The council, much of whose budget comes from public coffers, includes some of the most extreme settlements in the occupied territories.
The same settlers' committee made headlines last year when it produced an animated video that equated human rights activists in Israel with a "kapo," a Jew who collaborated with Nazi guards in the concentration camps.
This week it launched a new campaign urging Israeli Jews to boycott restaurants in Israel that abided last year by a one-day general strike called by the leadership of the country's Palestinian minority.
Spying operationA separate investigation this month by the liberal Haaretz daily revealed that Regavim, a state-funded group that tries to help settlers take over Palestinian land, had paid for a three-year spying operation, starting in 2010, against a prominent human rights lawyer.
Michael Sfard has been a legal adviser to several anti-occupation groups, including Breaking the Silence, Peace Now, which monitors settlement activity, and Yesh Din, which highlights violations of Palestinians' rights.
According to Haaretz, a private detective hired by Regavim passed on confidential documents that reached Im Tirtzu. They were later published in the Israeli media.
A newspaper article based on one document from Yesh Din claimed the organization was helping outside bodies to investigate Israeli soldiers for war crimes.
Gurvitz, who is also a researcher with Yesh Din, noted that many of the staff of far-right groups was closely involved with government parties.
Regavim's chief legal officer at the time of the spying operation was Bezalel Smotrich, now an MP for the governing Jewish Home party, which is pushing the legislation to weaken anti-occupation groups.
Undisclosed moneyA separate investigation by Peace Now disclosed last month that nine far-right Israeli groups received income of nearly $150mn between 2006 and 2013. More than 93 percent of the money was from undisclosed sources.
The donors, almost all from the US, are believed to include wealthy Jews as well as Jewish foundations and fundamentalist Christian organizations that support the settlements.
However, Peace Now's research also shows that the Israeli state funnelled some $25mn into far-right organizations in that period, mostly through government ministries and local authorities. The sums were concealed under a category called "participations."
Molad, an Israeli progressive think-tank, found in 2014 that the Netanyahu government had stepped up other forms of aid to far-right groups following the 2009 election.
The government transferred some $40mn in special grants to the settlements but then required their local authorities to redirect most of the money to a private settler organization, the Yesha Council, in apparent violation of Israeli law.
At the time of the decision, Naftali Bennett, now the leader of the Jewish Home party and the education minister, headed the Yesha Council.
Gag orderThe right-wing ad campaigns, the spying operations and government and police responses have fuelled a climate of hostility towards peace activists.
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