Three Images of Israel: A Human Rights Assessment

The views expressed below are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights or Harvard Kennedy School. These perspectives have been presented to encourage debate on important public policy challenges. 

I. The Difficulty of Balance

Throughout the calendar year 2026, the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights is offering a series called “From Pain to Hope? Israel/Palestine in 2026.” We held six events in this series in the spring semester 2026, and will offer more in the fall. The vote in mid-July by nearly 100 House Democrats to end aid to Israel—a move Politico calls “a seismic shift”—is a good occasion to look at the general approach that we bring to this conflict and in the process also contextualize the events that we held in this domain during the spring semester, as well as some additional podcasts and commentaries related to Israel/Palestine. 

Writing about Israel from a human rights standpoint requires confronting, at the outset, a specific intellectual difficulty: the subject has become so politicized that the aspiration to balanced assessment is itself treated as a political act. Those who foreground Israel’s role as a refuge for a historically persecuted people are accused of using Jewish suffering as a shield against legitimate accountability. Those who foreground Israel’s human rights record in the occupied territories are accused of applying double standards, ignoring context, or—at the worst—of antisemitism. The space for clear-sighted human rights analysis has been compressed by these pressures in ways that make the analysis simultaneously more difficult and more necessary.

The difficulty is compounded because Israel is genuinely three things at once—three things that are not logically contradictory but are in profound tension. First, Israel is the national home of the Jewish people, established after a genocide, in a region that was and to a considerable extent remains hostile to its existence, and it has functioned as a place of refuge and extraordinary human achievement.It is also a state that has, for decades, maintained an occupation over millions of Palestinians and has overseen a settlement enterprise that the overwhelming international legal consensus regards as unlawful under the law of occupation. In the specific context of Gaza since October 7, 2023, Israel has been credibly accused by international institutions and human rights organizations of conduct that may constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity, and it has been the subject of genocide proceedings before the International Court of Justice. Finally, Israel is, from within, a deeply divided society that contains vigorous self-criticism and sustained democratic contestation—facts that matter for understanding both what has happened and what could plausibly change.

What follows is not a verdict but an accounting: a human rights assessment that takes all three images seriously, that neither uses Jewish historical suffering to immunize state conduct from scrutiny nor uses state conduct to deny the legitimacy of Jewish national self-determination, and that does not reduce a society of roughly nine million people to a symbol serving the needs of external discourse. The balance is difficult and will not always be perfectly maintained. But the attempt is the minimum that intellectual honesty and commitment to human rights require. As far as our series is concerned, it is called “From Pain to Hope?”—with a question mark. The events we held threw light on many aspects of this ongoing conflict, and not all of them created optimism. But one event that was all about hope was a conversation with Dr. Eman Ansari, a Palestinian-American pediatrician and mother of four, and Guy Ben-Aharon, an Israeli-American theater director, writer and founder of the nonprofit The Jar. And hope has ways of being contagious. 

II. What Balance Looks Like Under Pressure: A Case Study in Epistemic Intimidation

The abstract difficulty of balance becomes clearer through a concrete dynamic that repeatedly appears in public discussion. A version of it is familiar in university settings: a speaker is hosted who criticizes Israeli military conduct in sharp terms; the hosting institution is then accused of reviving antisemitic tropes, sometimes through analogies to medieval myths such as the “blood libel.” This exact formulation was used in a letter sent to me in response to Carr-Ryan Center programming earlier this year. The claim is not always made in bad faith. The blood libel is one of history’s most lethal antisemitic conspiracy theories, and the general concern that rhetoric about Israel can slip into dehumanizing portrayals of Jews is a legitimate concern that must be taken seriously.

But the key move often made under this pressure—equating contested moral and political characterizations of documented state conduct with a fabricated myth invented to justify persecution—does not hold, and it matters enormously that it does not hold. The blood libel was a falsehood without factual basis, designed to justify violence against Jews. By contrast, characterizations of Israeli military conduct in Gaza or in the occupied territories—however sharp, however contestable—purport to describe real events that have been documented by journalists, by United Nations bodies, by human rights organizations including Israeli ones, and by international legal institutions. Whatever one thinks of particular speakers or particular formulations, the relevant distinction for a human rights framework is between fabricated accusations against Jews as Jews and contested moral judgments about state conduct subject to legal and factual evaluation.

The ICJ’s January 2024 provisional measures order in the South Africa v. Israel case is an especially clear illustration of why the distinction matters. The Court has not yet issued a final determination on genocide; it indicated provisional measures in a proceeding under the Genocide Convention on the basis of plausibility and urgency standards applicable at that stage. Regardless of where one stands on the merits, describing the existence of that legal proceeding, or taking its reasoning seriously, is not structurally akin to medieval antisemitic mythmaking. Collapsing the distinction—treating sharp criticism of Israeli state conduct as the moral equivalent of the blood libel—makes the charge of antisemitism less effective precisely where it is most needed by deploying it against legitimate discourse rather than against hatred of Jews as Jews.

A human rights stance must therefore do two things at once: take antisemitism seriously as a present danger, and refuse the intimidation tactic that treats accountability claims about documented state conduct as antisemitic by definition. None of this implies that rhetoric about Israeli conduct cannot be antisemitic; it can be, and sometimes is. The point is that antisemitism is not established merely by the fact that Israeli state conduct is criticized. Deploying the charge of antisemitism against legitimate, evidence‑based criticism also harms Jews, because it devalues the charge where it is most needed against hatred of Jews as Jews. Without that dual capacity, human rights analysis becomes either morally reckless or politically useless.

