Human-rights NGOs declared war on Israel and the West long ago.

Now Israel is starting to fight back, as it should. The rest of the Western world ought to do the same.

photo: Leonardo Basso/Unsplash

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This is a guest essay by Nachum Kaplan, who writes the newsletter, “Moral Clarity.”

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.

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Editor’s Note: On Tuesday, Israeli personnel arrived to dismantle the headquarters of UNRWA (the UN agency for Palestinians) in northern Jerusalem, from which all of the organization’s activities in the West Bank and Jerusalem were managed. Since October 7, 2023, UNRWA’s ties with Hamas have been exposed, and it was discovered that some UNRWA operatives even took part in the October 7th massacre and kidnappings. In addition, numerous terrorist infrastructure was found connected to buildings belonging to UNRWA in the Gaza Strip.

Human-rights organizations used to be small bands of idealists working from cramped offices with leaky ceilings and wonky radiators. They investigated torture, documented disappearances, and wrote letters to political prisoners. Their noble mission was to protect the innocent and vulnerable.

That era is as dead as the diplodocus. Far from being watchdogs, today’s human-rights industry is a wolf pack that hunts Israel and Jews. It is a powerful and well-funded cartel; a self-appointed foreign ministry that competes with states, lobbies countries with lies, and shapes the global narrative.

UNRWA boasts an annual operating budget of more than $1 billion. Human Rights Watch has a $105 million annual budget, thanks in part to a $100 million 10-year gift from billionaire George Soros, while Amnesty International’s revenues are $375 million. They operate with a confidence to which they have no right, enforcing doctrine over data.

Israel, naturally, provides the case study of all that is wrong with the NGO space.

Reading reports from UNRWA, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and their imitators is like entering a parallel universe. In this alternate reality, Israel is the Middle East’s primary engine of instability; Palestinian terrorists are nuisances with unfortunately explosive hobbies; and decades of Arab rejectionism have been excised from the historical record. NGOs that once documented torture now copy-and-paste press releases from the Gaza Health Ministry — which Hamas runs — and call it “verified.”

The NGO cartel is not an impartial observer trying to help the vulnerable. It curates the lies, edits out awkward facts, and omits anything that complicates its preferred narrative. Rockets, terror tunnels, cross-border raids, massacres, mass rapes, and theocracy-funded terror militias are reduced to footnotes in reports that read like prosecutorial briefs. Amnesty International’s infamous 2022 “apartheid” report, for example, was produced without a single on-the-ground investigation, and it admitted to applying different legal standards to Israel than to any other country.

What makes this cartel so influential, beyond its completely misguided sense of moral certainty, is its scale. They operate from headquarters that rival state ministries and deploy teams of lawyers, researchers, data analysts, media strategists, and lobbyists. Human Rights Watch alone has over 550 staff members, more than some European foreign ministries. Amnesty International’s London offices operate with corporate-level infrastructure (not the leaky ceilings of legend) and employ more staff than many UN missions.

They grace European parliaments with the ease of seasoned diplomats. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International representatives brief the European Parliament on Israel more often than Israeli diplomats themselves. They brief U.S. congressional committees to dispute U.S. military assessments despite not knowing anything about war or having ever seen a battlefield. I doubt their parents even let them play with toy soldiers as kids. Worst of all, they do this without any transparency, accountability, or mandate.

These groups have formed a diplomatic network that mirrors state structures. They issue quasi-legal rulings disguised as reports, draft shadow legislation to pressure governments to adopt positions they were not elected to take, and instruct courts and international tribunals on humanitarian law.

In the International Criminal Court’s 2021 “Israel/Palestine Situation” report, over half of the citations came from the same tight cartel: Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, a Palestinian NGO called Al-Haq, and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights — organizations that cite one another in an endless loop of borrowed authority. They even help craft the language that ends up in United Nations resolutions.

They watch the battlefield from afar — or pretend they can see it — and demand Israel adhere to rules of engagement no state has ever applied to itself, while making no such demands of Hamas or Hezbollah or the Islamic Republic of Iran. They have appointed themselves custodians of a moral vocabulary that states are expected to obey without question.

Israel experiences this system’s full weight. When the IDF produces incontrovertible evidence of Hamas tunneling under hospitals — as even major media outlets confirmed independently — the cartel responds with theatrical skepticism. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch dismiss the IDF’s evidence under Al-Shifa, Rantisi, and Al-Quds hospitals as “not yet verified,” while simultaneously relying on Hamas-supplied and -fabricated casualty statistics without a second thought.

