The Former Head of Human Rights Watch on the Challenges of Reporting on the Abuses of Israel’s Government

Reporting on Israel is challenging because no other government has such an organized group of supporters that are dedicated to attacking critics, often with little regard for factual accuracy. Indeed, there is a cottage industry of small organizations, typically with deceptively neutral-sounding names, whose purpose is to criticize any group or individual who criticizes Israel. Their frequent charge of bias is meant both to discredit the critic and to change the subject from the government’s conduct.

Although few informed observers take these one-sided partisans seriously, many people want to believe that the Israeli government does no wrong. These groups also benefit from the tendency of journalists to discuss “both sides” of an issue, a problematic equivalency when the other side to which they give voice consists of propagandists.

People often confront me with some inaccurate or misleading statistic or allegation from one of these groups as if it were the gospel truth. It is never hard to refute the statement if the questioner is open to it.

Because of the credibility and reach of Human Rights Watch, we were often the primary target of these groups. Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard Law professor and a leading partisan defender of the Israeli government, claimed that we had “done more to turn the international community and progressives against Israel than any other organization.”

The partisans seemed to attack me more than anyone else. One of the leaders of the Israel-right-or-wrong groups called me “the most powerful and obsessive Israel-basher…of the twenty-first century.” Apart from my position as Human Rights Watch’s director, the vitriol was in part the product of my significant following on Twitter, although it started long before that.

Although few informed observers take these one-sided partisans seriously, many people want to believe that the Israeli government does no wrong.

I drew ire because, having survived so many of their attacks, I did not hesitate to spotlight Israeli abuses—or the hypocrisy of the Israeli government’s defenders. Indeed, I felt a responsibility to do so.

I am sure that part of what drove these partisans crazy is that I am Jewish. The charge of antisemitism is often bandied about to silence critics of Israeli repression, including me—I was also accused of being a “Jew hater.” Such absurd accusations only reaffirmed my sense of duty to call out Israeli abuses. It pained me to be ostracized by elements of the community that I grew up with, but I took comfort in knowing that I was far from alone among American Jews who were deeply disturbed by the direction of the Israeli government.

Some of these charges were made at the height of Israel’s 2006 war with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, when Israeli forces were pummeling Lebanese civilians. I wrote: “An eye for an eye—or, more accurately in this case, twenty eyes for an eye—may have been the morality of some more primitive moment. But it is not the morality of international humanitarian law.”

While defending the disproportionate Israeli military response that I had condemned, Abraham Foxman, then the head of the Anti-Defamation League, accused me of repeating “a classic anti-Semitic stereotype about Jews,” although I could never figure out what that stereotype was.

To enhance the antisemitism charge, one partisan disparaged my “thin” Jewish roots and “nominal Jewish background,” saying that my “father’s history in Nazi Germany” is my “only Jewish identity,” even though both my mother and father were proudly Jewish, as am I. To challenge my Judaism, someone edited my Wikipedia entry to note the utterly irrelevant fact (other than to suggest that I am not really Jewish) that I married Annie, an Anglican, in an Anglican church. (It was important to her.)

At one point they even claimed that I had converted to Christianity before an editor removed the concoction. My willingness to criticize such underhanded methods only added to my “target” status.

Other Jewish critics of Israeli policy who faced these charges included Peter Beinart, a highly respected journalist who attended an Orthodox synagogue and called out the misuse of antisemitism to silence criticism of Israel, and Richard Goldstone, the revered antiapartheid South African judge who was lambasted as a “self-hating Jew” and even prevented, due to threats of protests, from attending his grandson’s bar mitzvah after he chaired a UN fact-finding mission that was critical of the Israeli military’s (as well as Hamas’) conduct during the 2008–09 conflict in Gaza.

(He later retracted part of the report that had charged Israeli forces with intentionally killing civilians.)

Journalists also often faced the charge. As one Australian journalist put it, “The aim is to make journalists and editors decide that, even if they have a legitimate story that may criticize Israel, it is simply not worth running it because it will cause ‘more trouble than it’s worth.’”

