A Palestinian state would be a human rights disaster. And no one gives a damn. ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Tuesday, July 29, 2025

A Palestinian state would be a human rights disaster. And no one gives a damn.

More European countries are moving towards or already recognizing "Palestine."

The irony is that these countries are pretending that this would be a boon to justice and are framing this recognition as promoting human rights. Yet we have thirty years of seeing how the Palestinians govern themselves post-Oslo, and human rights has been a disaster under their rule.

In the Human Rights and Rule of Law Index, Palestine scored 7.8 in 2022, significantly worse than the world average of 5.41 (higher scores are worse.)

Palestine is considered "Authoritarian" and ranks 112 out of 167 countries in The Economist Democracy Index.

The West Bank scores 22 out of 100 in the Freedom House scoring, and Gaza gets only a 2.

The story doesn't tend there, though.

The Wikipedia article Human Rights in Palestine, dedicated only to Palestinian Authority human rights violations, has not been meaningfully updated in years. For example, the it quotes the Freedom House report from 2002 and the Democracy Index from 2020. Most of the examples of human rights violations in the report are nearly 20 years old.

Not one of the tens of thousands of Wikipedia editors care enough about human rights under Palestinian rule to even update this page.

It isn't as if there are no current human rights issues under the Palestinian Authority - the entity that would presumably rule a united Palestine. Here is how the US State Department summarized human rights under the PA in 2023:

With respect to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank: arbitrary or unlawful killings; torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by the Palestinian Authority; arbitrary arrest or detention; serious problems with the independence of the judiciary; political prisoners or detainees; arbitrary or unlawful interference with privacy; punishment of family members for alleged offenses by a relative; serious restrictions on freedom of expression and media freedom, including violence or threats of violence against journalists, unjustified arrests or prosecutions of journalists and censorship; serious restrictions on internet freedom; substantial interference with the freedom of peaceful assembly and freedom of association, including overly restrictive laws on the organization, funding, or operation of nongovernmental and civil society organizations; inability of citizens to change their government peacefully through free and fair elections; serious and unreasonable restrictions on political participation; serious high-level corruption; serious restrictions on or harassment of domestic and international human rights organizations; extensive gender-based violence, including domestic or intimate partner violence; violence or threats of violence motivated by antisemitism; crimes involving violence or threats of violence targeting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or intersex persons; and existence of the worst forms of child labor.

This is not just a few problems here and there. The entire government is corrupt and systematically violates the rights of its people in virtually every possible way.

This is what a Palestinian state would look like.

Amnesty, Oxfam and Human Rights Watch are virtually silent, issuing next to zero reports on these issues.

Human rights advocate Bassem Eid created the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group in 1996 specifically to shine a spotlight on human rights violations under the Palestinian Authority. The NGO was dissolved in 2011 because of lack of funding. He told an interviewer several years later, "If I want to establish an anti-Israel NGO, I promise you tomorrow I would get a half a million dollars from Sweden."

This is not an exaggeration. I once found an obscure, one-person NGO dedicated to criticizing Israel that gets tens of thousands of dollars from Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Bertha Foundation, medico international, CCFD-Terre Solidaire and the .Open Society Foundations.

Dozens of NGOs have hundreds of people employed to find or fabricate Israeli violations of human rights of Palestinians. - and literally no one is dedicated to exposing human rights violations of Palestinians by their own leaders.

Which means that the world - including the Western European countries that are cozying up to the Palestinian Authority - really isn't interested in Palestinian human rights. It just wants an excuse to rake the Jewish state over the coals, using Palestinians as convenient pawns to achieve that goal.

Palestinian Arabs want to live in Israel. Israeli Arabs do not want to be citizens in a state of Palestine (although they will buy vacation homes there.) That tells you everything you need to know about who cares more about human rights in the region.

The world simply doesn't give a damn about Palestinian human rights unless Jews can be blamed.