Activities

• While HaMoked states that its main aim is “assisting Palestinians of the occupied territories whose rights are violated due to Israel’s policies,” it regularly represents families of terrorists responsible for carrying out terrorist attacks against Israel.
• Regularly petitions the High Court of Justice and makes inaccurate and inflammatory allegations of Israeli “apartheid,” “deportations,” “torture,” “collective punishment,” “forcible transfers,” and the “ghetto-ization of the West Bank.”

Legal Activity

• HaMoked has received money from European governments to represent the families of terrorists. 
• In December 2022, HaMoked was a signatory on a joint letter to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court stating that “We are all committed to assisting your office in advancing the ongoing investigation of the Situation in Palestine.”
• Publishes “Case Summaries” that aim to “illustrate the mechanisms of the occupation” by “provid[ing] administrative and legal assistance to Palestinian individuals, who have been directly harmed by the injustices of the Israeli occupation.”
• “Court Watch” section of website “examines Israeli court decisions on issues relating to the occupation” and issues petitions addressing “the measures taken by Israel to control the OPT and manage the life of the protected population – restrictions on freedom of movement, violations of the right to family life, house demolitions, the settlements, the use of administrative detention, torture, and more.”
• In April 2018, HaMoked, together with Yesh Din, Gisha, and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), petitioned the High Court of Justice demanding that the “Court order the cancellation of open-fire regulations allowing IDF soldiers to fire live ammunition at demonstrators who do not endanger the lives of soldiers on the border between Israel and the Gaza Strip.” The petition ignores the violent nature of the protests, which included Molotov cocktails, arson, and attempts to breach the border fence with Israel.

Demonization

• In an April 2023 segment published by Israel’s Channel 14 on HaMoked, HaMoked’s ex-CEO (1991-2017) Dalia Kerstein referenced the 2014 massacre of worshippers in a Har Nof synagogue (HaMoked represented the families of the attackers): “There was a case of two young Palestinians who went to a synagogue and killed people with a machete, you know? It’s like butchery…and then I said it was a horrible thing… But you can ask me, do you want them to kill elegantly? I don’t have an answer, I am against killing, but I can see why in such a struggle you have to kill once in a while. But you can’t quote me on that. I don’t think the question is a violent struggle. Good or bad, it’s good, but certain types of killing are not elegant.”
  • She also stated, “The way Israel uses the Holocaust is shameful… You know Yad Vashem?… it plays a political, dirty role.” She further declared “I guess they will have another intifada at some point…I hope it will happen.”
• In February 2022, HaMoked signed a statement defending a report published by Amnesty International accusing Israel of apartheid. According to the statement, “The debate around the crime of apartheid of which Israel is accused, and its geographical scope, is not only legitimate, but absolutely necessary. We wholeheartedly reject the idea that Amnesty International’s report is baseless, singles out Israel or displays antisemitic animus.” In February 2023, HaMoked signed a second joint statement, condemning EU High Representative Josep Borrell  for rejecting Amnesty’s report as antisemitic. The NGOs claimed to be “deeply concerned about the escalating instrumentalization of allegations of antisemitism…The European Commission should refrain from validating and fueling such instrumentalization in any way.”
• In January 2022, HaMoked was a signatory on a statement condemning the decision by the Israeli Ministry to designate six Palestinian NGOs as terrorist organizations. The statement called on the donors of the designated NGOs to “maintain and even increase their funding…Defunding the designated NGOs based on unsubstantiated allegations and designations will cause irreparable damage to Palestinian civil society at large and would undermine decades of humanitarian and human rights work.”
  • In October 2021, HaMoked published a statement that HaMoked “stands in full solidarity with Palestinian human rights organizations against this outrageous attempt to silence their important work. We are proud to be their partners in the struggle for Palestinians’ human rights.”
• In January 2021, HaMoked, alongside a number of Israeli, Palestinian, and international organizations, issued a declaration headlined “Israel must provide necessary vaccines to Palestinian health care systems.” The NGOs falsely claim that Israel has “legal obligations” to “ensure that quality vaccines be provided to Palestinians living under Israeli occupation and control,” while altogether ignoring that Palestinians residing in Jerusalem are part of the Israeli health care system; that under the Oslo Accords the PA is responsible for health care of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza; and that the PA has adopted its own vaccine policyfor its population.
• In June 2020, Nadia Daqqa, a member of HaMoked’s legal team, participated in a webinar titled “A Travesty of Justice: Palestinian Child Prisoners and Israeli Military Justice” that discussedthe “role and impact of military justice on Palestinians and its function in Israel’s occupation.” The webinar contained multiple distortions and omissions. See the NGO Campaign to Exploit Children’s Rights for more information.
• In June 2019, HaMoked was a signatory on a statement calling on the German Bundestag to revoke its joint resolution defining BDS campaigns against Israel as antisemitic.
• In April 2018, HaMoked published a report titled “Childhood in Chains: The Detention and Interrogation of Palestinian Teenagers in the West Bank,” making numerous false and misleading claims about the IDF and Israeli military courts. (For a complete discussion of these inaccuracies, see NGO Monitor’s reports “The Origins of ‘No Way to Treat a Child’: Analyzing UNICEF’s Report on Palestinian Minors” and “No Way to Represent a Child: Defense for Children International Palestine’s Distortions of the Israeli Justice System.”)
• In October 2017, HaMoked and B’Tselem published a joint report, “Unprotected: The Detention of Palestinian Teenagers in East Jerusalem,” that is part of an international NGO-led campaign of demonization that falsely accused Israel of abusing children’s rights. The publication also suffered from fundamental methodological flaws, highlighting the appropriation of human rights for political objectives.
• On February 24, 2016, HaMoked, along with B’Tselem, released a report “Backed by the System,” funded by the EU, alleging “Abuse and Torture” in Israeli prisons. The claims come from terrorists and suspected terrorists who were imprisoned in late 2013 and early 2014, and who were referred to the NGOs by their relatives. In contrast to the impression created in this report, only 14 of the 116 prisoners complained about “physical violence” during interrogation, and these allegations cannot be independently confirmed.
• Submitted a written statement to the 2009 Goldstone Commission, together with other Israeli NGOs, that failed to address alleged war crimes by Hamas, “but rather offers our own distinct perspective – human rights violations for which Israel must be held accountable.” The NGOs make the unsupported claim that “[t]o the extent that this was planned as a punitive operation which main purpose was not the achievement of actual military objectives, but the inflicting of deliberate damage as a deterrent and punitive measure.”
• Published an Online Legal Library (in “co-operation with Diakonia”) that included documents providing a distorted view or incorrect analysis of international law in order to criminalize Israeli actions, such as the false claim that “phosphorous and cluster bombs” are “illegal weapons prohibited by International Humanitarian Law.”
• In a 2009 petition about the security barrier, HaMoked wrote that that the case constituted “apartheid” and claimed that “there is no difference between the regime at issue in this petition…and the racial segregation regime in the southern states of the USA in the first half of the 20th century” (translated from the original Hebrew).
• In 2006, Israel’s State Prosecutor concluded that HaMoked’s “self-presentation as ‘a human rights organization’ has no basis in reality and is designed to mislead.”

