Israel Under Fire: NGO Warfare: From Human Rights Watch to Campus Mobs

Many of the slogans chanted by antisemitic mobs on university campuses and in major cities following the October 7, 2023, atrocities – “genocide… starvation… apartheid… war crimes… from River to the Sea…” – are propelled by an extensive network of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that carry the flags of human rights and international law. Similarly, the statements and reports of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) and the pronouncements of the International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor Karim Khan, including the decision to seek arrest warrants for at least two Israeli leaders – Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Galant on the claim of “starvation” – directly reflect the impact of these NGOs.

Immediately following the October 7 attacks, these NGOs launched concerted major political campaigns that downplayed or whitewashed Hamas and the other perpetrators and targeted Israel. Interviewed as “experts” on major media platforms and using social media posts, NGO officials like Omar Shakir (Human Rights Watch) declared: “Depriving an occupied population of food & electricity is collective punishment—a war crime—as is using starvation as a weapon of war.”¹

In parallel, Amnesty International called on the ICC Prosecutor to “urgently expedite its ongoing investigation in the situation of Palestine, examining alleged crimes by all parties, and including the crime against humanity of apartheid against Palestinians.”² The Paris-based International Federation of Human Rights (FIDH) published and marketed a call for the investigation of “Israel’s unfolding crime of genocide and other crimes in Gaza and against the Palestinian People,” as well as “Israel’s use of starvation as a tool of warfare… “forced displacement… and systematic domination and oppression over the Palestinian people for over 75 years.”³

The litany of demonization and modern blood libels, accompanied by expressions of support for Hamas and other terror organizations, is systematically repeated and amplified by a broad network consisting of hundreds of localized NGOs. These include groups organizing and supporting the pro-Palestinian activists based on university campuses and also conducting mob violence against Jews and other targets in major cities.

As described and analyzed in detail below, the role of NGOs in promoting antisemitism through anti-Zionism and demonization of Israel has become an enduring feature of the public discourse – paralleling a resurgence of physical violence against Jewish targets, particularly after October 7. The two primary NGO-led and mutually reinforcing dimensions are 1) the campus-based groups and activities and 2) the broader international campaigns based on accusations including war crimes, genocide, apartheid, and starvation.

Structure and Funding of the NGO Lawfare Network

The size and influence of the anti-Israel NGO network leading the demonization and antisemitism campaigns is reflected in the number of active organizations, which exceeds 250, and the resources they provide. These groups operate at four levels:

1. global organizations with staff and offices located in many locations and with significant resources to support their operations;
2. local and regionally-based NGOs in which Israel-related issues are predominant, including numerous Palestinian and Israeli groups;
3. campus-based organizations, led by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) primarily operating out of the United States, focusing exclusively on attacking and demonizing Israel through the language of human rights and international law; and
4. a small number of NGOs claiming to be “authentic Jewish voices” that support the pro-Palestinian groups, providing a shield to deflect evidence of antisemitism.

The global NGOs leading this campaign include Amnesty International, with an annual budget exceeding €300 million, HRW (yearly budget of $100 million), and FIDH (budget of €9 million). Although claiming to promote the universality of human rights, these organizations devote a highly disproportionate percentage of their staffing and funding to the demonization of Israel. Their publications (“reports”), press releases, and advocacy campaigns repeatedly accusing Israel of war crimes, genocide, and apartheid are cited as the primary sources in the weaponization of human rights and international law by the other NGOs, as well as UN agencies and officials, media platforms, and among academics.

The second tier of NGOs includes at least 200 smaller NGOs based primarily in Europe and North America, including several church-related political advocacy groups, as well as Palestinian and Israeli NGOs claiming to promote international humanitarian law (IHL) and human rights. Among the Palestinian NGOs active in the lawfare and related boycott (BDS) campaigns, the most significant is a core group of 13 organizations that are linked directly to and serve as political and civil society fronts for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) – a designated terrorist organization in the United States, Israel, and the EU. The heads of the three core Palestinian NGOs linked to the PFLP terror group – Shawan Jabarin (Al-Haq), Raji Sourani (PCHR), and Issam Younis (Al-Mezan) – are advisers in the “genocide” case brought by South Africa before the International Court of Justice and sat with the South African delegation during the court sessions.⁴ Prominent Israeli NGOs in this network include B’Tselem, Breaking the Silence, and Yesh Din. These Israeli and Palestinian NGOs are largely funded by European governments, justified as support for “civil society organizations” and for human rights. The combined budgets of these groups, as compiled by NGO Monitor and excluding the global NGOs, are estimated to exceed €100 million.

