The Shelved Report That Exposes HRW's Antisemitism ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Thursday, February 05, 2026

The Shelved Report That Exposes HRW's Antisemitism

Two senior Human Rights Watch staff members, Omar Shakir and Milena Ansari, resigned last month over the organization's decision to shelve a report concluding that Israel's refusal to allow Palestinian "refugees" and their descendants to "return" constitutes a crime against humanity. The New York Times and other outlets are framing this as a story about HRW's internal politics and the courage of principled researchers.

They're missing the real story: the report's underlying logic reveals how accusations against Israel consistently rely on assuming Jewish evil from the outset—and that assumption is itself antisemitic.

While the report hasn't been published, the NYT article provides enough detail to reconstruct HRW's likely legal argument. The dispute centers on "whether there is a solid legal basis for the sweeping determination that denying the right of return to a particular location causes a level of suffering that rises to a crime against humanity."

Under the Rome Statute, crimes against humanity require proof that acts were committed "as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack."

Here are the crimes against humanity listed in the Rome Statute:

(a) Murder;
(b) Extermination;
(c) Enslavement;
(d) Deportation or forcible transfer of population;
(e) Imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty in violation of fundamental rules of international law;
(f) Torture;
(g) Rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, or any other form of sexual violence of comparable gravity;
(h) Persecution against any identifiable group or collectivity on political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural, religious, gender
(j) Apartheid;

How on Earth can a nation's immigration policy be put in the same category as these crimes? How can it be considered an "attack" at all, which is the very definition of a crime against humanity?

It cannot - but the HRW report almost certainly relies on an additional item listed in the Rome Statute:

(k) Other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health.

Notice what's embedded both in that formulation as well as in the general definition of crimes against humanity: intentionality.

Let's be explicit about what HRW's theory requires: Israel's immigration policy must be intentionally designed to cause great suffering to Palestinians. No nation on Earth allows anyone to become a citizen without fitting some criteria, and Israel's is no more onerous than that of most other countries. As a Jewish state, it favors Jews - but millions of people became citizens of European states without even being residents because of their ethnic ties. Germany's Spätaussiedler program, Hungary's citizenship-by-descent law, and Ireland's generous policies for those with Irish grandparents are all considered legitimate expressions of national identity.

Only when Israel does that same is it considered an active act of aggression against another group of people specifically to cause suffering. HRW is arguing that Israel's immigration policy - denying entry to descendants of people who left in 1948, most of whom have never lived in Israel - belongs in the company of extermination and mass rape.. That standard immigration controls exercised by every state somehow constitute "intentionally causing great suffering" comparable to murder, torture, and enslavement.

We aren't even getting into the discussion of Israel's security needs that prompted the policy not to allow Arabs who fled in 1948, hoping for a quick defeat of Israel, to return. Nor about how the UN resolution that is misread to give a "right" to return also specifies that the people must be willing to live in peace, a requirement that was never met.

The Arab world has been clear from the start that their insistence on "return" is a means to destroy Israel. Muhammad Salah al-Din Bey, Foreign Minister of Egypt, said in 1949, "It is well-known and understood that the Arabs, in demanding the return of the refugees to Palestine, mean their return as masters of the Homeland… they mean the liquidation of the State of Israel."

Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser was equally explicit. In 1961 he stated that Arab demands meant "the destruction of the State of Israel." Even more directly, Nasser declared: "If the refugees return to Israel – Israel will cease to exist." Arab leaders weren't hiding their intent - the "right of return" was always a demographic weapon to eliminate the Jewish state

HRW is not advocating human rights for Palestinian Arabs. It is demanding the destruction of Israel.

The assumption of malicious intent when Israel is doing what every other nation does is not limited to this report. It's the common thread running through every major accusation against Israel:

"Genocide": Amnesty International's recent report claims Israel commits genocide in Gaza. But genocide requires "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group." If Israel's intent is to destroy Hamas then the entire argument falls apart - but Amnesty embedded the result claiming intent for genocide into the assumption. The accusation assumes the worst possible motive while ignoring the obvious alternative: self-defense against a terrorist organization that openly seeks Israel's destruction.

"Apartheid": Multiple NGO reports claim Israel practices apartheid. But apartheid requires intent "to maintain [a] regime of systematic oppression and domination." Israel's laws enshrining equality for its Arab citizens demolishes the "intent" requirement. As I've documented, Amnesty invented its own definition of apartheid to reach this conclusion.

