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Human Rights Watch Finally Finds a Line Too Far on Israel
Omar Shakir, then a US citizen representing New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) in Israel and the Palestinian territories, stands next to Kenneth Roth, executive director of HRW, while speaking before departing Israel at Ben-Gurion International Airport, near Tel Aviv, Nov. 25, 2019. Photo: Reuters / Ammar Awad.
Sometimes, members of a non-governmental organization raise an anti-Israel argument so extreme that it confounds the group’s own leadership. That happened earlier this month, when Human Rights Watch (HRW) shelved a report produced by its internal staff.
Two members of HRW’s “Israel/Palestine” team resigned when the NGO’s executive director and his colleagues rejected the far-reaching thesis of the team’s report, titled “Our Souls Are in the Houses We Left Behind.”
HRW’s former executive director was so disturbed by the report that he called the anti-Israel analysis “indefensible.” The officers paused the publication, despite the advice of their legal department, a protest letter signed by 200 employees, and the group’s past sweeping accusations of Israeli genocide and apartheid.
The Our Souls report essentially told the following tale: Israel ethnically cleansed Palestinians from Mandatory Palestine in the 1947-1948 Arab-Israeli War. The Palestinian refugees acquired a “right of return” to their pre-war homes through the 1948 UN General Assembly Resolution 194(III). By refusing to repatriate the refugees, Israel deprived them of their right of return. That illegal deprivation continues to this day. And the ongoing nature of the malfeasance constitutes a “crime against humanity” under the 1998 Rome Statute.
Every step in the Our Souls legal journey is groundless.
There was no policy of ethnic cleansing of Arabs in the Arab-Israeli War. The overwhelming majority of Arabs who relocated during the Arab-initiated war did so due to wartime dangers, not ethnic cleansing. Although Zionist commanders displaced some Arabs by force of military order, those were lawful acts of self-defense against the Arab invasion. By contrast, the Arab invaders who displaced Jews during the war had no justification of self-defense. After the war, the world community adopted the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention. The treaty prohibited “forcible transfers and deportations” but preserved the right of self-defense and said nothing about ethnic cleansing.
Most Arabs who left their homes during the Arab-Israeli War did not leave Mandatory Palestine and therefore did not become refugees. They were “internally displaced persons” not subject to any legally binding protection. Among the two populations — refugees and internally displaced persons — few are still alive.
The post-war UN relief agency created to serve Palestinians labeled them and their descendants “refugees.” But that self-styled moniker lacked any legal significance under the global refugee treaty, called the 1951 Refugee Convention. The uprooted Palestinians and their descendants enjoyed no higher legal status than the uprooted Jews and their offspring. And no other refugee group in the history of the world has had a “right of return” that extends generations.
UN Resolution 194(III) did not create any refugee right of return. The document was a non-binding compromise proposal, which the Arab states violently rejected because they refused to “live at peace” with Israel. For years after the war ended, Arab terrorists continued to infiltrate Israel and attack civilians. Any Palestinian wish for “return” today is subject to negotiation of the “refugee” issue in the Israeli-Palestinian Oslo Accords of the 1990s. Meanwhile, Israel already has millions of Arab citizens and permanent residents.
Where there is no right of return or deprivation of any related right, there can be no ongoing “crime against humanity.” Such a crime is defined a “widespread or systemic attack” comparable to murder, enslavement or torture. It applies to atrocities like Hamas’ October 7, 2023, invasion of Israel but not disputes over refugee rights.
The Our Souls concoction of grievances ignores overriding international norms. By letting approximately 6.4 million Palestinians “return” to Israel, a country of only 10 million, the report would demographically abolish the Jewish state in violation of UN Charter Article 2, which prohibits any threat to “the political independence” of a state. The proposed population transfer would also violate Israel’s sovereign powers of immigration, property ownership, and national security. Moreover, the scheme would breach the “refugee” provision of the Oslo Accords. And finally, the implicit denial of Israel’s right to exist would be antisemitic, according to the internationally recognized “IHRA” definition of antisemitism.
The Our Souls scandal was not HRW’s first implosion over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In 2009, the organization’s own founder wrote a scathing condemnation of the NGO’s discriminatory animus towards Israel. In 2023, an HRW senior editor resigned, saying the group’s anti-Israel bias “shattered professionalism.”
Other NGOs have faced similar upheavals. Four members of the board of Amnesty International Israel resigned when the parent organization declared that Israel committed genocide in the Gaza war. The CEO of Oxfam Great Britain, a vocal critic of Israel, recently resigned and sued the charity, claiming it had improperly accused Israel of genocide and maintained a “toxic antisemitic culture.”
