments are funding NGOs, issues that he fears will now go unexplored." "This polarization on the NGO issue concerns Steinberg. “It has been turned into a narrow wedge political issue. What we have is the far right and the far left competing about who is more democratic and more Zionist,” he said, adding that he is concerned that “partisan debate” has eclipsed “transparency” and the “public right to know.”"