Why are we ignoring human rights criticism of Israel?

Missing, muted coverage

This was evident in the coverage that was muted or missing altogether in early December after Amnesty International, a human rights organisation that is treated with the highest respect when it reports on non-Western countries, accused Israel of genocide in Gaza. Its report concluded that Israel had "deliberately inflicted conditions of life on Palestinians in Gaza intended to lead, over time, to their destruction."

Front-page news, right? Not really. And in some instances, coverage of Amnesty's findings placed Israel's vehement rejection of the charges ahead of the substance of the alleged violations of international law itself.

It would be wrong to say that the US media has ignored the war or has not levied serious criticisms of Israel's conduct. On 26 December, for example, the New York Times published a lengthy investigation showing that Israel loosened its own rules on warfare and allowed mid-ranking Israeli officers to drop bombs on suspected low-level Hamas members, even if those strikes risked killing their family members or other nearby civilians. But this has been infrequent.

To find much more unblinking coverage of the nature and toll of this war, however, one must look abroad to outlets such as the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

In one recent dispatch, unnamed Israeli military officers told Haaretz that their division's goal was the forcible displacement of the approximately 250,000 Palestinians remaining in northern Gaza. The officers said that their commander, Brig. Gen. Yehuda Vach, told them, "Only by losing land will the Palestinians learn the necessary lesson from the massacre Hamas perpetrated in southern Israel on October 7." One officer also recalled Vach saying that they "needed to make things hard on the (humanitarian aid) convoys that entered and harass them" and that "there are no innocents in Gaza."

Haaretz's reporting recalls an earlier milestone in the tally of serious human rights criticism of Israel since the war began. In June, Aryeh Neier, who co-founded the leading US-based rights organisation Human Rights Watch (HRW) in 1978, wrote in the New York Review of Books that he had come to the conclusion that Israel was conducting a genocide against Palestinians. It is rare for Neier, a Holocaust survivor, to believe a charge that grave is warranted; in his 15 years at HRW, he applied the term "genocide" to only one campaign: Saddam Hussein's 1988 massacre of Iraqi Kurds, which included the use of chemical weapons.

Damning reports

It was Israel's policy of obstructing humanitarian aid that persuaded Neier. He wrote:

"As early as October 9, top Israeli officials declared that they intended to block the delivery of food, water, and electricity, which is essential for purifying water and cooking. Defence Minister Yoav Gallant's words have become infamous: "I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly." The statement conveyed the view that has seemed to guide Israel's approach throughout the conflict: that Palestinians in Gaza are collectively complicit in Hamas's crimes on October 7.

As this week's UN report noted, Israel repeatedly justifies the death and destruction in Gaza by saying that it solely targets Hamas members. Yet, as Neier wrote, "The obstruction of humanitarian assistance is unlikely to affect Hamas combatants directly." He added, "All access to the territory is controlled by the Israel Defence Forces, which have denied entry to Israeli and Palestinian human rights organisations and to international organisations like HRW and Amnesty International. Limiting the ability of these organisations to gather information and make detailed reports on the conflict hardly insulates Israel from criticism for its abuses."

HRW weighed in with its own assessment last month, concluding that Israel is committing "acts of genocide." This came after South Africa submitted its main legal claim accusing Israel of genocide to the International Court of Justice in The Hague in October. Fourteen other countries have said that they intend to support South Africa's case, which Israel has dismissed as "blood libel."

As an individual journalist, I have no standing to adjudicate whether Israel's behaviour in Gaza constitutes genocide. What I do know, though, is that there is no graver charge in human affairs, and if society allows itself to become inured to claims from serious people and serious organisations like these—dismissing them as off base or partisan or brushing off their mounting chorus and downplaying the news—humanity as a whole, not just Palestinians, are likely to suffer.