Especially exasperating is how many Western governments have outsourced their moral reasoning to these groups. Ministries once responsible for foreign policy now defer to NGOs for ethical validation. The U.S. State Department’s annual human-rights reports on Israel lift paragraphs directly from Human Right Watch and Amnesty International texts. EU foreign ministries cite NGO material that EU taxpayers paid for — a €300-million annual loop in which NGOs write reports the EU then uses to justify funding the same NGOs again.

To add insult to injury, journalists treat them as infallible. Courts use them as primary evidence. These unelected organizations now define the parameters of legitimate force, but they do so only for one state: the Jewish one, Israel.

This cartel has spent decades cultivating and perfecting its aura of authority and moral purity by insisting it is independent, even as our taxes fund them, as do billionaire philanthropists. Amnesty UK itself has admitted to receiving government grants despite styling itself as fiercely independent.

The lack of accountability is infuriating. This cartel claims unmatched expertise, yet its errors rarely lead to corrections. Human Rights Watch falsely claimed Israel committed a massacre in Jenin (a city in the West Bank) in 2023; casualty counts later confirmed that all 12 Palestinians killed were combatants, which even the terror group Palestinian Islamic Jihad conceded. No correction was ever issued.

Amnesty International circulated a heartbreaking story of a Gazan girl “killed while studying for exams,” later proven to be a misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket — again, no correction. They demand transparency from countries, yet their own internal processes are as opaque as a ginger-beer bottle. They insist foreign militaries be accountable to them, while they will not even hold their own staff accountable for collaborating with terrorists.

Al-Haq’s director Shawan Jabarin is a convicted Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine operative, described by Israel’s Supreme Court as having a “split identity — human-rights worker by day, terrorist by night.” Human Rights Watch’s former Middle East director, Sarah Leah Whitson, once solicited donations from longtime Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi’s son.

The Israeli–Palestinian conflict has been the cartel’s most successful project. Here we can see how well they have perfected their nefarious methods. They treat Palestinian terrorists as civilians, Israeli civilians as abstractions, self-defense as aggression, and Palestinian suffering as evidence of Israeli intent rather than the direct result of Palestinian choices. This mad logic has transformed the phrase “human rights” from a universal principle into a political cudgel.

As powerful as it has become, the cartel is still improving its game. Not content with influencing policy, it now circumvents it. When Western governments hesitate to condemn Israel, the cartel fills the gap with instant reports. When political leaders urge caution, the cartel demands immediate action. When intelligence agencies warn that NGO casualty figures are unreliable, the cartel republishes them in a bigger font.

The result is that many Western democracies are increasingly governed by an unacknowledged dual system: elected administrations and an unelected moral bureaucracy. This is profoundly dangerous. Governments can be held accountable and voted out of office; NGOs cannot. States can be criticized for bias; NGOs pretend they are above such lowly afflictions.

This creates a political alchemy in which human-rights groups can wage ideological campaigns with no institutional brakes. They can distort wars they do not — and have no desire to — understand. They delegitimize Israeli actions year-in-year-out without offering any alternative policies. They can push democracies into strategic paralysis while praising tyrannies for cooperation. It is a sick inversion.

When China operates concentration camps for Uyghurs, the NGO output is a trickle. When Russia helped the Syrian regime flatten Aleppo in 2016, Amnesty International’s own senior officials admitted their response was “shameful.” Yet Israel builds a housing block in Jerusalem and a 120-page report materializes within weeks.

Israel is simply the test case; the same cartel villains have their eyes set on the West more broadly. The apparatus is now deployed across the West in debates about border controls, counterterrorism, immigration, policing, national security, and sovereignty. They position themselves as the West’s conscience, but they are custodians of a fantasy. They demand democracies adhere to utopian standards while excusing their adversaries’ barbarism. They feign neutrality while promoting a distinctly Left-leaning agenda and a foreign policy detached from on-the-ground realities and rooted in the aesthetics of victimhood.

The only state that can resist this pressure is Israel, whose sovereignty and existence are routinely challenged, therefore serving as constant reminders of their enormous value. Israel has no alternative but to defend itself. The human-rights cartel may yelp, but it cannot write Israel’s laws, dictate its security policy, or override its moral obligation to keep its citizens safe. That defiance is intolerable to these organizations, which believe they should be allowed to wield their self-proclaimed moral authority unrestricted.

The human-rights movement once confronted tyrants, defended the vulnerable, and held power accountable. Today, it constrains democracies, empowers their tormentors, and seeks power for itself. While these NGOs see themselves as the vanguard of moral progress, they are really just an unaccountable transnational bureaucracy — armed with moral edicts and paid-for legal briefs — and answerable to no one.

Western excess, namely its obsession with rights with no mention of attendant responsibilities, created this monster. Now it must confront it and tame it — or elected, accountable government will become the ultimate victim.

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