THE HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH (HRW) IS WORKING TO TURN ISRAEL INTO A LEPER

Faced with delegitimization, Israel is silent

 

By Sara Ha'etzni-Cohen

Israel Hayom

April 29, 2021

On Tuesday, Human Rights Watch published 217 pages of propaganda in its latest report. The global organization – it has offices in around 100 countries and a massive budget – has an unexplained obsession with a small country in the Middle East, a democracy in a jungle of dictatorships. When it comes to Israel, the term "human rights" disappears and is transformed into a facade for poisonous political activity that has no trace of concern for either humans or their rights.

This report was published with great international fanfare and saw to it that the State of Israel's name would appear alongside the word "apartheid" in the world's largest media outlets. While we were busy talking about our never-ending political rivalries, anti-Israel organizations are working to turn Israel into a leper.

 

                           Israeli border wall

 

What will you find in the hundreds of pages of this report? For the most part, a major anti-Israel obsession. The word "apartheid" appears no less than 200 times in the report, and it is replete with startling distortions of the truth. There no longer any talk of Judea and Samaria or the Gaza Strip. The old occupation is dead. Now, they speak of "from the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea," all the while ignoring the Palestinian Authority that administers the lives of the Arabs in Judea and Samaria and the Hamas regime in Gaza. The organization recognizes every citizen between the river and the sea, outside of Jews, as Palestinians. There are no Druze, no Bedouin, and no Circassians. That, by the way, is racist. The report makes no mention of Arab terrorism while treating every Israeli security operation as aimed at demographic expansion.

The report negates the Law of Return, which it asserts is racist while demanding Israel immediately accept the "right of return" of Arabs and open its gates to millions of people, some of them from enemy states. Furthermore, the report's authors have emptied the word apartheid" of any meaning and twisted international legal terms such as the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. The ends justify the means. The report's recommended actions are all taken from the world of delegitimization and the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement.

You won't see HRW run this kind of campaign against Iran, which just last week was tasked with heading the UN's Commission on Women's Rights. Yes, Iran, which makes women's lives miserable and keeps them from their children for violating modesty laws. You won't see a campaign like that against Venezuela or Russia, and certainly not at the same level as ones directed at the Jewish state. This is an organization that was involved in consolidating countless boycotts of Israel in the past, and its representative in Israel was accused by the High Court of Justice of working to promote BDS while enjoying the privilege of having a visa from the very same country he was acting against. That same representative, by the way, is the main researcher behind this latest report. Try and act surprised.

This is a racist and antisemitic report from a giant organization with an annual budget of around $90 million and international legitimacy, and Israel has no official player in the arena. It is only civilian organizations like NGO Monitor and the Kohelet Policy Forum that have spoken up for the Jewish state. They have all known about this report for about a week. They might have broken their embargo on the media and acted intelligently and aggressively. If we had a government, a Knesset, and Foreign Ministry that wanted to fight, they would have declared all the non-Israeli authors of the report persona non grata in Israel and demanded answers from the embassies of those countries funding the organizations funding HRW. It's not too late.