The data collected by Palestinian groups is shared with international and Israeli human rights organisations such as HRW and B'Tselem, both of which recently issued reports declaring Israel an apartheid state.
Israel has been targeting these groups too.
Omar Shakir, the regional director of HRW, was expelled by Israel two years ago. Last year, Israel refused to renew work visas for United Nations human rights officials after they published an investigation into the collusion of international firms with illegal West Bank settlements.
And B'Tselem, Israel's foremost occupation watchdog, and Breaking the Silence, a group of whistleblowing former Israeli soldiers, are denied the right to speak in Israeli schools and are regularly vilified by Israeli politicians and the media. This assault by Israel on the entire human rights community - at home and abroad - is obviously explained.
These organisations have been gradually making an unassailable case: both for Israeli leaders to be prosecuted at the ICC for war crimes, and for boycotts and sanctions to be imposed on Israel of the kind that was used against apartheid South Africa.
That work is polarising Jewish communities abroad, traditionally a reliable support base for Israel. And it is making an overpowering case for Israel to be shunned, exposing the yawning gulf between the expectations of western publics and the inaction of their leaders.
For Israel, all this is truly terrifying - and therefore those responsible for it must be deemed terrorists.
Ending EU fundingGantz's suggestion that Israel has new information tying these Palestinian human rights groups to terror is belied by the fact that Israel has been abusing them for many years.
Staff have been arrested and jailed or denied the right to travel abroad. Jerusalem residency permits for their workers have been revoked. And the army has raided their offices, seizing computers and documents. Those abuses have intensified as these organisations have found more purchase at international forums for their research into Israeli war crimes and apartheid practices.
Israel will now be able to exploit its new "terror list" to justify intensifying the crackdown. It will be even easier to find pretexts for harassing and jailing staff.
But there are other advantages for Israel. It will make it even harder for international and Israeli partners to collaborate with Palestinian groups on work exposing the crimes of Israeli occupation.
And undoubtedly Israel and its advocates abroad will use the terror designation to further vilify these groups and discredit their findings.
But perhaps the biggest prize for Israel will be using this new "terror list" to try to bully European states and the European Union into ending their funding for the Palestinian human rights community.
Labelling Palestinian human rights activists as "terrorists" will serve the same goal as labelling western activists seeking to end Israel's oppression of Palestinians as "antisemites" or labelling Jews acting in solidarity with Palestinians as "self-hating" and "traitors".
Israel will bundle all this supposed "hate" into its existing narrative that it is facing a campaign from all sides to "demonise" the only Jewish state in the world.
The reality is that Israeli leaders are conflating their own terror at being held to account for their crimes with an imagined "terrorism" being waged by lawyers and researchers trying to show the reality of occupation.
Will anyone fall for it? The record suggests western governments just might.
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