NGOs like HRW, Amnesty International, and Oxfam have no judicial authority or superior legal wisdom. They are interest groups posing as neutral arbiters of law. As they keep spreading their extreme anti-Israel indoctrination, their hostility spirals to delusional extremes. No wonder they sometimes antagonize each other.
Joel M. Margolis is the legal commentator of the American Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists, U.S. affiliate of the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists. He is the author of The Israeli-Palestinian Legal War.
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War with Iran puts the US-Israel alliance at grave risk
The Iran war is strategically sound yet politically unsupported — an unstable foundation for a gamble that could reshape the Middle East. That creates danger for Israel, which needs the support of an American public that is rapidly drifting away.
For decades, the country’s greatest strategic asset has not been its military technology or intelligence capabilities — spectacular as these are — but rather the political, diplomatic and military backing of the United States. That relationship has not been merely transactional. It was supposed to rest on shared values and deep public support across the American political spectrum.
If that support erodes or disappears, Israel’s strategic environment will fundamentally change. To be blunt: it will not be able to arm its military. This creates a paradox. A campaign that has so far demonstrated extraordinary value for the Jewish state also stands a risk of fundamentally weakening it.
An alliance at its strongest
The conflict has showcased the depth of the current U.S.–Israel alliance. To many observers, and critically to Israel’s enemies, the operation has underscored not only Israel’s capabilities but also the reality that it stands alongside the world’s most powerful state.
The strikes have projected deep into Iranian territory, revealed astonishing intelligence penetration, and destroyed or degraded key threats. Israel’s enemies across the region have already been weakened by previous rounds of fighting since Oct. 7, and the current operation has reinforced the impression that Israel can reach its adversaries wherever they operate.
Moreover, Iran’s regime has managed to isolate itself to the point where most Arab countries are in effect on the side of Israel and the U.S. That projection — of an unbreakable and strong alliance – may ultimately be the most important strategic element of this war.
But therein lies the rub.
The political foundations of American support for Israel are eroding, which means the very element that currently strengthens Israel’s deterrence — American participation — may also be the one most at risk.
A just war, unjustified
Americans do not understand why their country is at war.
A Reuters/Ipsos survey conducted at the start of the conflict found only 27% of Americans supported the U.S. action, while 43% opposed it. Other surveys show similar results, with roughly six in ten Americans against the military intervention.
In modern American history that is highly unusual. Most wars begin with a “rally around the flag” moment when public support surges. Even conflicts that later became controversial — from Afghanistan to Iraq — initially enjoyed majority backing.
This one did not — in part because the case for it has not been made clearly to the public.
That error is compounded by years of polarization in American politics; declining trust in institutions and leadership; and the record of President Donald Trump, who has spent years spreading conspiracy theories and demonstrating a remarkable indifference to factual truth. It is no exaggeration to say that many Americans do not believe a word he says – which is perhaps unprecedented.
When a president with that record launches a war, at least half the country assumes the worst. Even if the strategic logic is sound, the credibility deficit remains.
The tragedy is that the war is, in fact, eminently justifiable. The Islamic Republic has long since forfeited the moral legitimacy that normally shields states from outside force. It brutally suppresses its own population, jailing and killing protesters, policing women’s bodies, and crushing dissent with an apparatus of repression. Its foreign policy is not defensive but revolutionary. Through proxy militias it has destabilized Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen, as well as the Palestinian areas, in some cases for decades.
The regime has pursued nuclear weapons through a series of transparent machinations, deceptions and brinkmanship. Negotiations have repeatedly been used as delaying tactics while enrichment continued. Any deal that relieved sanctions would not simply reduce tensions; it would also inject new resources into a system dedicated both to repression at home and aggression abroad — one that is despised by the vast majority of its own people, as murderous dictatorships inevitably will be.
There is a doctrine in international law known as the Responsibility to Protect — the principle that when a state systematically brutalizes its own population, the international community may have the right, even the obligation, to act. By that standard, the Iranian regime has been skating on thin ice for years.
But with this clear rationale left uncommunicated, the politically dangerous perception has spread that the U.S. was reacting to Israel rather than acting on its own strategic judgment.
A perilous future
If Americans come to believe that Israel caused a costly war that they did not support in the first place, the backlash could be severe.
For centuries, one of the most persistent antisemitic tropes has been the accusation that Jews manipulate powerful states into fighting wars on their behalf. The suggestion that Israel can pull the U.S. into conflict feeds directly into that mythology. Once such perceptions take hold, they can be extremely difficult to reverse.
Even people who reject antisemitism outright can absorb a softer version of the same idea: that American interests are being subordinated to Israeli ones. In a political environment already marked by growing skepticism toward Israel, that perception risks deepening the erosion of support that has been underway for years.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio seemed to inadvertently feed such notions by suggesting in recent days that the U.S. had to attack Iran because Israel was going to do so “anyway,” and then America would have been a target. It was a short path from that to conspiracy theorists like Tucker Carlson blaming Chabad for the war.
