The BDS movement condemns HRW’s latest expression of anti-Palestinian racism and reminds the world that the right of return for refugees everywhere is an inalienable right. Indigenous Palestinians will never give up that right–a core principle of the BDS Call of 2005.
Two Human Rights Watch staff members have resigned after the organization’s leadership blocked the publication of a report accusing Israel of crimes against humanity over the denial of Palestinian refugees’ right of return.
A former HRW Executive Director defended the organization’s decision, asserting that the report’s conclusion was, in legal terms, “novel and unsupported.” However, HRW in 2023 issued a report that called the UK's denial of the right of return of the people of Chagos Islands a "crime against humanity."
Excluding Palestinians from the applicability of universal rights constitutes anti-Palestinian racism. And it is not the first time for HRW.
In August 2024, Palestinian civil society condemned Human Rights Watch for issuing a substandard report accusing, without sufficient evidence, Palestinian armed resistance groups of committing abuses and crimes against Israeli civilians and soldiers on 7 October 2023.
All the while, HRW failed, for many months, to produce a single coherent report condemning Israel’s ongoing, livestreamed atrocities against 2.3 million Palestinians in the occupied and besieged Gaza Strip as a genocide. This said everything about the organization’s political bias.
The fact that by August 2024, HRW had failed to even call for a permanent ceasefire, let alone name Israel’s crime as a genocide, as have many UN experts and prominent scholars of genocide, further exposed the organization’s racist and colonial devaluation of Palestinian lives. HRW chose to remove the actions of the oppressed from the context of oppression, in the service of Israel’s colonial domination over all Palestinians, and of its genocide in the Gaza ghetto.
Though that report in 2024 was by far the most dangerous attempt by HRW to indirectly justify Israel’s genocide in Gaza, it was not the first. HRW’s infamous report on the massacre of hundreds of Palestinians at the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital on October 17th 2023, for instance, concluded, without any evidence, that a Palestinian-fired rocket was responsible for the killings, despite concrete evidence to the contrary presented by prominent media and human rights organizations. As Palestinian legal and human rights experts said in response:
"The unspoken starting point of HRW’s analysis has been that the problem with Israel’s genocidal onslaught against Palestinians is a matter of disproportionality in dispersed ‘incidents’ to be investigated. In most of its reports or articles, HRW’s analysis starts with absolute language on the ‘heinous,’ ‘vile,’ and ‘unspeakable’ October 7 attacks by Palestinian armed groups, with a clear determination that these are crimes. Yet, when reporting on Palestinian victims of [Israel’s] atrocity crimes, the killing of at least 15,523 Palestinians in Gaza, it is either entirely absent or otherwise not acknowledged as unlawful. What can explain the violence inherent in such double standards, the devaluing and near erasure of Palestinian life and suffering, other than racism and white supremacy?
"In a similar vein, when the current report is forced to mention the mass killing fields of Gaza, it hides the perpetrator, dealing a fatal blow to the report’s not just professional credentials but also the organization’s claimed ethical integrity.”
Israel's ongoing genocide in Gaza is armed, funded, and defended by the colonial West, headed by the US. It is also enabled by the complicity of states, institutions, corporations, and racist mainstream media outlets – as well as organizations claiming the mantle of human rights, yet engaging in an unethical attempt to whitewash the most grotesque, systematic violations of those same rights.
Human Rights Watch really means Human Rights for Some.