Human Rights Watch Finally Draws the Line

Omar Shakir has served as Human Rights Watch (HRW)’s Israel/Palestine director for the past decade. In 2018, Israel revoked his work visa due to his support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, claiming that such activism conflicted with the neutrality expected of a human rights investigator. He has worked from abroad ever since.

In 2021, he wrote a report accusing Israel of apartheid, and I went to one of his presentations at an interfaith conference to hear his case firsthand. He then went on to author another report accusing Israel of genocide.

Recently, Shakir and a colleague drafted a new document advancing an even more far-reaching claim: that Israel is committing a crime against humanity by denying the descendants of Palestinians uprooted in Israel’s War of Independence the “right of return.”

Crimes against humanity are among the gravest offenses in international law, typically defined as persecution, torture, or enslavement. Yet Shakir argues that Israel’s denial of a right of return to descendants should fall under the statute’s vague catch-all category of “other inhumane acts that cause great suffering.”

The Geneva Conventions prohibit the forcible displacement of civilians in war and recognize claims for return or compensation. Anyone, whether Arab or Jew, who was driven from their home illegally in Israel’s 1948 War of Independence should have been allowed back or compensated. But that debate is not the real issue here.

Omar Shakir is not concerned with the plight of people actually displaced way back then, as the vast majority are no longer living. Rather, he is referring to their descendants, often after three or four generations. This is a different claim entirely.

Under ordinary international practice, refugee status is temporary. It ends once a person either returns home or resettles with legal permission to live and work in a new place. At that point, refugee protections are no longer needed, and refugee status is therefore not inherited indefinitely across generations.

But the United Nations created a unique framework which it applies only to Palestinians. Unlike every other refugee group in history — including Jews murdered by the millions during the Holocaust — Palestinians uprooted in 1948 pass their refugee status along to their descendants without limit, even after they have successfully resettled. And that’s even though it’s questionable how many of the original descendants were actually forced out — something that also happened to large numbers of Jews in the Middle East at exactly the same time.

UNRWA, the United Nations agency dedicated to assisting Palestinian refugees, has also added additional eligibility categories. These include individuals who experienced poverty or hardship they attribute to the 1948 war, along with their descendants as well. When a Palestinian descendant living in the United States recently asked UNRWA to remove him from its rolls because he no longer considered himself a refugee, the agency refused. It said there was no mechanism to do so, and that names are typically removed only upon death.

These are the individuals whom Shakir says are victims of Israel’s new crime against humanity. But there are two problems. First, since most, if not all, were born in countries that grant them citizenship, they are not refugees in any ordinary sense of the word. They therefore have no right to demand to immigrate to a different country based solely on ancestral ties to a land they have never lived in.

Second, international criminal law does not treat the hardships of third- and fourth-generation descendants as the continuing legal responsibility of states decades later. If it did, nearly every country on earth would stand accused of slavery, colonialism, and crimes committed in centuries-old wars. Crimes against humanity would cease to denote deliberate, large-scale atrocities and instead be stretched to cover political and historical disputes that international criminal law was never meant for.

To its credit, this new report was a step too far even for Human Rights Watch, which did not allow its publication. While current HRW officials are reticent to comment, former HRW executive director Kenneth Roth stated that Shakir’s report, “was indefensible and would have been deeply embarrassing if given a Human Rights Watch imprimatur.”

This refusal prompted Shakir and his colleague to resign. They’ve since been outspoken in the press and social media, alleging that HRW has double standards when it comes to Israel, and questioning the organization’s integrity.

But for those of us who have long criticized Human Rights Watch for its scathing treatment of Israel — despite the group’s pulled punches regarding Hamas — its decision not to publish Shakir’s report may be what is surprising. Human Rights Watch recognized that not every injustice is genocide, and historical grievances are not crimes against humanity. When advocacy groups stretch legal terms to score political points, they cheapen the very concepts meant to prevent atrocities. In this case, Human Rights Watch acted properly in drawing the line.

Shlomo Levin is the author of the Human Rights Haggadah, and he uses short fiction to explore human rights at https://shalzed.com/