Behind the charge of antisemitism is a battle about what the concept means. One working definition, issued by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), states in part that examples of antisemitism include “applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.” That example lies behind the growing efforts to highlight supposed double standards in how Israel’s rights record was assessed.

That argument did not hold up well against us because we treated Israel according to the same standards that we applied to one hundred other governments. As in any conflict situation, we reported on Israeli abuses as well as those by all opposing forces: the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah.

Although we did not address terrorist acts if committed by unsponsored individuals—those are serious crimes but not necessarily human-rights violations— we did address terrorism that seemed to have been sponsored by a government or armed group, such as in our 172-page report “Erased in a Moment” on suicide bombing against Israeli civilians.

Another type of speech that IHRA highlights as potentially antisemitic is “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.” Some partisans claimed that it is therefore antisemitic even to point out when the Israeli government is acting in a racist way, such as enforcing apartheid against Palestinians.

Some say that because there are few contemporary examples of apartheid—Human Rights Watch also found it in the case of the Myanmar government’s treatment of Rohingya Muslims in western Rakhine State—the application of the legal concept to Israel must somehow be antisemitic.

The IHRA working definition of antisemitism also refers to “demonizing” Jews. One prominent partisan equated such demonization with the legitimate criticism of Israel by groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International and asserted that the purpose of the working definition is to stop such criticism.

An alternative definition of antisemitism, issued by 210 scholars and known as the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, seeks to avoid such misuse of the concept by including several examples of statements and acts that are not antisemitic, such as “evidence-based criticism of Israel as a state” including “the conduct of Israel in the West Bank and Gaza.” It goes on to say:

It is not antisemitic to point out systematic racial discrimination. In general, the same norms of debate that apply to other states and to other conflicts over national self-determination apply in the case of Israel and Palestine. Thus, even if contentious, it is not antisemitic, in and of itself, to compare Israel with other historical cases, including settler-colonialism or apartheid.

Similarly, the Nexus Document addressing the relationship between Israel and antisemitism concludes:

Paying disproportionate attention to Israel and treating Israel differently than other countries is not prima facie proof of antisemitism. (There are numerous reasons for devoting special attention to Israel and treating Israel differently, e.g., some people care about Israel more; others may pay more attention because Israel has a special relationship with the United States and receives $4 billion in American aid.)

I prefer the Jerusalem Declaration and the Nexus Document because, by including examples of what is not antisemitism, they give greater deference to freedom of speech. The IHRA definition, although billed by its authors as only a “working definition,” has not been updated to include negative examples, despite its increasing weaponization against legitimate critics of Israeli practices.

Any discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian situation is prone to be heated. It would be a mistake, in my view, to limit such discussion beyond excluding clearly antisemitic expressions. Indeed, Kenneth Stern, the main drafter of the IHRA definition as the American Jewish Committee’s antisemitism expert at the time, later warned of this misuse. More than one hundred rights groups including Human Rights Watch stated their opposition to using the IHRA definition.

Gareth Evans, the former Australian foreign minister and past president of the International Crisis Group, summed up the issue well:

Calling out China for its persecution of Uighurs is not to be a Sinophobic racist. Calling out Myanmar for its crimes against Rohingya people is not to be anti-Buddhist. Calling out Saudi Arabia and Egypt for their murder and suppression of dissidents is not to be Islamophobic or anti-Arab. And calling out Israel for its sabotage of the two-state solution and creation of a de facto apartheid state is not to be anti-Semitic.

Antisemitism is a serious problem. But if people see it as a tool to stifle legitimate criticism of Israel, its meaning will be devalued. The Israeli government may feel temporarily strengthened, but Jews around the world will be left more vulnerable. Jewish leaders therefore are increasingly expressing concern about the misuse of charges of antisemitism to silence legitimate criticism of Israel.

