Human Rights Watch has released another biased and lying report, this one demanding that FIFA expel Israel because some football clubs operate in Area C.
Area C is territory that is under full Israeli control under the Oslo Accords interim agreements between Israel and the PLO. Those agreements do not limit any Israeli activity in those areas. While the agreement was meant to be temporary, the Palestinian decision to reject Israeli peace offers and instead engage in a terror war against Israeli Jews essentially froze the agreements where they were. But that is the only relevant international law that governs the areas.
HRW, however, regards all of the land in Area C as "stolen," as the report says:
“By holding games on stolen land, FIFA is tarnishing the beautiful game of football,” said Sari Bashi, Israel and Palestine country director at Human Rights Watch.HRW is now making a claim of land being "stolen" and implying that the rulings of the Israeli Supreme Court which has ruled on many aspects of Israeli activities in Area C is illegitimate. If the land was indeed privately owned by Palestinian individuals, then calling it "stolen" may be accurate, but since most of the land Israel controls was state land under Jordanian and Ottoman law, calling it "stolen" is not a legal term, but an inflammatory lie. The Israeli Supreme Court routinely rules on issues of land ownership in the territories with detailed descriptions of its legal reasonings. HRW, on the other hand, simply declares it "stolen" without any serious scholarship behind that slander.
However, HRW goes beyond those lies to claim that there is some sort of litmus test that Israel uses to check if someone is of Jewish ancestry before allowing them to attend football games or even to enter settlements:
Military law in the West Bank limits entry to settlements to Israeli citizens and residents, holders of Israeli visas, or individuals of Jewish ancestry. The West Bank’s 2.5 million Palestinian residents, excluding East Jerusalem residents, are not allowed to enter settlements, except for approximately 26,000 laborers bearing special permits. Arab citizens and residents of Israel, like their Jewish counterparts, may enter the settlements.That's funny, because I've driven into "settlements" without any Israeli soldier checking to see if I was circumcised. So can anyone else visiting Israel from most countries in the world - even without an Israeli visa.
HRW gives two purported sources for this claim, and neither one of them say anything about a Jewish litmus test to enter settlements.
Human Rights Watch simply made this up to pretend that Israel is practicing anti-Gentile apartheid and Jewish supremacism.
Now, why would a so-called human rights organization falsely claim that Jews are discriminating against non-Jews?
(h/t Gidon Shaviv)