Palestinian police officers stand guard during a protest over the death of Nizar Banat, a critic of the Palestinian Authority, in Ramallah in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, June 26, 2021. Picture taken June 26, 2021. REUTERS/Mohamad Torokman

Human Rights Watch (HRW) claimed last week in its latest World Report that Israel was a repressive regime, and called on the world’s democratic leaders to stop supporting the Jewish state.

Israel — the only democratic country in the Middle East — was grouped by the controversial rights group into the same cadre of serial human rights violators such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Hungary, Turkey, and the Czech Republic.

Within a matter of hours, major outlets such as  France24, the Independent, and the Daily Mail had uncritically reproduced these claims from articles that first appeared in the AP, AFP, and Reuters.

Meanwhile, HRW’s urging of Western-style democracies to cut aid to autocratic rulers and Israel did not extend to the West Bank’s Palestinian Authority (PA) — despite the PA’s long record of political corruption and cracking down on internal dissent.

Seemingly, Human Rights Watch has no qualms with Ramallah receiving copious amounts of aid from the US and Europe (see here, here, here, and here) to continue its repression of the Palestinian people.

A deeper look into the report’s claims shows that the HRW’s doubting of the legitimacy of Israel’s democratic institutions, as well as the call for Western countries to suspend support for the Jewish state, reveals the organization’s chronic anti-Israel bias.

HRW executive director Kenneth Roth depicts the Jewish state as having an ailing democracy by associating it with autocratic countries and minimizing its political freedoms. Directly before referring to Israel, Roth writes: “In certain countries where some degree of political pluralism was still tolerated, broad coalitions of political parties have begun to form, spanning the political spectrum.” (Emphasis added)

However, sandwiched between mentions of opposition groups forming against incumbents in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Turkey — all of which are struggling under controversial leaders — Roth implies that the same dynamics were evidenced in Israel, where “a broad coalition ended the long-time rule of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.”

No further explanation is given for this specious association, and neither HRW nor the outlets that provided a platform for its claims sought to provide context.

In fact, Netanyahu’s tenure as premier ended as a result of a functional Israeli democracy. Indeed, the same legal and political processes that enabled Netanyahu’s rise to power also facilitated his political demise.

Even though Netanyahu’s ouster came after four elections, it is a testament to the vigor of Israeli democracy that these elections were carried out to completion; that each election resulted in the reorganization of power in Israel’s parliament; and that Jerusalem is currently run by the most ideologically diverse political coalition in the Jewish state’s history, which includes prominent Arab representatives.

Israeli democracy continues to rank high by global standards. Freedom House in 2019 gave the country 13 out of 16 points for “political pluralism and participation,” showing that Israelis count on much more than what Roth described as “some degree of political pluralism.” Furthermore, Israel received a perfect score for “electoral process,” and 10 out of 12 points for a “functioning of government.”

In stark contrast, Mahmoud Abbas is currently serving the 17th year of his first four-year term as the president of the Palestinian Authority. Since then, elections in the West Bank were announced and subsequently canceled in 2009, 2011, 2018, 2019, and 2021.

Currently, the only viable electoral alternative in the West Bank to the ruling Fatah party is Hamas, designated by the US and Israel as a terrorist organization. No other political contender exists.

Yet out of the 1,133 words devoted in HRW’s report to outlining the state of human rights in the West Bank, only 176 words addressed the Palestinian Authority. The study correctly states that the PA has “detained activists on manifestly political charges, like insulting ‘higher authorities’ and creating ‘sectarian strife,’ that in effect criminalized peaceful dissent.” It also notes that “PA personal status laws discriminated against women, including in relation to marriage, divorce, custody of children and inheritance.”

And that’s it.

HRW is curiously silent on the details of Ramallah’s crackdown against ordinary Palestinians. Indeed, what the report fails to note is that “criminalization of peaceful dissent” is characterized by brutal PA raids, smear campaigns against anti-corruption activists, arrests and harassment of members of the Palestinian and international press, and the incitement to violence against its own people as well as Israelis (see here and here).

Yet neither HRW or the international press have called for the US or the other Western countries that back the PA’s government to reconsider their support in light of this unambiguous autocracy.

In an article, titled “HRW: Democracy must step up as autocrats face turning point,” the Associated Press notes that:

[Roth] faulted President Joe Biden’s administration for promising a US foreign policy led by human rights but then continuing ‘to sell arms to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Israel despite their persistent repression.’

Roth, AP, and the other agencies that published this excerpt completely ignored Washington and other Western-style democracies’ vested interest in Mideast security. What Roth fails to note is that American support of Saudi Arabia and Egypt is indispensable in the fight against extremism in the Middle East, specifically against the Iranian proxy militias that since 2014 have plunged Yemen into a bitter war.

Instead, a sovereign nation’s right — obligation, in fact — to defend its citizens from a government committed to its destruction is simply overlooked (see here, here, and here). The AP’s agenda-driven reporting thus sets up a false dichotomy — between human rights and the Jewish state’s fundamental right to survive.

Such support is also crucial in combating threats emanating from Lebanon’s Hezbollah terrorist group, another Iranian proxy that routinely threatens to destroy Israel. Another beneficiary of Iranian largesse is the Gaza Strip’s Hamas rulers, who also vow on a regular basis to eradicate Israel, and launched thousands of rockets last year in its latest attempt to accomplish this goal.

The Iranian issue has become even more crucial to regional peace, with Tehran accelerating its nuclear weapons program following former-US President Donald Trump’s withdrawal in 2018 from the Iran Nuclear Deal. In recent months, the Islamic Republic has openly threatened to bomb Israeli cities, including where the Jewish state’s alleged nuclear plant is located.

HRW’s blatantly anti-Israel agenda became clear as early as 2011, with the retraction of the fraudulent Goldstone Report that was produced with the organization’s support. The report falsely alleged that Israel was guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Most recently, HRW has taken on the mission of arguing, against all available evidence, that Israel is guilty of the crime of apartheid.

But even as HRW has continued to publish unsubstantiated claims against Israel, major media outlets have carried on printing the opinions of the controversial organization as if its reputation is above reproach.

Charles Bybelezer is the managing director of HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared — and whose staff worked together on this report.