In February 2023, “a slate of 169 prominent American Jews, including former leaders of major mainstream Jewish organizations, called on U.S. politicians not to conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism,” as reported by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. The signatories included former heads of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, and the Jewish Federations of North America. In August 2023, a leading Israeli Holocaust historian said that accusing Israel of apartheid is not antisemitic.

One memorable encounter for me with an extreme pro-Israel partisan took place in 2004, when I met with Abraham Foxman, at the time the long-serving national director of the pro-Israel AntiDefamation League. I went to his headquarters in Midtown Manhattan to see him as part of a reconciliation effort.

A few minutes into the meeting in a small conference room, Foxman exploded, carrying on about Human Rights Watch’s supposed anti-Israel bias, and stormed out of the room. His colleague continued the meeting as if nothing unusual had taken place.

After a while, Foxman returned. He said he thought that Human Rights Watch devoted twenty to thirty percent of its resources to criticizing Israel. When I explained that Israel was only one of, at that point, seventy countries that we covered, that we had only a single researcher assigned to the country (who also covered Palestinian Authority and Hamas abuses), he admitted that he had “learned something.” To this day, though, partisans of the Israeli government regularly respond to my tweets on the country as if I criticize only Israel.

One can never suggest to supporters of the Israeli government that spikes in antisemitic incidents or speech sometimes parallel Israel’s conduct. To note this correlation is not to blame the victim, as some Israeli partisans charge, but rather a measurable fact, as observed during Israel’s military campaign in Gaza beginning in October 2023, which caused high civilian casualties and extensive hunger.

Even the Anti-Defamation League noted “a significant spike in antisemitic incidents across the United States” beginning in October 2023 “directly linked to the war in Israel and Gaza.” As Jonathan Greenblatt, the ADL CEO, put it, “When conflict erupts in Israel, antisemitic incidents soon follow in the U.S. and globally.” Nonetheless, in the minds of some partisans, the idea that a state designed as a haven for Jews could stimulate harm against Jews is inadmissible.

One can never suggest to supporters of the Israeli government that spikes in antisemitic incidents or speech sometimes parallel Israel’s conduct.

I had one heated exchange on this topic with Jeffrey Goldberg, who became editor in chief of The Atlantic. I knew Goldberg casually and had even bumped into him once at Israel’s Erez crossing into Gaza. He argued: “Anti-Semitism in Europe did not flare ‘in response to Israel’s conduct in Gaza,’ or anywhere else….This is for the simple reason that Jews do not cause anti-Semitism. It is a universal and immutable rule that the targets of prejudice are not the cause of prejudice.”

That strikes me as one-dimensional. Antisemitism is not static. It is not an autonomous force that follows its own internal logic unconnected to the world. Events affect it.

The irony is that while Israeli partisans treat it as taboo to say that the Israeli government’s conduct has any effect on antisemitism, they find it totally acceptable to blame human-rights groups for fueling antisemitism through our criticism of the Israeli government’s conduct.

That is akin to what the Anti-Defamation League, the self-proclaimed leader of the fight against antisemitism, did when Amnesty International issued its report on the Israeli government’s apartheid. It said that Amnesty’s report “likely will lead to intensified antisemitism.” The ADL, the American Jewish Committee, and four other well-known American Jewish groups also said the report “fuels those antisemites around the world who seek to undermine the only Jewish country on earth.”

Another critic accused me of “stating that Israel’s actions were responsible for rising antisemitism rather than HRW’s relentless criticism, including accusations of ‘apartheid.’” Evidently antisemitism is suddenly not an autonomous force when it can be used to tar critics of Israeli repression.

The Israeli government’s concern with antisemitism is also selective. Some of its supporters are quick to throw the slur at critics, but the government has no trouble sidling up to antisemitic leaders for political advantage. Netanyahu, for example, embraced Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán despite Orbán’s notorious antisemitic campaigns against George Soros. That Soros was also a critic of Israeli repression undoubtedly contributed to the Israeli government’s willingness to close its eyes to Orbán’s antisemitism.

