Israel bars Human Rights Watch worker from country — again
Despite pledge to let him enter, Interior Ministry denies tourist visa for NGO’s regional director Omar Shakir, a former BDS activist
Despite pledges to allow an American employee of Human Rights Watch into the country, Israel on Thursday again blocked his entry, this time on a tourist visa.
Omar Shakir, HRW’s Israel and Palestine Director, was first denied a work visa last week over his alleged anti-Israel bias. The Israeli Embassy in Washington then suggested Shakir would be allowed to enter on a a tourist visa.
But on Thursday that was also denied by the Border Control Department, a branch of the Interior Ministry’s Population and Immigration Authority.
In its rejection letter, the department states that Shakir was first denied an employment permit as a human rights researcher on behalf of Human Rights Watch, based on “the opinion provided by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs… that, for some time now, the organization’s public actions and reports have focused on politics in the service of Palestinian propaganda while falsely raising the banner of ‘human rights,’ and therefore, the recommendation was to deny the application.”
“Given that his request for an employment and temporary residency permit has been denied, we have found no special circumstances that warrant approval of his entry into the country,” reads the letter, signed by the head of Border and Crossing Control, Michal Yosefov.
Shakir had requested to enter Israel on March 5 for a 10-day visit.
After the work permit was denied last week, Itai Bar-Dov, the spokesman for the Israeli embassy in Washington, said: “This is to clarify that the HRW representative may enter Israel with a tourist visa. With regard to the working visa, this may be reconsidered if the organization appeals the Ministry of Interior decision.”
The Interior Ministry made its ruling some six months after Human Rights Watch asked for permission for Shakir, to be able to work in the country.
Shakir has campaigned against Israel and is a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. He has compared Israel to apartheid South Africa and equated Zionism to Afrikaner nationalism, which begat apartheid.
“It is deeply troubling that Israeli officials, despite promises to the contrary, have denied Human Rights Watch’s country director a visa to enter Israel,” said HRW’s deputy program director Iain Levine.
“Blocking access for human rights workers impedes our ability to document abuses by all sides and to engage the Israeli and Palestinian authorities and partners to improve the human rights situation for all.”
These decisions were Israel’s latest step against human rights groups and other advocacy organizations that it accuses of bias against the Jewish state.
At least two US Jewish groups objected to the refusal of entry last week
“Israel now finds itself in very poor company: Only a government with something to hide would work this hard to keep out human rights workers,” Daniel Sokatch, the CEO of the New Israel Fund, a group that raises funds for Israeli civil society groups – including a number that have also been singled out for attack by Israeli government figures – said in a statement.
Earlier this month, Israeli authorities apologized for detaining for questioning at the airport the New Israel Fund vice president, Jennifer Gorovitz.
Also criticizing the barring of Shakir was T’ruah, a rabbinical human rights group.
“Human rights and civil society groups play a prophetic role, even if their words may not be ones governments want to hear,” the group said in a statement. “The Israeli government should welcome Human Rights Watch and other such groups as voices that will ultimately push us toward justice and life.”
Shakir, a Stanford-educated lawyer, has also done work on human rights in Egypt, Pakistan and at the US detention center at Guantanamo Bay, according to his biography.
Before joining Human rights Watch in 2016, Shakir was a legal fellow at the Center for Constitutional Rights, an organization that has filed war crimes lawsuits against former Israeli defense minister Moshe Ya’alon and former director of the Shin Bet security service Avi Dichter.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon had defended the decision to bar Shakir, calling Human Rights Watch a “blatantly hostile anti-Israeli organization whose reports have the sole purpose of harming Israel with no consideration whatsoever for the truth or reality.”
He said “there is no reason” to give a visa to a person or organization that wants to hurt the country. “We are not masochists and there is no reason we should keep doing that,” he said.
HRW, Nahshon said, had “demonstrated time and again it is a fundamentally biased and anti-Israeli organization with a clear hostile agenda.”
Nahshon added that the group was not banned and its Israeli and Palestinian employees would still be permitted to work in Israel and issue reports.
“But why should we give working visas to people whose only purpose is to besmirch us and to attack us?” he asked.
He said the decision was connected solely to the group’s activities and had nothing to do with the ethnicity of Shakir, a US citizen of Iraqi descent.
The New York-based group monitors human rights in over 90 countries, including nations throughout the Middle East. It said it has direct access to most of these countries, but said a small number of them, including Cuba, Egypt, Iran, North Korea, Uzbekistan and Venezuela, have blocked access to its staff.
“The denial letter came as a shock, given that we have had regular access to Israel and the West Bank for nearly three decades and regularly engage Israeli authorities,” Shakir said in an email last week. “Branding us as propagandists and fake human rights advocates puts Israel in the company of heavily repressive states like North Korea, Iran and Sudan that have blocked access for Human Rights Watch staff members.”
“We were shocked they (Israeli authorities) were not able to distinguish between genuine criticism and propaganda,” Shakir said.
He admitted to having taken part in pro-Palestinian campaigns before joining HRW.
According to Shakir, Israeli authorities told HRW the visa ban was not targeting him alone but would be applied to all foreign members of the organization.
Israel, its advocates and some of its critics have repeatedly accused Human Rights Watch of pursuing an anti-Israel bias — a criticism which the organization’s founder, Robert L. Bernstein, joined in an unusual op-ed he published in 2009 in The New York Times. Bernstein reiterated his criticism the following year during a lecture at a Nebraska university.
Human Rights Watch has published a series of reports that were highly critical of Israel, especially after wars or periods of heightened violence with Palestinian militants. For instance, it accused Israel of committing war crimes during fighting with Hamas terrorists in the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2014. Israel harshly rejected the findings of that report.
HRW has also staunchly campaigned for Israeli soccer clubs based in West Bank settlements to be expelled by the sport’s governing body FIFA.
The group has also issued reports critical of the Palestinians. For instance, last year it accused the internationally backed Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and the rival Hamas Islamist terror group in Gaza of arbitrarily detaining journalists and activists. It also has criticized executions carried out by Hamas.
