An Israeli judge asked me in court last month if I
would vow not to promote “boycotts,” defined under Israeli law to
include calls on companies to stop doing business in Israeli settlements
in the occupied West Bank. In light of the human rights impact of those
activities, I refused.
This week, the court upheld a government deportation order against me, citing that refusal. The court gave me two weeks to leave the country.
Israeli authorities say they’re deporting me because
I promote boycotts of Israel. Setting aside the paradox of the region’s
self-proclaimed “only democracy” deporting a rights defender over
peaceful expression, the claim isn’t true.
Human Rights Watch neither supports nor opposes boycotts of Israel, a fact that Israel’s Ministry of Interior acknowledged last year.
Rather, we document the practices of businesses in settlements as part
of our global efforts to urge companies, governments and other actors to
meet their human rights responsibilities. We also defend the right of
individuals to support or oppose boycotts peacefully, as a matter of
freedom of speech and conscience.
Initially, the Israeli government said it revoked my
work visa based on a dossier it compiled on my long-past
student-activist days, before I became the Human Rights Watch
Israel-Palestine director in October 2016. When we challenged the
deportation in court, noting that the Interior Ministry’s own guidelines
require support for a boycott to be “active and continuous,” they
shifted to highlight Human Rights Watch research on the activities of
businesses such as Airbnb and our recommendation that they cease operating in settlements.
This isn’t the first time a Middle Eastern country
has sought to bar me. In 2009, Syria denied me a visa after a government
official said my writings “reflected poorly on the Syrian government.”
In 2014, I was forced to leave Egypt after I wrote a report for Human
Rights Watch documenting the Rab’a Massacre,
one of the largest single-day killings of protesters. In 2017, Bahrain
denied me entry after I identified myself as a Human Rights Watch
researcher.
This isn’t new territory for the Israeli government
either. Over the past decade, authorities have barred from entry MIT
professor Noam Chomsky, U.N. special rapporteurs Richard Falk and Michael Lynk, Nobel Peace Prize winner Mairead Maguire, U.S. human rights lawyers Vincent Warren and Katherine Franke, a delegation of European Parliament members, and leaders of 20 advocacy groups,
among others, all over their advocacy around Israeli rights abuses.
Israeli and Palestinian rights defenders have not been spared. Israeli
officials have smeared, obstructed and sometimes even brought criminal charges against them.
What is new, though, is an Israeli court endorsing
the government’s efforts to expel a human rights worker for calling on
businesses to uphold their human rights’ responsibilities by cutting
settlement ties. Israeli courts have often found justifications for the
systematic rights abuses and entrenched discrimination that characterize
Israel’s half-century occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. But
siding with the government in directly targeting advocates challenging
these abuses signals a potentially new and dangerous phase.
