Last week, Human Rights Watch's "Senior EU Advocate," Claudio Francavilla, wrote an
The recent spike in deadly attacks and repression in the occupied West Bank should surprise no one. Last year, Israeli forces killed more Palestinians than in any other year since 2005, when the UN began systematically recording fatalities: 151, including 35 children. A little over a month, a new year and another Netanyahu-led government, the situation is only getting worse.
Already, we see the bias - and indeed hatred - that animates so-called "human rights experts" who are effectively, if not explicitly, antisemitic.
Yes, there were more Palestinian fatalities in the West Bank (although not Gaza) last year since the Second Intifada. But Francavilla pointedly leaves out three crucial facts - facts that are missing in virtually all left-wing analyses and articles.
The first is that the vast majority of the Palestinians killed were members of armed groups and/or actively involved in hostilities at the time they were killed. Once this is realized, the entire calculus is turned on its head - Israeli forces aren't killing Palestinians but defending themselves and Israelis against Palestinian militants.
The second is that the Israeli actions were a response to the increase of Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians. The latest terror spree started in March 2022, and Israeli incursions into the West Bank were to stop them.
The third is that armed militias such as the "Lion's Den" were allowed to form over the past 18 months. Their members - many of whom are also members of the ruling Fatah party - publicly strut through the streets of Jenin and Nablus under the noses of the Palestinian Authority that is obligated under existing agreements to combat them.
Cause and effect are ignored by Human Rights Watch, in its zeal to paint the Jewish state as evil - and as "apartheid:"
The government has also responded to Palestinian attacks on Israelis with collective punishment, a war crime in the occupied territory, including razing attackers' family homes.
It is an amazing sentence. He doesn't refer to Palestinian attacks on Jews as war crimes or even as collective punishment. Israel's response to terror, meant to end such attacks, are the only "war crimes" HRW's Francavilla is interested in addressing.
These abusive and discriminatory practices by Israeli authorities are not new: they further a policy to maintain the domination by Jewish Israelis over Palestinians and take place in the context of systematic oppression of Palestinians, which collectively amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.
This conclusion, reached by Human Rights Watch and other international, Israeli and Palestinian human rights groups, legal and UN experts — among many others — should make it impossible for the EU to continue to pretend that the repression of Palestinians is a temporary phenomenon best addressed in the context of the "peace process."
Earlier today I created an
infographic to show the deception used by the three major so-called human rights organizations in creating new definitions of apartheid specifically to give Israel, and only Israel, that label.
B'Tselem,
Al Haq and the
UN, don't bother to use any legal definition of apartheid and simply make the assertion of Israeli apartheid with no proof.
HRW and
Amnesty - as well as the
International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard - try to shoehorn the definitions of apartheid in international law to fit to Israel by selectively taking texts from other documents out of context.
The latter groups base their arguments on the assumption that Israel's treatment of Palestinians who are not citizens of Israel differently from Jews are based on a national ethos of discrimination against Palestinians.
We've shown how the papers issued by HRW and Amnesty lie about the facts. To make their basic argument stick, that Israel discriminates against Palestinians based on "national origin," they must prove that Israel discriminates against Arab Israelis as well. To do that, they must egregiously lie.
HRW falsely claims Israeli Arabs do not have the same
voting rights as Jews do and that Israeli Arabs cannot move beyond the Green Line, only Jews.
Amnesty
falsely claims that not forcing Arab Israelis to join the army is evidence of discrimination (what about Haredi Jews?), and that Israel's raising the threshold of votes needed for small parties to enter Knesset discriminates against Arab parties (when in fact all of the parties who failed to reach the threshold in 2021 were Jewish parties.)
B'Tselem and HRW use as "proof" of apartheid the fact that Palestinian Arabs
cannot travel freely in Israel while Israeli Jew can travel to parts of the West Bank. But Israeli Arabs and even non-Israeli Arab residents of Jerusalem have
far greater freedom of movement than Israeli Jews do - they can go literally anywhere from the river to the sea, while Jews cannot enter areas A and B of the West Bank, and are severely restricted from the Temple Mount.
If that is your definition of apartheid, then it is apartheid against Jews!
Even beyond that, if you define Israel's policies as based on "national origin" and not citizenship, then you start to go down a bizarre slippery slope that ends in antisemitism.
Israel defines itself as the Jewish state. Its existence is based on the concept that Jews need a single place to live, in their ancestral homeland, where they will not suffer any discrimination whatsoever. Where there is no penalty for following Jewish law in observing the Jewish Sabbath and holidays. where Jews do not suffer discrimination on where they can raise their families. Where Jews can flee persecution to safety without having to remain stateless. This is not "Jewish supremacy" - this is Jewish survival. It is an oasis where Jews can freely be Jews in a way that they simply cannot be in any other country on Earth.
The "human rights groups" are claiming that the entire concept of a Jewish state and a place where Jews can walk freely without fear is wrong and "apartheid." That is antisemitism.
Beyond that, they claim that Israel is discriminating against Palestinians based on their "national origin." But they cannot point to any laws that favor Jews (primarily the Law of Return) that specifically discriminate
against Palestinians as opposed to the entire world minus a tiny minority. As with
jus sanguinis laws in other countries, these laws
favor those of the same national origin versus everyone else; there is no discrimination
against any specific group.
If that is apartheid, then most countries with jus sanguinis nationality laws are also guilty of apartheid.
But only the Jewish state is given that label.
Moreover, this also means that, according to these "human rights groups," even Jews whose families lived in Palestine for hundreds of years (or indeed since the days of the Second Temple) do not have a Palestinian "national origin." If they did, then Israel should be discriminating against them as well! Yet Palestinians who moved to the region as late as 1947 from Syria or Egypt do have a "national origin" of - Palestine!
What can you possibly call that except antisemitism?
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