The third layer of this NGO network is based in American universities, led by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which claims over 300 campus branches, coordinated under the nebulous National SJP framework, founded and run by Hatem Bazian, a part-time lecturer in ethnic studies at UC Berkeley. Allied NGOs, often with overlapping leaders and working in close coordination, include Within Our Lifetime, the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR), Palestine Legal, Jewish Voice for Peace, and the Palestinian Youth Movement.⁵ In parallel, Samidoun, which the Israeli Ministry of Defense has designated as a terrorist organization and “a subsidiary of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP),” is very active. This organization was founded by and continues to be led by Khaled Barakat, identified as a member of the PFLP Central Committee, who was expelled from Germany and currently resides in Vancouver with his wife, Charlotte Kates, also a Samidoun leader. ⁶

A subset in the third tier consists of ostensibly Jewish NGOs, including Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), If Not Now (INN), Jews For Racial & Economic Justice (JFREJ), and Independent Jewish Voices (Canada). These groups are sometimes referred to as “the Jewish arms of the SJP” or as the fig leaves used to refute allegations of antisemitism. JVP’s explicit mission is to create “a wedge” within the American Jewish community while working toward the goal of eliminating U.S. economic, military, and political aid to Israel.⁷

NGO Leadership on the Campus-based Front

The NGO network led by SJP and Samidoun provides the organization, planning, staffing, publicity, and funding for the waves of anti-Israel and antisemitic attacks in North America and Europe. Already, on October 9, 2023, SJP held a call-in session for its affiliates to plan “a national day of resistance on college campuses” on October 12 and provided a detailed toolkit, including messages and framing (“When people are occupied, resistance is justified — normalize the resistance”), and graphics for posters and social media posts.⁸

This instantaneous and highly effective response reflects more than 30 years of experience led by Bazian. In this time frame, he and the SJP leadership were deeply involved in annual campus Israel Apartheid Week events, as well as student government BDS resolutions and similar forms of propaganda and demonization.

After October 7, and continuing through the end of the academic terms, these groups coordinated the occupation of campus buildings, created roped-off tent encampments, harassed, intimidated, and attacked Jewish and “Zionist” students, faculty, and administrators, and forced cancellation of lectures by Israeli academics and events at Hillel and other Jewish institutions. These were accompanied by banners calling for “resistance” and mobs chanting slogans of “intifada now” and “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” The same NGOs were responsible for disruptions and violence in several cities. For example, Within Our Lifetime (WOL), which, until 2019, operated as the New York branch of SJP, led several attacks and posted online maps detailing the locations of Jewish organizations in New York that had “blood on their hands.”⁹

In examining the details of individuals associated with the branches of SJP, WOL, and many of the other groups in this network, it appears that most are led by Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims, for whom this is their primary activity. In addition to Bazian, the former SJP activists who now lead WOL include Nerdeen Kiswani, Abdullah Akl, and Fatima Mohammed, and there are many more examples.

The second circle beyond this core is composed of non-Moslem and non-Arab ideological neo-Marxist, intersectional, and NGO activists, including supporters of Black Lives Matter and others who identify as or support “minorities of color,” and for whom the Palestinian cause is seen as central in the anti-western agenda based on the opposition to “settler-colonialism.”

The third or outer circle consists primarily of students and faculty whose knowledge of the history and details is minimal and who join the “protests” based on sympathy for the perceived Palestinian victims as they are portrayed in media platforms and NGO “reports,” including the accusations of genocide, starvation, apartheid, and war crimes (see analysis below).

