B'Tselem Director one of Foreign Policy Magazine's 100 global thinkers for 2014

17 November 2014

Hagai El-Ad, B'Tselem Executive Director has been included in Foreign Policy's sixth annual “100 Leading Global Thinkers” issue, the magazine announced today in Washington DC. The list, recognizes a year of "tumult, protest, inspiration, and new beginnings" to quote the magazine's editors.

This year’s diverse group of Global Thinker honorees are organized into ten categories, including international personas such as Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, economist Thomas Piketty, journalist Kara Swisher, political television personality John Oliver and Alibaba Group founder Jack Ma.

Hagai El-Ad was selected with Rami Abdul Rahman, of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights in the "Advocates" category, which include social change activists from around the world, such as Hanna Hopko of the Ukraine, Zainab Bangura of the USA and Iris Yasmin Aguilar of Guatemala. The list also includes Farah Baker, a Gazan teenager who tweeted the course of operation Protective Edge.

The issue, and the Global Thinkers, will be honored at a dinner celebration in Washington on the evening of the 17th. Between 40 and 50 of the honorees, coming in from all parts of the world, will participate in a Town Hall discussion at The Four Seasons Hotel. Earlier, they will also join panel discussions as part of "Transformational Trends: A Year of Disruptive Thinking", an innovative policy conference, now in its 3rd year, jointly sponsored by FP and the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff. Secretary of State John Kerry is the keynote speaker of the conference.

The list also appears in a special interactive minisite

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Yuli Novak – B’Tselem’s new executive director

After nine years, B’Tselem’s executive director, Hagai El-Ad, is stepping down. Yuli Novak was chosen by B’Tselem Board to serve as the new executive director. Amid political turmoil, and against a growing consensus in Jewish Israeli society, El-Ad led a steadfast line of resistance to the occupation and worked to keep it on the political and public agenda. During his tenure, B’Tselem stopped referring complaints to the military law enforcement system, which serves as a whitewashing mechanism for violence against Palestinians by security forces. B’Tselem also called on snipers to refuse orders to use live fire against Palestinian protesters on the other side of the Gaza perimeter fence and insisted on the need for the international community to step in in defense of Palestinians’ human rights. Under El-Ad’s leadership, B’Tselem challenged the common misconception that Israel is a democracy that maintains alongside a temporary regime of occupation and unflinchingly exposed reality: the regime between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean is an apartheid regime that promotes Jewish supremacy in the entire area under its control. Adv. Yuli Novak served as the executive director of Breaking the Silence between 2012 and 2017, a time when the attack the Israeli government and right-wing organizations waged against Israeli human rights organizations reached new heights. Novak led the fight against this campaign to delegitimize the organizations and their work and wrote about this time and the political insights she gained in a personal-political memoir entitled “Who do you think you are?” published last year. In the past few years, Novak has founded and run a project designed to help Israeli and Palestinian social justice and political activists hone their strategic skills. “I’m grateful to Hagai El-Ad for years of courageous, principled leadership at B’Tselem,” Novak said, “As an Israeli, it is my duty and right to firmly demand an end to the occupation and the replacement of the apartheid regime with a democracy. This is the only way to ensure the human rights of everyone living in this land. More and more people, Israelis and others, understand today that democracy and occupation cannot coexist and that there is no democracy under apartheid. My commitment, our commitment, is to continue driving this understanding forward at home and abroad, with honesty, devotion and determination.”

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53 civil society organizations in solidarity with the Palestinian organizations designated by Israel as “terrorist groups”

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21 August 2022

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Joint call by Israeli civil society organizations to donors of designated Palestinian NGOs

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