A future Democratic president, facing a base that appears to have abandoned Israel, may feel far less obligation to defend it diplomatically or militarily. Even a Republican successor could prove unreliable if the party continues its drift toward isolationism.
That likelihood is compounded by studies showing that a large part of the U.S. Jewish community itself no longer backs Zionism. That process is driven by Israel’s own policies, including the West Bank occupation and the deadly brutality of the war in Gaza.
So the very war that is showcasing the best the U.S.-Israel alliance has to offer is also at risk of fundamentally damaging that partnership. Particularly if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — the rightful object of much American ire — manipulates the Iran campaign into an electoral victory this year, the alliance’s greatest success could also be its undoing.
The post War with Iran puts the US-Israel alliance at grave risk appeared first on The Forward.
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Report: Iran’s New Military Plan Is Regime Survival Through Regional Escalation
Members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) attend an IRGC ground forces military drill in the Aras area, East Azerbaijan province, Iran, Oct. 17, 2022. Photo: IRGC/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS
i24 News – After last year’s devastating conflict with the United States and Israel, Iranian leaders have reportedly adopted a major strategic shift aimed at expanding the war across the Middle East to secure the regime’s survival, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Previously, Iran responded to foreign strikes with limited, targeted reprisals. The new doctrine abandons that approach, aiming instead to escalate the conflict regionally, particularly against Gulf Arab states and critical economic infrastructure. The goal is to disrupt the global economy and pressure Washington into shortening the war.
This decision followed the twelve-day war with Israel in June 2025, during which Israeli and US strikes eliminated senior Iranian military leaders, destroyed key air defense systems, and severely damaged nuclear facilities. In response, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei—before his elimination early in the current conflict—activated a strategy designed to maintain continuity even if top commanders were neutralized.
Central to this approach is the so-called “mosaic defense” doctrine: a decentralized military structure in which the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) operates through multiple regional command centers. Each center can conduct operations independently, allowing local commanders to continue fighting even if national leadership is incapacitated. This makes the military apparatus more resilient to targeted strikes.
Analysts cited by the Wall Street Journal suggest that Tehran’s calculation is to make the conflict costly enough for all parties to force the US and its allies into a diplomatic resolution.
However, the plan carries enormous risks. By escalating attacks on regional states and international economic interests, Iran could provoke a broader coalition against itself. Despite prior military losses, Iranian forces retain the capability to launch drone and missile strikes, maintaining their influence over the ongoing conflict.
For Iranian leaders, the immediate priority remains unchanged: the survival of the regime, even if it requires a major regional escalation.
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Katz Warns Lebanon to Disarm Hezbollah or ‘Pay a Heavy Price’
Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz and his Greek counterpart Nikos Dendias make statements to the press, at the Ministry of Defense in Athens Greece, Jan. 20, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Louisa Gouliamaki
i24 News – Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz on Saturday warned Lebanon’s leadership that it must act to disarm Hezbollah and enforce existing agreements, cautioning that failure to do so could lead to severe consequences for the Lebanese state.
Speaking after a high-level security assessment with senior military officials, Katz directed a message to Lebanese President Joseph Aoun, saying Beirut had committed to enforcing an agreement requiring Hezbollah’s disarmament but had failed to follow through.
“You pledged to uphold the agreement and disarm Hezbollah — and this is not happening,” Katz said. “Act and enforce it before we do even more.”
The meeting took place in Israel’s military command center and included Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir and other senior defense officials, as Israel continues operations on multiple fronts.
Katz emphasized that Israel would not tolerate attacks on its communities or soldiers from Lebanese territory.
“We will not allow harm to our communities or to our soldiers,” he said. “If the choice is between protecting our citizens and soldiers or protecting the State of Lebanon, we will choose our citizens and soldiers — and the Lebanese government and Lebanon will pay a very heavy price.”
The defense minister also referenced Hezbollah’s leadership, warning that the group’s current chief could lead Lebanon into further destruction.
“If Hassan Nasrallah destroyed Lebanon, then Naim Qassem will destroy it as well,” Katz said.
Katz stressed that Israel has no territorial ambitions in Lebanon but said it would not accept a return to the years in which Hezbollah launched repeated attacks on Israel from Lebanese territory.
“We have no territorial claims against Lebanon,” he said. “But we will not allow Lebanese territory to again become a platform for attacks against the State of Israel.”
He concluded with a warning to Lebanese authorities to take action against Hezbollah before Israel escalates its response.
“Do and act before we do even more,” Katz said.