In 2004, Human Rights Watch (HRW) published a 133-page report headlined “Razing Rafah,” accompanied by a world-wide media campaign condemning the Israeli military and government for “mass home demolitions in Gaza.” The main accusation was that the tunnels built under the houses along the border and used by Palestinian groups to smuggle explosives and terrorists from Egypt into Israel “posed little threat, and the IDF action was ‘unnecessary,’ ‘unlawful,’ and designed to maintain ‘long-term control’ over Gaza.”
For the next 19 years, this powerful organization orchestrated automatic condemnations following every Israeli counterterror action in Gaza, repeating the earlier slogans and political campaigns under the facades of human rights and international law. They continued and even intensified after Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, and the violent Hamas takeover from the PLO in 2007.
It is not an exaggeration to conclude that HRW played a central role in protecting the Hamas terror machine, including turning a blind eye to the massive network of concrete tunnels and command centers constructed under schools and hospitals, and the production of tens of thousands of rockets to target Israel. The brutal results were traumatically displayed on October 7, 2023.
This history was brought into sharp focus by the email that a long-time HRW employee sent to the entire staff (approximately 500 individuals) on November 14, 2023, her last day before leaving the organization. Danielle Haas spent 13 years as a senior editor, working with all the key officials, led by Executive Director Ken Roth (1993-2022), who set the tone and fashioned the corporate culture of demonization for everything connected to Israel and Zionism. Her email was leaked and published, confirming what many serious observers of the organization had concluded and providing additional evidence.
Regarding the response to the brutal October 7 Hamas massacre, Haas referred to HRW’s refusal to condemn “the murder, torture, and kidnapping of Israeli men, women, and children,” instead marketing a repulsive justification using “the ‘context’ of ‘apartheid’ and ‘occupation’ before blood was even dry on bedroom walls.”
She quotes one of the many heinous statements by Omar Shakir, a veteran anti-Israel campaigner hired by Roth as HRW’s Israel and Palestine director, who blamed Israel’s “unlawful attacks and systematic repression” for October 7, and, in Haas’s words “could easily be construed as blaming the victim.” Blaming Israel and its Jewish supporters for terror and antisemitism has been one of HRW’s frequent themes, even prior to 2004.
The moral rot in the Human Rights Watch's core
Haas did not mention Ken Roth by name, but his fingerprints were apparent in her depiction of the moral rot at the core of HRW and the “shattered professionalism, abandoned principles of accuracy and fairness, and surrendered its duty to stand for the human rights of all.” On Israel, she highlighted “years of politicization… that has frequently violated basic editorial standards related to rigor, balance, and collegiality.” The Israel chapter in HRW’s annual review “has always been longer than those of rights-abusing goliaths such as Iran and North Korea.”
In many ways, this criticism is understated. For more than 20 years, HRW targeted Israel with repeated and false accusations of “deliberately killing civilians,” committing war crimes, collective punishment, disproportionate responses, and even ethnic cleansing. In hundreds of press statements, news interviews and social media posts, Roth and his hand-picked HRW team lobbied the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague to open investigations of Israelis that would lead to war crimes indictments. This unique and obsessive attack is far more than the “politicization” and lack of rigor or accuracy.
In 2009, HRW played a central role in the travesty known as the Goldstone report (officially, the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict), which repeated the standard HRW attack phrases and the call for ICC war crimes investigations. Richard Goldstone, who was a member of HRW’s international board, later acknowledged that the report with his name was based on false and inaccurate accusations, but by then, the damage to Israel was done. In the years that followed, HRW’s campaign singling out the Jewish state as the world’s worst violator of human rights and most evil country in the world has expanded continuously.
For these and many other reasons, HRW founder Robert Bernstein painfully “joined the group’s critics” in denouncing the organization that he founded for “helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state.” He also expanded on these themes in public speeches. 14 years ago, Bernstein’s warnings should have flagged HRW as toxic, but with a massive budget (over $100 million annually as of 2022) and large staff to manipulate media coverage, the powerful NGO was able to ignore even this condemnation.
In recent years, Roth and HRW added a malicious campaign to label Israel as the world’s only “apartheid state” – which, as in the case of South Africa, has no right to exist. Following the script they used many times, including in 2004 on the IDF’s first attempt to destroy Gaza’s terror tunnels, HRW published a pseudo-research report, which was immediately given headlines in major media platforms. As was obvious at the time, and now confirmed by Haas, “HRW knew its careful, legal argument would rarely be read in full. And there is little doubt it has not been by those – including Hamas supporters – who now bandy about the term with appalling ease.”
According to Haas, there are others among the staff who agree with her “but are fearful to speak out.” Perhaps some of them, as well as HRW’s major funders, will be emboldened to follow her example, and finally realize that they are supporting a fundamentally immoral agenda that exploits and destroys the founding principles of human rights.
The writer is professor of political science at Bar-Ilan University and president of NGO Monitor.