Human Rights Watch ‘apartheid’ claim should serve as a wake-up call for Israel

It’s a flawed and biased report but its predictable dismissal as anti-Israel propaganda allows politicians to avoid the allegations it makes about the treatment of Palestinians

THE REPORT RELEASED by Human Rights Watch (HRW) that determines Israel “has crossed the threshold” and Israeli officials have committed “the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution” is methodologically flawed, intellectually disingenuous, and politically biased. 

Yet, it should serve as a wake-up call for Israel and an opportunity for self-criticism. Sadly, and predictably, Israeli politicians and officials have responded by dismissing the report in its entirety without any further discussion. 

The 213-page report, which HRW touts as one of the most comprehensive of its kind, is predicated on what the organisation refers to as “the present-day reality of a single authority, the Israeli-government, ruling primarily over the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, populated by two groups of roughly-equal size….”  The conflation of three distinct entities – the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and the State of Israel within its internationally-accepted borders – is the report’s most glaring flaw. Even in sections in which it does recognise distinctions between these three situations, the use of a single analytical framework (Israeli authority) across widely differing categories is methodologically lazy and politically misleading. By applying Israel’s control over the region as the single analytic variable, the report reduces a complex situation into a simplistic accusation.

Journalist and political analyst Hirsch Goodman, who left his birth home in South Africa because of his objection to apartheid, notes another problem resulting from this methodology. Writing in The Forward, he observes, “Ironically, much of the case Human Rights Watch lays out draws on the work of watchdog groups based in Israel, making the precise efforts toward reform that the report leaves no room to acknowledge. None of those groups – more than 40 in all – would have been able to function under a true apartheid regime. If the underlining objective was to prove and substantiate that Israel is an apartheid state, it just doesn’t hold up to serious scrutiny.”