He told a conference near Tel Aviv that the government had set up a legal team that would try to find connection between activists belonging to the BDS movement -- supporting boycott, divestment and sanctions -- and terrorist organisations.
Zoabi said: "Is there any form of struggle against Israeli oppression more peaceful, more civil than BDS? It is clear the government's real goal is silencing any criticism, any dissent."
Knesset supportThe Knesset passed the anti-terror bill with an overwhelming majority on Wednesday night. It was backed by all parties apart from the Joint List and the small, left-wing Meretz faction.
Formally, the law applies equally to Israeli citizens, whether Palestinians or Jews. However, Palestinian leaders said the law had been crafted to specifically target Palestinians in Israel and East Jerusalem.
"Be sure, if Israeli Jews are affected by this law, it will be only the left-wing ones who identify with the Palestinian struggle for liberation," said Zoabi.
At a parliamentary committee hearing on the law last month, Issawi Freij, a member of the Meretz party, observed: "A stone-throwing Arab will become a terrorist, while a stone-throwing ultra-Orthodox Jew will not."
Under the legislation, leaders of terror organizations face 25 years in jail. The tariff rises to a mandatory life sentence if a terror attack is carried out. The defense minister will be able to order the seizure of an organization's assets even before it has been indicted as a terror group.
Secret evidenceAdalah noted that the law does not distinguish between attacks on civilians and soldiers enforcing the occupation. In international law, the latter are considered legitimate targets.
An advisory committee will be able to approve declaring a group a terror organization. Those under investigation for links to terror may find that they have no access to the secret evidence used against them, Shehadeh said.
Most Palestinian political movements in the occupied territories are treated by Israel as terror organizations. Israeli officials, for example, make no legal distinction between Hamas' military leadership and its politicians running Gaza.
Shehadeh said the law would severely curtail freedom of expression. Threats to carry out a terror act -- however improbable -- could incur seven years in prison. Those inciting terror face five years, while those praising a terror organization risk three.
Those aiding a terror organization or providing it with services face five years' imprisonment.
In many cases, he added, the burden of proof would shift to the accused to show that they had not aided or sympathized with a terror organization, or failed to stop a terror act. "That violates a basic principle of due process in criminal law," Shehadeh said.
Emergency codes adoptedAyelet Shaked, the justice minister from the far-right Jewish Home party, welcomed the new powers. "Terrorism can only be defeated with appropriate punishments and deterrents," she said. "The 2016 model of terrorism will receive a 2016 response."
The law is designed to supersede previous anti-terror legislation and incorporates many of the dozens of emergency regulations introduced by the British in the 1940s. The Knesset adopted those powers upon Israel's creation in 1948 over vehement opposition from some lawmakers.
Menachem Begin, who would later serve as prime minister, called the British measures "Nazi, tyrannical and unethical" laws.
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