Staff

• In September 2017, Jessica Montell became the Executive Director of Hamoked.
  • Montell is the former Director of B’Tselem and SISO: Save Israel, Stop the Occupation.
  • Montell has said: “I think the word apartheid is useful for mobilizing people because of its emotional power. In some cases, the situation in the West Bank is worse than apartheid in South Africa.”
  • In 2009, Montell claimed that “Israel has only itself to blame” for Goldstone’s one-sided conclusions and recommendations. She also stated that Israel was “shoot[ing] the messenger and bury[ing] its head in the sand.”
• Daniel Seidemann, founder of Terrestrial Jerusalem, is a Board Member of HaMoked.
  • Seidemann has claimed that Israel’s actions in Jerusalem are “contributing to the transformation of a resolvable national-political conflict into an intractable mix of jihad, war of mitzvah, and Armageddon – a religious war driven by the Biblical imagery.”
  • On July 4, 2017, Seidemann spoke at a Council for Arab-British Understanding (CAABU) briefing on “Jerusalem, 50 Years On: Unification or Occupation?” stating that “Israel has a choice…either it can have its united Jerusalem, or it can have international legitimacy. It cannot have both.” Seidemann furthered that “while it used to be a ‘benign’ occupation that existed,” it was now an “’unapologetic’ and ‘metastasizing’ occupation which exercises constant collective punishment” (emphasis added).
  • In July 2017, Seidemann stated in an interview with the World Council of Churches (WCC) that “For most of the time since 1967, the occupation of the West Bank has been military, while it has been of a more colonial nature in east Jerusalem. There is no military rule there, although the Israelis crush anything more radical than a scout meeting. And Palestinians are permanently politically disempowered.”
  • In a June 2017 interview with the BBC, Seidemann stated that the “greatest threat to the Jewish people in this generation to be perpetual occupation and Israelis are in a state of clinical denial.” When asked “What’s the mechanism that brings Israel to an end if you don’tdisengage from occupation,” Seidemann answered “Decay [and] isolation.”