HRW says #EyalNaftaliGilad were killed because of "settlements"

Human Rights Watch continues its disgusting anti-Israel campaign with its latest article by "researcher" Bill Van Esveld:

Israel typically justifies its harsh policies in the West Bank on security grounds, but since Binyamin Netanyahu took office in 2009, Israel has begun construction on more than 10,000 housing units there for Israeli civilians.

Israel assigns soldiers to protect these civilians, for whose safety it proclaims the need to build expensive special roads, walls and checkpoints. Those measures failed this summer, when Palestinian gunmen abducted and killed three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank – sparking a massive military operation.

Van Esveld knows quite well who was behind the planning, funding, logistics, kidnapping and murders of the boys: Hamas.

Hamas doesn't distinguish between Jews on either side of the Green Line, calling all Israeli towns "settlements."

So HRW's pathetic attempt to claim that Israeli security is compromised by Jews living in their historic homeland of Judea and Samaria is absurd. The second intifada made no distinctions between where Jews lived. The bombings that happened regularly during the Oslo process weren't concentrated to the east of the Green Line.

If HRW wants to use the murder of the boys as proof that settlements cause terror, then they must admit that the number of terror attacks has decreased significantly even as the number of Jews who live in the territories - Jews who move there voluntarily, and not in violation of any sane reading of international law - has increased. By their own logic, settlements help curb terror.

By blaming the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria for Arab terror, HRW is pushing a myth that has no factual basis in the interests of furthering an agenda against Jews having the human rights to live where their forefathers lived  Control of that land has passed from the Ottomans to the British to the Jordanians to the Israelis without ever having been legally owned by the newly minted "Palestinian people."

The depths of HRW's hate for Israeli Jews can be seen from this sentence:

Unsurprisingly, settlements are flashpoints for confrontation; many arrests of Palestinian children, often for throwing stones, occur near settlements.

Hmmm, why would those horrible Israelis arrest people who throw stones at Jews who are living in and traveling to their communities? Who are the children (HRW doesn't want to mention the adults) throwing stones at? This article blames Jews for Palestinian Arabs throwing rocks at them - and it implies that people throwing rocks at other people is only a human rights issue for the criminals, not the victims! Indeed, Van Esveld seems to believe that throwing rocks at people is a human right in itself.

This is how depraved HRW has become in its zeal to characterize everything Israel does as a violation of human rights while giving Hamas (not mentioned once in this article) and stone throwers (who can and do kill human beings) a pass.

As we've seen, HRW is not a human rights organization: it is a racist organization that has condoned, supported and justified war crimes against Israeli Jews.

(h/t Anne)