It must be difficult to be a pro-Palestinian propagandist these days. After all, how can you possibly defend the gruesome slaughter of over 1,400 innocents, torture, rape, defiling corpses?! Yet there is a network of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that are doing their best to justify the unjustifiable.
For the past week, my colleagues and I at NGO Monitor have carefully examined the output of NGOs that claim human rights agendas, many funded by European governments, and analyzed their claims and argumentation. We have identified a three-staged process by which NGOs work to erase the heinousness of Hamas crimes and fuel the international demonization of Israel.
Justifying and celebrating attacks
The first stage is open justification and celebration of the attacks as “resistance” against a “settler-colonial state.” For example, the 150-member Palestinian NGO Network (PNGO) “saluted this honorable image that our people are sketching,” having faced, “for more than 75 years, a racist, fascist occupation,” and stated that “the Palestinian people… are resisting this with all valor and sacrifice.” BADIL, a Palestinian “return” NGO, wrote, “resistance is the most human and legitimate act” because “the Palestinian people have been suffering for 75 years of colonial-apartheid regime, ethnic cleansing, forcible transfer/displacement.”
Similarly, an advocacy officer from Defense for Children International-Palestine (DCI-P) referred to “Palestinians resisting Israeli colonization & trying to take back their land.”
These and other examples demonstrate how the initial NGO responses celebrated the “accomplishments” of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terrorist groups, i.e. the mass killing, abduction, and other heinous crimes against thousands of civilians.
Whataboutism and shifting focus
Next, NGOs moved on to stage two: trying to shift media and political focus by inventing Israeli atrocities that are similar to the actual brutality of Hamas. Palestinian NGOs have always delegitimized Israel’s right to self-defense and denied the existence of Palestinian terrorism, which they invariably decorate as “resistance.”
Israel’s military response targeting terror infrastructure in Gaza provided another opportunity to accuse Israel of committing the worst crimes. For example, a joint statement from the PFLP’s NGO network – Al-Mezan, Bisan, Al-Haq, DCI-P, Addameer, Union of Palestinian Women’s Committes (UPWC), and others – demanded that the EU “fully denounce Israel’s indiscriminate military reprisals…and intervene to protect the Palestinian people against Israel’s incitement to genocide.”
In another statement, Al-Haq accused Israel of “targeting male and female civilians and civilian objects in such a way that amounts to acts of genocide.” Zakaria Bakr, who heads the Union of Agricultural Work Committees’ Gaza Fisherman Committee, wrote, “We are living through an action of ethnic cleansing and genocide accompanied by starvation…what we are living through is more powerful and stronger than the holocaust which the Zionists talk about.” Palestinian Medical Relief Society Director Mustafa Barghouti published a statement referencing an Israeli “plot…to carry out the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip.”
Of course, all these NGOs, primarily funded by their European government patrons under the facade of “human rights,” were entirely silent on Hamas’s genocidal violence. Stage three is reminiscent of a standard tactic employed by those caught red handed – deny, deny, deny. As they recognized the need to salvage international support for the Palestinian cause, some NGOs began denying that the atrocities and crimes against humanity perpetrated by Hamas actually happened. Good Shepherd Collective, which describes itself as “an anti-Zionist, anti-colonial organization,” alleged that “zionists” (sic) were sharing “AI generated images, trying to convince us that Palestinian resistance fighters simply must be the barbarians they believe them to be.”
An official of Al-Haq, described as a “highly respected Palestinian NGO,” claimed that the Israeli Air Force bombed Israeli cars – burning the occupants – and that an Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs video of the aftermath was “deceptive and misleading.”
Denying Israel's claims as honest
This third stage is particularly pernicious, since it is often accompanied by the notion – sometimes explicitly, sometimes implied – that Israel orchestrated the deception to fool the world into a permissive attitude towards war crimes in Gaza.
These three stages might be familiar. They are the same tactics used by antisemites who deny the Holocaust and its magnitude, e.g., claiming that only “a few hundred thousand were killed.” Or by those who suggest that Jews were persecuted because of their economic status, because “they engaged is usury,” or for their “social behavior.” And then there are conspiracy theorists like Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas who declare that Zionists cooperated with the Nazis or that Jews were behind the Holocaust.
The NGO propaganda playbook is not unique to the political dimension in the war to eliminate Israel or even to centuries of antisemitism against the Jewish people. But now, it a central front in a deadly conflict involving a heinously brutal terrorist group. It is incumbent that the audiences for NGO propaganda – diplomats, UN officials, journalists, academics and the government allies and funders of these NGOs – firmly reject their lies and fictitious human rights claims.
The writer is a researcher at NGO Monitor (www. ngo-monitor.org), a Jerusalem-based research institute.