It is important to note that critical aspects of these NGOs, including budget, donors, number of employees, and other essential information, are carefully hidden. In contrast to most political advocacy NGOs in the first and second tier, SJP, WOL, Palestine Youth Movement, and allied groups do not exist in formal legal frameworks, do not report financial information, and are not registered as non-profit organizations with the IRS. With the exception of a few known donors, such as the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, which provides some support to JVP, INN, Palestine Legal, and USCPR, most of the money is provided by fiscal sponsors and pass-through donation arrangements.¹⁰ These frameworks include American Muslims for Palestine (also controlled by Bazian), the Tides Foundation, and the WESPAC foundation, which also hide sources of funding (potentially including foreign governments), salaries paid to staff, and similar details.¹¹ Samidoun’s sources of funding are also entirely non-transparent.

Reflecting this central concern and the possibility that significant funding comes from foreign governments and terror frameworks, Representatives Virginia Foxx (U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Education and the Workforce) and James Comer (Committee on Oversight and Accountability) sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Yellin requesting relevant documents for an investigation of “the sources of funding and financing for groups who are organizing, leading, and participating in pro-Hamas, antisemitic, anti-Israel, and anti-American protests with illegal encampments on American college campuses,” including SJP, Jewish Voice for Peace, and allied organizations.¹² As of August 1, 2024, no response has been made public, and the funding questions remained unanswered.

The Central Role of NGO Lawfare: 2001-2024

As noted, the SJP network’s ability to mobilize supporters and generate favorable media coverage for disruptive and violent antisemitic attacks is closely linked to and dependent on the demonization that propelled allegations of war crimes, genocide, apartheid, and starvation. In this form of soft-power warfare that accompanies the “hard” power of terrorism and missile attacks against Israel, the first and second NGO tiers play central roles.

The NGO campaigns that were launched immediately after the October 7 atrocities were refined over the previous two decades following the NGO Forum of the antisemitic UN World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, in September 2001, which reactivated the 1975 General Assembly resolution labeling “Zionism is racism.” The Durban NGO Forum’s Final Declaration adopted a strategy of lawfare and boycotts designed to promote “a policy of complete and total isolation of Israel as an apartheid state…and the full cessation of all links (diplomatic, economic, social, aid, military cooperation, and training) between all states and Israel.”¹³

In the past two decades, the NGO Durban soft-power warfare strategy has been implemented through publications, press statements, and media essays Claiming to present credible and “neutral research,” HRW, Amnesty, FIDH, and the second-tier groups publish reports echoed by journalists, cited in United Nations pseudo-investigations, quoted in scholarly journals and books, and embraced by many diplomats.

A central strategy since Durban has been to expand the impact from the UN to the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Following the negotiation of the Rome Treaty and after the ICC began operations in 2002, the NGOs demanded investigations targeting Israel. NGO leaders held numerous meetings with ICC prosecutors, submitted “documentation,” lobbied governments, appeared as “experts” on influential media platforms, and coordinated with UN agencies – particularly the Human Rights Council. The close links between the NGOs in the network were reflected in joint publications, and HRW appointed Al Haq’s executive director, Shawan Jabarin, to its MENA advisory board. (Jabarin was convicted for membership in the PFLP terror group, and the Israeli High Court referred to him as a “Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde, acting some of the time as the CEO of a human rights organization and at other times as an activist in a terror organization.”¹⁴)

The Durban lawfare strategy was implemented in condemnations and demands for “independent international investigations” of the IDF’s 2002 Jenin operation (Defensive Shield) in response to Palestinian mass bombings. HRW issued press releases and published a report based on unverifiable Palestinian “eyewitness testimony,” declaring: “Israeli forces committed serious violations of international humanitarian law, some amounting prima facie to war crimes.” These were cited as justifications for the academic and other boycotts (BDS), and speakers from NGOs such as HRW, Amnesty, and Al Haq conducted university speaking tours.

