Claims of bias and disproportionate attention on Israel
In December 2006,
Kofi Annan, former
UN Secretary-General, accused the
Human Rights Council of focusing too heavily on the
Arab–Israeli conflict, while allowing it to monopolize attention at the expense of other situations where violations are no less grave or even worse.
[227]
Matti Friedman, former
AP correspondent in Israel, has analyzed what he perceives as the disproportionate media attention given to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, compared to other conflicts that are no less violent or even worse.
[228][229][230]
Tuvia Tenenbom, in his book
Catch the Jew!, argues that many seemingly "human rights"
NGOs, EU representatives and
Red Cross representatives that act in Israel actually come to implant and inflame the hatred of the Palestinians against Israel and the Jews, while promoting a one-sided view of the conflict in the world. He also claims that the textbooks in the schools run by the
UN,
UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency), and flyers distributed by the
Red Cross prompt and encourage anti-semitism against Jews and teach toward a lack of recognition in the existence of
Israel.
[231] Ben-Dror Yemini wrote in his book
The Industry of Lies that the Arab–Israeli conflict has become the center of a major deception. According to Yemini, lies about Israel in media and academia have been presented as truths; deeply rooted in the global consciousness, this has caused Israel to be seen as a monster, similar to perceptions of Jews in
Nazi Germany.
United Nations
Freedom House has claimed the United Nations has a history of negative focus on Israel that is disproportional in respect to other members, including the actions and statements of the
United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) and its predecessor, the
UN Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR).
[233]
Hillel Neuer of
UN Watch has described the actions of the UN Commission on Human Rights as a "campaign to demonize Israel".
[234] Neuer has stated that an example of bias is that in 2005, the Commission adopted four resolutions against Israel, equaling the combined total of resolutions against all other states in the world.
Belarus, Cuba,
Myanmar, and
North Korea were the subject of one resolution each. In addition, according to UN Watch, in 2004–2005, the
UN General Assembly passed nineteen resolutions concerning Israel, while not passing any resolution concerning
Sudan, which at the time was facing
a genocide in the
Darfur region.
In 2006, the
UN General Assembly voted to replace UNCHR with the UN Human Rights Council.
[236] In 2011,
Richard Goldstone publicly regretted appointing the UN Human Rights Council to investigate for the
Goldstone Report, saying that their "history of bias against Israel cannot be doubted."
In December 2006,
Kofi Annan, former UN Secretary-General, accused the members of the Human Rights Council at that time of "double standard", and of holding Israel to a standard of behaviour that they are unwilling to apply to other states, to Israel's adversaries, or to themselves. He said that the repeated resolutions and conferences of the General Assembly that condemn Israel's behaviour just strengthen the belief in Israel, and among many of its supporters, that the UN is too one-sided.
In April 2012, the UN released an official statement in which Israel was listed as a country that is restricting the activities of human rights organisations. Israel, the only democratic country to be named on the list, was included because of a bill approved by the Ministerial Committee on Legislation that would restrict foreign governmental funding of Israeli non-profit groups. The bill was frozen by the Prime Minister and never reached the Knesset, but the statement said: "In Israel, the recently adopted Foreign Funding Law could have a major impact on human rights organizations".
During his visit in Jerusalem in 2013, UN Secretary-General
Ban Ki-moon confirmed that there was a biased attitude towards the Israeli people and Israeli government, stressing that it was "an unfortunate situation". He added that Israel has been criticized and sometimes discriminated against because of the
Mideast conflict.
Richard Falk, who was the UNHRC's special investigator of "Israel's violations of the bases and principles of international law", has been criticised by UN Watch for "pro-Hamas appeasement", anti-Western invective, support for
9/11 conspiracy theorists and demonization of Israel.
William Schabas, a Canadian international law expert, was the head of a UN committee investigating the Israeli role in the
2014 Israel–Gaza conflict. Schabas was often accused of anti-Israeli positions. In February 2015, Schabas acknowledged that he was paid for previous work for the
Palestine Liberation Organization in 2012, and that he had not declared this when he applied for the role. This behavior has been seen by Israelis as "clear and documented bias" against Israel. In 2015, Schabas resigned his post, saying he didn't want the issue to overshadow the work of the inquiry.
Ron Prosor, Israel's representative to the United Nations, claimed in General Assembly debate on the
Question of Palestine, November 2014, that the UN is illogical and tends to lack of sense of justice when it comes to the case of Israel. He claimed that the UN's focus was solely on Israel, ignoring the thousands murdered and expelled in the Middle East under the tyranny of
Radical Islam, and that the Arab–Israeli conflict was never about the establishment of a
Palestinian state but the existence of the Jewish state. He also claimed that the UN is not for peace or the Palestinian people but simply against Israel, and pointed out that if the UN really cared about the situation of the Palestinians, they would have taken at least one decision regarding the situation of the Palestinians in
Syria and
Lebanon, where Palestinians are being persecuted and systematically discriminated against.
Amnesty International
Main article:
Criticism of Amnesty International
Amnesty International (AI) has been accused by the
American Jewish Congress and
NGO Monitor of having a double standard with its assessment of Israel. Professor
Alan Dershowitz, an American legal scholar and columnist for the
Huffington Post, has attacked Amnesty International's perceived bias against Israel, claiming that AI absolves Palestinian men of responsibility for domestic violence and places the blame on Israel instead and that it illegitimately characterises legal acts of Israeli self-defence as war-crimes. Dershowitz has joined NGO Monitor's calls for an independent evaluation of anti-Israeli bias within the organisation.
In 2004,
NGO Monitor, a pro-Israel organization, released a study comparing Amnesty International's response to the
twenty years of ethnic, religious and racial violence in Sudan – in which (at that time) 2,000,000 people were killed and 4,000,000 people displaced – to their treatment of Israel. When NGO Monitor focused on 2001, they found that Amnesty International issued seven reports on Sudan, as opposed to 39 reports on Israel. Between 2000 and 2003, they claimed the imbalance in issued reports to be 52 reports on Sudan and 192 reports on Israel, which they call "lack of balance and objectivity and apparent political bias [which] is entirely inconsistent with AI's official stated mission." They further called attention to the difference in both scale and intensity: "While ignoring the large-scale and systematic bombing and destruction of Sudanese villages, AI issued numerous condemnations of the razing of Palestinian houses, most of which were used as sniper nests or belonged to terrorists. Although failing to decry the slaughter of thousands of civilians by Sudanese government and allied troops, AI managed to criticize Israel's 'assassinations' of active terrorist leaders."
Government attitude toward NGOs and activists
According to the US State Department's 2015 Country Report on Human Rights Practices, Israeli officials were generally cooperative with the United Nations and human rights groups and invited the testimony of human rights NGOs at Knesset hearings. These groups can directly petition the Israeli Supreme Court on government policies and individual cases.
