HRW’s ‘Apartheid’ Report Denies Israel’s Legitimacy as a Jewish State – NGO Monitor

Jerusalem, 27 April, 2021 (TPS) -- A Human Rights Watch (HRW) report, titled “A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution,” is an attempt to deny Israel’s legitimacy as a Jewish state, NGO Monitor charged.

HRW released a report on Tuesday accusing Israeli authorities of “committing the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.”

The report’s findings are ostensibly based on an “overarching Israeli government policy to maintain the domination by Jewish Israelis over Palestinians and grave abuses committed against Palestinians living in the occupied territory.”

The 213-page report claims to present “the present-day reality of a single authority, the Israeli government, ruling primarily over the area between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea, populated by two groups of roughly equal size, and methodologically privileging Jewish Israelis while repressing Palestinians, most severely in the occupied territory.”

“Israeli authorities should dismantle all forms of repression and discrimination that privilege Jewish Israelis at the expense of Palestinians,” HRW demanded.

Israel’s apartheid policies should “prompt the international community to reevaluate the nature of its engagement in Israel and Palestine and adopt an approach centered on human rights and accountability, and should establish a UN commission of inquiry to “investigate systematic discrimination and repression in Israel and Palestine.”

Countries should also condition arms sales and military and security assistance to Israel on Israeli authorities “taking concrete and verifiable steps toward ending their commission of these crimes.”

Responding to the allegations in an extensive analysis of the report, the NGO Monitor watchdog said that the document “adds to decades of HRW’s obsessively singling out of Jews and Israel, and rejection of the legitimacy of a Jewish nation-state, per se and regardless of policies or borders.”

HRW’s report is part of a concerted campaign by at least 15 groups over the past 18-months to interject the term “apartheid” into discourse about Israel. Indeed, HRW cites and quotes many of these NGOs in its publication.

Furthermore, the claims made regarding Israel and the definition of apartheid under the Rome Statute are “fundamentally political, and rejected by many legal experts as distortion and slander.”

The HRW’s recommendations to the international community repeat the claims it has made for 20 years in promoting BDS campaigns against Israel and targeting companies that do business in Israel and are primarily focused on advancing boycotts on Israel.

The report was written by Omar Shakir, whose work visa was not renewed by Israel because of his active involvement in  BDS campaigns and activities against the Jewish state.

Possibly most importantly, HRW denies Israel’s legitimacy as a Jewish state and reduces all security policies to “demographic objectives.”

Finally, NGO Monitor noted that the report reinforces the warning of HRW founder Robert Bernstein, in the New York Times, who wrote in 2009 that HRW “has been issuing reports on the Israeli-Arab conflict that are helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state.”

Former Foreign Ministry spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon has called HRW a “blatantly hostile anti-Israeli organization whose reports have the sole purpose of harming Israel with no consideration whatsoever for the truth or reality.”