For years, HRW has been hiring anti-Israel activists to work in its Middle East division.
If they cared about human rights and transparency, these people should be specifically assigned to work anywhere else. Human rights expertise can be used anywhere in the world, the fact that HRW has consistently hired people whose anti-Israel political positions have been obvious specifically to work on reports about Israel is proof positive that HRW is not interested in fairness or transparency.
Now, NGO Monitor has discovered that they have done it again:In October 2016, Human Rights Watch (HRW) hired Omar Shakir to serve as its New York-based “Israel and Palestine Country Director.” Shakir is a consistent supporter of a one-state framework and advocate for BDS (boycotts, divestment, sanctions) tactics, fitting the longstanding HRW practice of hiring anti-Israel activists to serve in key positions relating to Israel:
- Shakir’s overt anti-Israel activism is exemplified by his May 2010 presentation at UC Irvine, “Apartheid IsReal.” In his talk, Shakir called for abandoning the two-state model as a way to eliminate Israel as the Jewish state: “Ehud Olmert is telling us where we need to go….that ‘If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses and we face a South African style struggle for equal voting rights, then as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished’.” (emphasis added)
- Similarly, in his speech Shakir called on the Palestinian Authority (PA) to end its goal of “self-determination,” a euphemism for promoting the replacement of a Jewish State with a binational state. He also rejected the idea of a negotiated solution to the conflict, saying that negotiations “will do nothing but institutionalize injustice.”
- Shakir compared Zionism to “Afrikaner nationalism,” and added that “It’s also an honor to be speaking at the campus that made a statement heard around the world, and the campus that officially said that we have no place here for a war criminal” (an apparent reference to the (illegal) disruption of the February 2010 campus appearance of Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren, emphasis added).
HRW's consistency in hiring anti-Israel activists, together with its anti-Israel bias in its reports, shows yet again that the organization has zero credibility when it comes to reporting about Israel.