The NGO campaigns continued as the Palestinian terror attacks increased, particularly from Gaza, followed by Israeli responses. In 2009, during the first Gaza war (Cast Lead), NGOs demanded an “independent international investigation of Israeli war crimes.”¹⁵ Reflecting NGO influence, the UN Human Rights Council appointed the Goldstone Commission, and in its report, most of the over 500 references were sourced to NGOs. ¹⁶ Following the script, the Commission recommended that the UN Security Council consider referring “the situation in Gaza to the International Criminal Court (ICC).”¹⁷ Although Goldstone later retracted his own report, acknowledging that the claims were false or unsupported, the UN and the NGO network continued to promote the allegations.¹⁸

Another NGO lobbying push accompanied the Gaza War of 2014 (Protective Edge). HRW called for Palestinian accession to the ICC, and Amnesty referred to Israel’s “entrenched impunity for war crimes and crimes against humanity.” ¹⁹ The Israeli NGO B’Tselem declared that the targeted destruction of the homes of Hamas leaders violated international humanitarian law and might constitute war crimes.²⁰

In coordination with Palestinian Authority officials and UN appointees such as the Special Rapporteurs of the Human Rights Council, the NGO network focused on countering the two main ICC constraints – jurisdiction and complementarity. According to the Rome Statute, only state parties and the UN Security Council have standing to initiate cases, but by accepting Palestine as a state, the ICC prosecutor would open the door to investigating Israelis. In 2009, the Palestinian Authority (PA) applied to join the Court, and the Prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, initiated a three-year examination.²¹ HRW’s Ken Roth was very active in pressing the prosecutor to accept jurisdiction, including numerous social media posts – for example, “ICC Prosecutor Says Palestine Statehood Status Rests with UN General Assembly (Which Is Why Israel Is so Worried).”²²

In January 2015, Ocampo’s successor, Fatou Bensouda, agreed to the accession of the “State of Palestine,” preparing the way for ICC jurisdiction over alleged “crimes in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem.” Once again, HRW, Amnesty, and FIDH were very active in this process, accompanied by Palestinian, Israeli, and other NGOs funded by Europe. These included earmarked projects vis-à-vis the ICC, “international justice,” and other coded phrases, as detailed in the examples below.

Table 1: European funding for NGO Campaigns on the International Criminal Court (ICC)²³

NGO	Top European Funders
Addameer	Ireland, Switzerland, Spain
Al-Dameer	Switzerland, European Union
Al-Haq	Sweden, France, Italy
Al Mezan	European Union, Sweden, Netherlands
Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR)	European Union, Norway, Switzerland
Adalah	Switzerland, Bread for the World-EED (Germany), Christian Aid (UK)
B’Tselem	Norway, Switzerland, NGO Development Center
Breaking the Silence	European Union, Switzerland, NGO Development Center
Yesh Din	European Union, NGO Development Center, Norwegian Refugee Council
International Federation of Human Rights (FIDH)	France, European Union, Sweden
Diakonia – Sweden	Sweden, Swedish Embassy, European Union

Roth met with ICC prosecutors to press the campaign on Israel. In February 2019, a post on the official ICC Twitter account (now X) featured a photo of the meeting between Roth and Bensouda and declared that civil society “continues to play an indispensable role in promoting the fight against #impunity for #atrocity crimes.”²⁴

The focus of the NGO lawfare campaign shifted to complementarity and the position that the ICC prosecutor is prevented from opening investigations when there are “genuine national proceedings” investigating the potential commission of international crimes.

As in most other aspects of international law (IHL/LOAC), the inherent ambiguity allowed for easy manipulation of the criteria. Claiming expertise and moral authority, the NGOs attacked the Israeli legal process. The Israeli political advocacy NGO Yesh Din published a report, “Lacuna: War Crimes in Israeli Law and Court-Martial Rulings,” labeling Israel’s legal system “defective.”²⁵ (Like many Israeli and Palestinian NGO lawfare reports, this was funded by the European Union under a grant “to change Israeli policy vis-à-vis criminal accountability of Israeli Security Forces Personnel.”)

