No Other Country Kicks Us Out When We Try To Undermine Only Israel’s Existential Legitimacy

By Kenneth Roth, Director, Human Rights Watch

Our researchers should be free to conduct their observations and analysis in a country that purports to call itself democratic, but Israel’s behavior in this regard raises some disturbing questions: what does it say about Israel that, unique among all states, it tries to remove our personnel from its borders when those personnel work to undermine Israel as a Jewish State and negate it as a refuge for history’s most oppressed minority?

Israel refused to renew our employee Omar Shakir’s work visa, claiming that his vocal advocacy of boycotting and delegitimizing the Jewish State, and of no other documented systematic violators of human rights, makes him ineligible to continue working in the country. The decision is currently subject to an appeal of a lower court decision on the matter, but whatever the outcome, Israel’s government has already indicated it adheres only when convenient to the democratic norms it professes – situations that do not include when NGOs work to undermine Israeli democracy and Israel’s democratically-elected officials by non-democratic means, measures we and our human rights allies employ only when it comes to Israel. The hypocrisy rankles.

Some try to defend Israel’s actions by pointing to our organization’s comparative soft-pedaling on violations by almost every other country on the planet, but that can be dismissed as mere whataboutery. Deflection is not how to address the flagrant policies of the world’s only Jewish State and the only state we and our allies continually try to make disappear. Only dismantling the State of the Jews in favor of a country that offers the Jews no special protection or political identity, thereby opening them up once again to the whims of the surrounding hostile populations, can address our concerns. But no other country reacts to such aspirations of ours or our allies with such blatant disregard for democratic principles, the fact that we undertake no such efforts with any other country on Earth notwithstanding.

It comes to this: either Israel allows us to employ within its borders a person who made his reputation working to call into question the legitimacy of the country as a Jewish state, or we will continue to point out that no other nation on this planet reacts with such draconian steps to our efforts to negate its democratically-self-determined political character, efforts that it just so happens we have undertaken exactly nowhere else. It’s that simple.

But based on precedent, I think we know what their decision will be. Predictable.

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