"Illegal settlements": The portrayal of Israeli communities in the West Bank assumes they exist to "steal land" or "oppress Palestinians"—not for security, not because Jews have historical and legal claims to the territory, not because successive Arab rejections of peace offers left the status unresolved.

In every case, the methodology is identical:

Assume Israeli Jews act from uniquely malicious motives
Ignore obvious alternative explanations (security, self-defense, standard state practice)
Use that assumption of evil intent to "prove" the predetermined conclusion
Create legal standards that apply only when you've assumed malicious intent from the start

In this case, it is crystal clear that the HRW report was written with the conclusion first, and the legal justification shoe-horned in afterwards. (Which is similar to Amnesty's report which was referred to internally as the "genocide" report while it was being written.)

This isn't just bias. It's a modern variant of an ancient libel.

The classical blood libel assumed Jews murdered Christian children for ritual purposes. The modern version assumes Jews design state policies specifically to maximize gentile suffering. The structure is identical: attribute uniquely evil motivations to Jews, dismiss obvious innocent explanations, use the assumption to "prove" extraordinary Jewish wickedness.

When you assume a Jewish state operates from fundamentally different and malicious motives than other states, you're not applying universal standards. You're applying a Jewish exception. And when that exception consistently assumes the worst possible intent while ignoring obvious alternatives, it reveals the prejudice driving the analysis.

The antisemitism becomes even clearer when you examine how Arab states treat the exact same Palestinian population.

Israel's immigration policies have been in place since 1948. There is no active oppression in not allowing Arabs to "return" to a state that almost none of them have ever lived.

But Arab nations that have hosted Palestinian Arabs since 1948 have refused to give them citizenship for over 75 years. And this is a deliberate policy - the Arab League says that Arabs can become citizens of other Arab countries except for Palestinians.

Under HRW's own logic - that denying people citizenship causes 'great suffering' - this active, ongoing discrimination against actual residents would far more clearly constitute a crime against humanity than Israel's standard immigration policy. History has shown that Palestinians want to become citizens of Arab countries if they could, and the rare times that brief windows opened to allow some of them to be naturalized they enthusiastically took advantage of that. The 1951 Refugee Convention says, "The Contracting States shall as far as possible facilitate the assimilation and naturalization of refugees" and every Arab state has flouted that. (Even Jordan, which naturalized the West Bank Palestinians in 1951, has not done the same for Gazans who went to Jordan after the Six Day War; they are still living in camps without access to state services.)

Don't hold your breath for HRW to accuse Lebanon, which doesn't even allow Palestinians to purchase land and forces them to live in overcrowded camps, of "crimes against humanity." But if HRW wasn't institutionally antisemitic and truly believed that keeping Palestinians stateless is a crime, that is exactly what they would do.

Even Kenneth Roth, HRW's executive director from 1993 to 2022, called this "a novel legal theory that was unsupported by the facts and law." When Kenneth Roth - whose anti-Israel bias has been extensively documented - can't defend your reasoning, you've revealed the prejudice underlying it.

Interestingly, HRW and Amnesty claimed that the "right to return" is a legal requirement over 20 years ago, using a different argument. It was based on a purposeful misreading of the Nottebohm ICJ case. They quote-mined an ICJ decision about citizenship disputes to mean the opposite of what it says - because they started with the conclusion that Israel must be violating international law and worked backwards, just as they have done countless times since. Elevating the argument to the even more absurd "crime against humanity" shows far more about HRW than about Israel.

The report was led by Omar Shakir, HRW's Israel-Palestine director for nearly a decade. Shakir has a documented history of opposing Israel's existence dating to his college years. HRW hired him knowing this - they wanted someone who would assume the worst about Israel.

And that's precisely what this report represents: start with the assumption that Israeli Jews are uniquely evil, construct a legal theory that only works if you maintain that assumption, apply it only to Israel while exempting states engaged in far worse conduct.

The report may be shelved, but the effort to write it reveals the antisemitism embedded in HRW's institutional approach: assume Jewish malice, ignore alternative explanations, use that assumption to prove predetermined conclusions, and call it "human rights research."

When your entire analytical framework depends on assuming Jews act from uniquely evil motives, you're not doing legal analysis. You're perpetuating an ancient prejudice in modern legal language.