Breaking the Silence, also funded by European governments, repeatedly discredits the Israeli judicial system, claiming that the “investigation of low-ranking soldiers allows Israel to present a semblance of objective investigation mechanisms before international investigative bodies.”²⁶ The Israeli news site Ynet reported that ICC Prosecutor Bensouda “was trying to get a copy of the [Breaking the Silence] report” in her review of the 2014 Gaza war.²⁷

HRW also emphasized this theme. In a June 2018 statement, “Israel: Apparent War Crimes in Gaza,” Sarah Leah Whitson, the NGO’s former MENA Director, stated, “The international community needs to rip up the old playbook, where Israel conducts investigations that mainly whitewash the conduct of its troops…”²⁸

In December 2019, Bensouda filed a brief with the Pre-Trial Chamber asking for confirmation of jurisdiction to open an investigation into the “Situation in Palestine,” and the Court granted authorization to intervene on alleged war crimes “committed in Palestine by members of the Israeli military or Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups.” Amnesty immediately voiced support: “For over half a century, Israel has committed crimes under international law and other serious human rights violations in both Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT).”²⁹

In February 2021, Bensouda issued a finding asserting jurisdiction, followed by announcing the opening of an investigation in March. Al-Haq, Al-Mezan, and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) declared “…it is imperative that the Prosecutor include acts of apartheid in the scope of her investigation…” and stressed their “tireless” cooperation with the ICC, having submitted “six substantial communications and thousands of eyewitness files to the Office of the Prosecutor…”³⁰ Ken Roth tweeted, “The International Criminal Court wouldn’t need to investigate Israeli and Palestinian war crimes if Israeli and Palestinian authorities had been prosecuting their own war criminals. They haven’t been. At all.”³¹

This 23-year campaign (beginning with the 2001 Durban NGO Forum) reached its objective on May 20, 2024, when ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan announced that he was seeking arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Galant (as well as for three Hamas leaders, incorporating the NGO façade of balance).

The NGO network immediately praised the move. Amnesty Secretary General Agnes Callamard posted, “No one is above international law… All states must respect the legitimacy of the court; they must refrain from any attempts to intimidate or pressure the court to allow the judges to conduct their work with full independence and impartiality.”³² HRW’s Sari Bashi wrote: “2007 was the first time Israeli authorities acknowledged deliberately depriving civilians in Gaza of basic goods, including food. No one intervened & the policy got worse, graduating to starvation as a weapon of war. May today’s ICC statement set in motion, finally, accountability.”³³

Al Mezan, Al-Haq, and PCHR urged the ICC prosecutor to go further by adding “genocide as an additional crime…” ³⁴ A statement from the Europe-funded Israeli NGO B’Tselem – headlined “The era of impunity for Israeli decision-makers is over” – joined in supporting the “prosecutor’s request to issue arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on suspicion of committing war crimes in Gaza.” ³⁵

Conclusions

This history highlights the central role of the anti-Israel NGO network in anti-Israel lawfare and the campus-based anti-Israel and antisemitic mob violence that has accompanied the terror attacks launched on October 7. These influential NGOs claiming to promote universal human rights and moral principles are the engines that drive lawfare campaigns, including the 21st-century blood libels of genocide and starvation, adopted by the ICC and ICJ and manipulated to attract liberal students and faculty.

For more than two decades, the biases, hypocrisy, and propaganda of the NGOs have been amplified by the UN, journalists, academics, and Western political officials – some ideologically allied and others blinded by the NGO halo effect. Their massive budgets, in many cases provided by hidden donors, enable them to employ large staffs, which produce a constant torrent of “reports” and statements based on unverifiable and invented factual and legal claims, which are then aggressively marketed by the NGO public relations teams.

These NGOs and their allies have inverted the principles adopted after the Holocaust and embodied in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), as well as the institutions created to promote them – in particular, the UN Human Rights Council and, with the Rome Treaty, the ICC. By weaponizing these principles for demonization and lawfare against Israel, they sought to deprive the nation-state of the Jewish people of the fundamental right to self-defense against brutal enemies seeking their destruction. Beyond 21st century blood libels, NGO manipulation of genocide, apartheid, and starvation against Israel are a form of Holocaust inversion, under the false banners of human rights and international law.

Shortly after the October 7 atrocities, Danielle Haas, a senior editor at HRW for 13 years, left the organization, denouncing the blatant anti-Israel and antisemitic climate, and declared, “Human rights are too important to be left to human-rights groups.”³⁶ From within what she referred to as “the human rights establishment,” Haas confirmed the repeated evidence of cynical manipulation, demonstrating the juxtaposition of the moral principles of human rights and the actions of the powerful NGO network that has captured and weaponized these principles.

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Notes

 

{Reposted from JCPA}