Former Human Rights Watch director calls hostage crisis and Israel’s need for self defense ‘utter irrelevancies’

Roth: ‘The Israeli government responded to the ICC war-crime charges with the usual diversionary excuses – the need to liberate the hostages, Hamas’s use of human shields, Israel’s democracy and self-defense, supposed ICC antisemitism.’

By Vered Weiss, World Israel News

Former Human Rights Watch director Kenneth Roth dismissed the 101 hostages still in Gaza and Israel’s right to self-defense as “diversionary excuses” and “utter irrelevancies” compared to the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.

Roth wrote in an Op-Ed for the Guardian and reposted on X, “The Israeli government responded to the ICC war-crime charges with the usual diversionary excuses – the need to liberate the hostages, Hamas’s use of human shields, Israel’s democracy and self-defense, supposed ICC antisemitism – all utter irrelevancies.”

The post received many critical comments, particularly for considering the ongoing captivity of the Bibas children, aged one and five, as “irrelevant.”

Roth, who ran Human Rights Watch for 30 years, was criticized by the Human Rights Watch founder and the Anti-Defamation League for bringing antisemitism into the organization and showing marked bias against Israel.

In addition, a 2022 report by NGO Monitor accused Roth of normalizing antisemitism while claiming to uphold human rights.

In 2009, Human Rights Watch founder Robert Bernstein wrote an Op-Ed in the New York Times criticizing the NGO’s direction with Roth at the helm.

Bernstein noted that Israel was singled out for criticism more often than “authoritarian regimes with appalling human rights records.”

“Recently, it has been issuing reports on the Israeli-Arab conflict that are helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state,” he wrote.

Bernstein continued that Iran and Hamas’s declaration of their intention to destroy the Jewish State violates the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,  yet Roth did not call them out.

He added, “Leaders of Human Rights Watch know that Hamas and Hezbollah chose to wage war from densely populated areas, deliberately transforming neighborhoods into battlefields.”

Bernstein continued, “Yet Israel, the repeated victim of aggression, faces the brunt of Human Rights Watch’s criticism.”

In 2006, during the Second Lebanon War, Abe Foxman, who was the chairman of the Anti-Defamation League at the time, accused Roth of promoting a “classic anti-Semitic stereotype about Jews.” This came after Roth remarked that “an eye for an eye – or, more accurately in this case, twenty eyes for an eye – may have been the morality of some more primitive moment.”