Why would Orbán, despite his antisemitism, embrace the Israeli leader? As Peter Beinart pointed out, it is quite possible to be a Zionist, supporting the state of Israel as a nationalist enterprise, while still being antisemitic, disliking liberal Jews in their own societies who tend to prioritize “diversity and equal citizenship” over ethnic “homogeneity” as the basis of a democratic nation.

I suspect that my Jewish background was also annoying to Israeli government supporters because I derived such different conclusions from them about the Holocaust. Like many Jews who have been drawn to the human-rights cause—and who support Human Rights Watch—the lesson that I take from the long history of Jews being persecuted is the need to build a strong set of human-rights norms that raise the stakes for governments or armed groups that attack Jews.

However, this should not be a matter of defending only Jews but rather of recognizing that Jews will be safest by working with others to promote a human-rights system in which the persecution of any group faces condemnation. Indeed, the leading American Jewish opponents of antisemitism, such as the ADL and the American Jewish Congress, at first adopted a similar perspective. So did Aharon Barak, the former president of Israel’s Supreme Court.

But in recent years the right-wing politicians that dominated the Israeli government seem to have drawn a different lesson from the Holocaust. For them, the Jews were persecuted because they were weak and did not have a state of their own. These politicians are determined not only to defend the State of Israel, as any government would do for its nation, but to be the toughest, most brutal force in the region—the one that no one dares mess with.

As Netanyahu described it, “The weak crumble, are slaughtered and are erased from history while the strong, for good or for ill, survive.” “Israel had to make clear to the Arabs that they would be hurt far, far more than the pain they could inflict,” said Foxman. “In other words, without Israel hitting back (not in an ‘eye for an eye a tooth for a tooth’ fashion….) but in a much stronger way, Israel would have been destroyed long ago.”

The lesson I draw from the Holocaust dictates the importance of respecting the rights of Palestinians as part of an effort to build stronger human-rights norms capable of deterring persecution of any group. If Palestinians are treated as exceptions to human-rights protections, so might Jews.

But the lesson that the right-wing governments of Israel draw is that Palestinians, as the perceived threat of the moment, should be crushed, and then crushed some more, until they have no choice but to accept their subordination. In other words, the Israeli government sees human rights as an obstacle to its preferred defense, which relies mainly on force, applied as brutally as deemed necessary.

That right-wing lesson obviously does nothing for Jews outside of Israel, but the Israeli government seems to feel that that is their problem, because they have not emigrated to Israel. Indeed, Netanyahu seems long ago to have begun hedging his bets on American Jews as a source of support for Israel, given their tendency to be liberal and believe in rights.

Instead, he banks on a combination of AIPAC, which represents highly conservative parts of American Jewry, and Christian evangelicals, many of whom favor a strong Israel not out of any love for Jews but because they see it as a prerequisite to the second coming of Christ, at which point Jews who don’t convert to Christianity would presumably go to hell. The right-wing lesson drawn from the Holocaust is not a wise policy for the Jews of Israel, either, as Hamas’s October 2023 slaughter and abduction of Israeli civilians demonstrated.

The aim should be to make such flouting of the most basic rights unthinkable. But refusing to recognize one’s enemy as deserving rights can only encourage, though never justify, such atrocities.

*

The political pressure not to report critically on Israel was illustrated shortly after I announced that I would be leaving Human Rights Watch. The leadership of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, part of the Harvard Kennedy School, wanted me to join them for a year as a senior fellow. I had been involved informally with the Carr Center since its founding. It seemed like a good place to kick around ideas as I wrote this book, so I accepted. All that was needed was the sign-off of the Kennedy School dean, Douglas Elmendorf, which, given that it was a human-rights fellowship, we all assumed would be a formality.

Reflecting that assumption, I contacted the dean to introduce myself in advance of my planned arrival in September 2022. In July, we had a perfectly pleasant half-hour video conversation. The only odd note occurred at the end, when he asked me whether I had “any enemies.”

Of course I have enemies, I told him, many of them. That is a hazard of being a human-rights defender. I explained that the Chinese and Russian governments had imposed sanctions on me. I mentioned that a range of governments, including Rwanda’s and Saudi Arabia’s, hated me. I said that the Israeli government undoubtedly detested me too.

