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........

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