I came across earlier this week the headline “Lebanon: Israel Unlawfully Used White Phosphorus in Lebanon” published by Human Rights Watch and cited by Al Jazeera, The New Arab, Middle East Eye, Al-Monitor, Anadolu Agency, and you can, of course, continue the expected list yourself.

I am not Israeli, and ordinarily a report condemning Israel would not provoke anything in me beyond a journalist’s clinical interest. But as a Moroccan who has watched these same organizations produce report after report targeting my country over Western Sahara – treating Morocco’s territorial integrity as a debatable proposition while ignoring the Polisario’s documented ties to Iran, Hezbollah, and jihadist networks – I felt something more personal.

It was a particular exhaustion of a man who has sat through the same institutional machinery spewing out the same genre of report, in the same tone of scripted moral alarm, with the same predictable cascade of Arab euphoria, for so many years that the entire ritual has acquired the repetitive cadence of a liturgy performed by people who no longer believe in the god they are invoking but cannot stop chanting because the congregation expects it.

Human Rights Watch documented that on March 3, the Israeli military fired M825-series 155mm white phosphorus artillery over the residential town of Yohmor in southern Lebanon, verified and geolocated seven images of airburst munitions over civilian rooftops, and concluded that the deployment was unlawful under international humanitarian law. I do not dispute this.

White phosphorus over populated areas is indefensible regardless of the smokescreen justification, and Israel’s response – that it was “unaware and cannot confirm” the use – carries the persuasive weight of a man caught holding a lighter in a burning building. The report is legitimate. The weapon is abhorrent. The criticism is warranted.

But here is where I part company with the industry that produced it – and it is an industry, operating with the institutional rhythms of a factory whose assembly line never stops, whose product is always the same shape, and whose most devoted consumers are the very governments that would imprison anyone attempting to manufacture a similar product on their own soil.

These are the organizations – Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the UN Human Rights Council, and the constellation of NGOs that orbit them – staffed overwhelmingly by a class of Western-educated, left-leaning professionals who entered the human rights racket genuinely believing they were the inheritors of the anti-colonial liberation movements of the twentieth century and have never updated their intellectual software since.

They remain trapped in a Cold War relic framework where the world is permanently divided into oppressors and oppressed, where the West and its allies are structurally guilty and the Global South is structurally innocent, and where every conflict must be forced into a colonial template regardless of whether it fits.

They are not part of the solution. They are the problem dressed in the language of solutions – ideologues who have dissolved the distinction between advocacy and analysis, and who have done more to weaponize human rights as a geopolitical bludgeon than any government they claim to monitor.

These are the organizations that have declared Israel guilty of genocide in Gaza, apartheid in the West Bank, war crimes in Lebanon, unlawful siege, collective punishment, and now incendiary weapons deployment.

Amnesty International’s December 2024 report – a 296-page document titled “You Feel Like You Are Subhuman” – concluded unequivocally that Israel was committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Two weeks later, Human Rights Watch followed with its own 179-page report, “Extermination and Acts of Genocide,” documenting Israel’s deliberate deprivation of water as a calculated policy constituting the crime against humanity of extermination and acts of genocide. The ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu. The ICJ ordered provisional measures.

The accumulated mountain of these reports fills libraries. And the Arab world – from Rabat to Riyadh, from Algiers to Doha – receives each one with the reverence of a pilgrim receiving scripture: shared instantly, quoted reverentially, cited as definitive proof that the Zionist entity stands condemned by the conscience of humanity.

Now here is the question I have never seen a single Arab government, a single Arab commentator, or a single Arab social media warrior answer honestly: these same organizations – the identical institutions, staffed by the identical researchers, applying the identical methodologies, operating under the identical mandates – produce annual reports on every Arab state.

And those reports describe a region that is, by any empirical measure, among the most systemically abusive on earth. Amnesty International’s latest Middle East overview documents Saudi Arabia sentencing citizens to death for social media posts, executing people after grossly unfair trials, and killing hundreds of Ethiopian migrants at the Yemen-Saudi border in what Amnesty said may constitute crimes against humanity.

