https://nationalinterest.org/feature/confronting-anti-israel-narrative-industrial-complex-210394
“Israel has become so demonized” in human rights organizations, says Danielle Haas, former senior editor at Human Rights Watch (HRW), that there’s “no space to see Israelis as victims, or to absorb nuance or voices that challenge their orthodoxies. In a conceptual universe where Israel is an occupier-colonizer-apartheid state, it is a priori the aggressor, regardless of the brutal human-rights abuses it suffers.”
Haas (no relation to me) edited HRW’s annual review of human rights around the world from 2010 to 2023. In a blistering piece for the journal SAPIR, she writes that in human rights organizations, “Israel has become their watchword of outrage, the focus of disproportionate attention, and the note to sound for signaling fealty to a human-rights movement that is increasingly hijacked by politics and dominated by groupthink.”
That’s why, she writes, these organizations have been so anodyne in their response to Hamas’ brutality of October 7, so disinterested in the tunnels it has built “beneath children’s beds,” so skeptical of the proven ties between Hamas and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, so eager to parrot false claims of Israeli brutality in response to October 7, and so reluctant to correct the record later.
From their perch as self-appointed human rights arbiters, these groups play a huge role in shaping public views of the Jewish state. Their reports, tweets, and other utterances are echoed at the United Nations and other global bodies, in leading capitals, through media, on campuses, and in Hollywood—all of it contributing to what one might call a “narrative-industrial complex” that sets and reinforces a narrative about Israel that’s driven by ideology, biased in its conclusions, and disproportionate in its focus.