Two weeks later, the Carr Center called to say sheepishly that Elmendorf had vetoed my fellowship. He told Professor Kathryn Sikkink, the highly respected human-rights scholar at the Kennedy School, that the reason was my, and Human Rights Watch’s, criticism of Israel.

I was shocked. How can an institution that purports to address foreign policy—that even hosts a human-rights policy center—avoid criticism of Israel?

It later emerged that, while Elmendorf did not seem to have strong personal views on the subject, “‘some people in the university’ who mattered to him did,” as he explained to the Carr Center’s faculty director, Professor Mathias Risse. By all appearances, these people were either donors or people who were worried how donors would react. The journalist Michael Massing wrote a detailed exposé in The Nation outlining the major donors to the Kennedy School who were strong supporters of Israel.

At first, Elmendorf refused to discuss the matter, although the Kennedy School spokesperson elliptically “did not deny [my] specific allegations,” as reported by The Harvard Crimson. Elmendorf justified his decision by citing my, and Human Rights Watch’s, supposed “anti-Israel bias.”

That was an odd allegation, given that the Kennedy School each year welcomed up to ten midlevel Israeli officials for yearlong fellowships and had even granted a fellowship to a retired Israel Defense Force general. Bias in favor of Israel was plainly not an issue.

On rare occasions, the Kennedy School granted a fellowship to a Palestinian, most notably Saeb Erekat, the longtime chief negotiator for the Palestine Liberation Organization. He was undoubtedly critical of Israel, but no one would pretend he was unbiased.

I came to believe that what really must have bothered the people who “mattered” to Elmendorf was Human Rights Watch’s impartiality. A biased critic can easily be dismissed. But it was precisely the care and objectivity that Human Rights Watch brought to its work on Israel and Palestine (and the rest of the world) that made our criticism difficult to ignore.

I used Twitter to shape media coverage. I distributed the many articles that were written about the dean’s veto. I defended the fairness of our work on Israel and Palestine. I asked questions about the university’s apparent sensitivity to presumed donor concerns.

When I ran Human Rights Watch, as I said, I recognized that certain prospective donors would not contribute to the organization because, as a matter of principle, we would not exempt their favorite country from our critical reporting. But if donors were behind the Kennedy School dean’s decision, why was Elmendorf not willing to take the same approach to uphold academic freedom?

The principled thing to do would have been to tell donors that they had no right to use their financial influence to compromise intellectual independence. If any university could take such a principled stance, it would be Harvard, the world’s richest academic institution.

Elmendorf ’s decision met an uproar of opposition among Harvard students, faculty, and alumni. It also yielded a lead editorial and two articles, one on the front page, in Harvard’s hometown paper, The Boston Globe. In addition, I placed an op-ed in the Globe as well as The Guardian, which also published its own articles on the controversy. I did countless interviews on television, radio, and in print.

After two weeks of intense negative publicity and apparently uniform disapproval of his action at an emergency meeting of the Kennedy School faculty, Elmendorf allowed my fellowship to proceed. But as I pointed out to the media, that did not address the broader issue of academic freedom.

For years, universities and other institutions have penalized scholars and others for their criticism of Israel or advocacy of Palestinian rights.

Elmendorf never did say who the people who “mattered” to him were. He hid behind the confidentiality of the fellowship process but nonetheless asserted that the people were not donors. That did little to appease concerns that they could turn their attention to others at the Kennedy School who criticized Israel. In September 2023, Elmendorf announced that he would step down as dean at the end of the academic year.

For years, universities and other institutions have penalized scholars and others for their criticism of Israel or advocacy of Palestinian rights. That Elmendorf reversed himself for me, after I was able to mobilize substantial media and public attention, did nothing to protect critics with a less public profile.

I asked the Kennedy School, and Harvard University as a whole, to clarify that they uphold academic freedom even for less visible critics of Israel. They never did.

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Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments by Kenneth Roth is available via Knopf.