It documents Egypt imprisoning journalists, peaceful protesters, and political opponents on an industrial scale. It documents Bahrain’s arbitrary detention and torture. It documents the UAE’s exploitation of migrant workers under conditions that meet the legal definition of forced labor. It documents Algeria’s escalating crackdown on freedom of expression. It documents Morocco targeting journalists and activists through prosecution and surveillance.

Every single year, without exception, these reports land – and the Arab response is instantaneous, unanimous, and identical: biased, politicized, Western agenda, colonial interference, funded by Zionists, tools of imperialism, part of a conspiracy to destabilize the Arab Islamic world. That these very organizations issue the harshest condemnations of Israel on record should alone put the final nail in the coffin of the tiresome, outdated canard that Jews control the world.

The selectivity is so exquisitely choreographed that it recalls the moral pageantry of ancient Rome, where senators could thunder about justice and civilization while the legions were already marching to erase Carthage from the map – a spectacle whose discipline might almost command admiration were it not so intellectually obscene.

The same Saudi official who tweets an HRW report on Israeli white phosphorus in Lebanon will, without the slightest awareness of irony, dismiss an HRW report on Saudi executions of peaceful dissidents as “Western interference in sovereign affairs.” The same Egyptian commentator who cites Amnesty International’s genocide finding in Gaza will call Amnesty a tool of foreign intelligence when it documents the disappearance of Egyptian journalists into military prisons. The same Algerian newspaper that headlines the ICJ’s provisional measures against Israel will not print a single paragraph from the same organizations’ documentation of Algeria’s persecution of Kabyle activists and opposition journalists.

The methodology is sacred when the target is Jewish, and suspect when the target is Arab – and nobody, in the entire ecosystem of Arab media, academia, and public discourse, finds this contradiction worthy of even a moment’s pause.

And there is the additional comedy – darker still – that when these organizations do report on Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Houthis, the Arab consumer of their Israel-related output performs a surgical editorial operation of scalpel-like precision: the paragraphs condemning Israeli violations are extracted, amplified, and shared across every platform; the paragraphs in the same report documenting Hamas’s use of civilian infrastructure, Hezbollah’s indiscriminate rocket fire, or Houthi recruitment of child soldiers are excised with the quiet ruthlessness of a court historian rewriting the record, preserving only those fragments of truth that flatter the narrative while consigning the inconvenient remainder to oblivion.

The ICJ’s provisional measures order included explicit language about Hamas’s obligations regarding hostages. That section does not exist in the Arab discourse of the ruling. It was never translated, never shared, never discussed – because acknowledging that the same court that ordered Israel to prevent genocide also ordered Hamas to release hostages would complicate a narrative that can only survive in a state of selective quotation.

I am not arguing that Israel should be exempt from scrutiny. I am arguing that scrutiny is either universal or it is propaganda – and the Arab world has chosen propaganda with such consistency, such discipline, and such institutional thoroughness that the choice itself has become invisible, mistaken for principle by the very people practicing it.

If Human Rights Watch is credible enough to indict Israel for white phosphorus in Yohmor, it is credible enough to indict Saudi Arabia for killing Ethiopian migrants at its border. If Amnesty International is authoritative enough to declare genocide in Gaza, it is authoritative enough to declare that Egypt’s prison system constitutes systematic torture. If the ICJ carries the moral weight to order Israel to halt its offensive, it carries the same weight when its sister institutions document Bahrain’s extrajudicial killings or Algeria’s suppression of the Amazigh.

You cannot drink from a well when it condemns your enemy and poison it when it condemns you. Or rather, you can – but then do not call it justice. Call it what it is: the selective weaponization of human rights as a geopolitical instrument, wielded with precision against one state and sheathed the moment it turns toward your own. The Arab world has perfected this art so completely that it no longer recognizes it as hypocrisy. It has mistaken the habit for conviction, the performance for principle, and the applause of its own audience for the verdict of history. It is none of these things. It resembles the same logic of a Muslim who accepts the Qur’an as unaltered revelation while relegating the Bible and the rest of the scriptural tradition to the category of corrupted texts.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)