US pro-Israel advocates focus more on antisemitism than the reality of Israel

PETER BEINART: Many of the hawkish commentators described as Israel experts prefer to argue about the threat of antisemitism rather than what’s happening in the country itself

THIS SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN an easy year for people who claim that Palestinians under Israeli control enjoy human rights. The first half of 2021 saw two high-profile reports—one in January by B’Tselem, Israel’s most prominent human rights group, and another in April by Human Rights Watch, arguably the most influential human rights organisation in the world—arguing that Israel practices apartheid. 

The second half of the year saw Israel’s designation, without credible evidence, of six well-known Palestinian human rights groups as terrorist organizations, thus banning them inside Israel.

How did high-profile American defenders of Israel respond to these discomforting developments? For the most part, they didn’t. In the two weeks following its release, the B’Tselem report went unmentioned on the Twitter feeds of the commentator Bari Weiss, the historian Deborah Lipstadt, Anti-Defamation League (ADL) CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, American Jewish Committee (AJC) CEO David Harris, and the political advocacy organization Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI). On Twitter, Weiss, Lipstadt, and Greenblatt ignored the Human Rights Watch report as well. 

Harris responded once: He called it a “hatchet job,” without explaining why. His organization, the AJC, tweeted a document that purported to debunk the report—but which was devoted almost entirely to detailing the alleged biases of Human Rights Watch and its staff, and didn’t substantively address the organization’s claims. 

For its part, DMFI labelled the report “Orwellian” and “propagandistic,” again without citing any evidence. It also suggested that the chair of Human Rights Watch’s Board might be a “hypocrite” for investing in companies based in Israel. The same group of commentators also refrained from weighing in on Israel’s assault on Palestinian human rights groups.

What these prominent Israel supporters did discuss in the same period, often in great detail, was antisemitism.

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