In this context it is also worth recalling that the theme of moral complexity has always been guiding the Carr-Ryan Center’s work on Israel/Palestine (see e.g., here, here, and here). For my own views on the question of what obligations specifically Germany and Germans have vis-à-vis Palestinians, see here. That piece also captures my take on much of the contested vocabulary used in this context. 

III. The First Image: Refuge, Achievement, and Existential Vulnerability

Israel’s emergence cannot be treated as mere background. It is constitutive of what the state is and why many Jews experience it as existentially necessary. The Holocaust was not only a catastrophe; it was the culmination of a pattern of vulnerability and statelessness. That pattern shaped a central human rights lesson of the twentieth century: “humanity alone,” without political membership and enforceable institutions, is often insufficient protection against what states or armed actors can do. The Zionist project predated the Holocaust, but the Holocaust transformed it for many Jews from one political possibility among others into a perceived necessity: a state that could not lawfully or practically refuse Jewish refugees because it was obligated to protect them as citizens.

This first image also includes Israel’s achievements. Israel built robust institutions, a dynamic economy, and an unusually active civil society under conditions of repeated war and persistent insecurity. It also produced some of the most important human rights documentation of any country in the region, including Israeli organizations willing to scrutinize their own state’s conduct. That capacity for internal critique is not a footnote; it is one of the features that distinguishes Israel from many authoritarian neighbors and that shapes what accountability can look like in practice.

The October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas activated the deepest layers of this vulnerability narrative. Israel’s official death toll was revised to “around 1,200” killed. A total of 251 people were abducted and taken as hostages. These events were not abstract to Israelis; they were experienced as a mass assault on civilians and as a vivid reminder that the state’s core promise—safety for Jews in a world that has repeatedly failed to provide it—could be catastrophically breached. No human rights assessment is credible if it treats that fear as mere propaganda rather than a real political and psychological force shaping decision-making. One of those abducted on October 7 was Omer Shem Tov, who appeared in the HKS forum on March 2, 2026—an event co-sponsored by the Carr-Ryan Center that was part of our events series on Israel/Palestine. We also did a podcast with Omer Shem Tov and his cousin Leat Corinne Unger. Another event in our series featured a conversation with Amit Segal, a prominent right-wing Israeli journalist. This conversation threw a lot of light on how the Israeli government and the right wing of the country’s political spectrum sees the political situation. 

IV. The Second Image: Occupation, Asymmetric Power, and Accountability

And yet the Israel of 2026 is not only the vulnerable refuge of a historically persecuted people. It is also a powerful state with extraordinary military and intelligence capacity and deep international support, particularly from the United States. That asymmetry of power matters for human rights analysis. Existential threat narratives often begin with genuine facts—armed actors have repeatedly attacked Israeli civilians, and some continue to deny Israel’s right to exist—but the existence of threats does not suspend international humanitarian law. Nor does it justify policies that systematically deny the rights of an occupied population.

The occupation of the West Bank has persisted for nearly six decades. Occupation, in international law, is supposed to be temporary and governed by stringent duties. One of the most central is that the occupying power must not transfer parts of its own civilian population into the occupied territory. Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention states that “[t]he Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” The International Committee of the Red Cross has repeatedly stated that Israel’s settlement policy is contrary to international humanitarian law and specifically cites this provision. A recent UN Secretary‑General report places the settler population in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, at well over seven hundred thousand. Whatever one’s view of final-status negotiations, the settlement enterprise has materially changed the feasibility of a territorial compromise and entrenched a coercive hierarchy of rights and movement.

The system of control in the West Bank includes checkpoints and movement restrictions, extensive military jurisdiction over Palestinians, administrative detention practices, and a dual legal reality in which Israeli settlers and Palestinians living in the same territory face different legal regimes. These claims are not dependent on any one ideological frame; they are extensively documented in human rights and UN reporting. They are also the basis for a serious legal argument—advanced by multiple major organizations—that the regime meets the definition of apartheid under international law. B’Tselem’s January 2021 report argues that the regime across the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea constitutes apartheid. Human Rights Watch’s April 2021 report describes Israeli authorities as committing the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution. Amnesty International’s 2022 report similarly concludes that Israel is enforcing a system of apartheid against Palestinians and frames it as a crime against humanity. 

Gaza, meanwhile, has been subject to a land, sea, and air blockade imposed by Israel since June 2007, with OCHA describing restrictions as intensified after Hamas’s takeover. Before October 2023, Gaza already suffered severe economic deprivation and unemployment; the World Bank reports Gaza unemployment at 45.3 percent in 2022. This second image is therefore not merely an accusation about discrete incidents; it is a structural portrait of a prolonged denial of rights under conditions of asymmetric power. Framing these realities solely in terms of “security” misses the core of the human rights critique, which concerns the systematic and enduring nature of the rights restrictions themselves.

The Carr-Ryan Center has all along given voice to Palestinian intellectuals and activists and their supporters, and will continue to do so. Our series this year featured a panel discussion with Yousef Munayyer, Malkit Shoshan, Josh Ruebner and Zaha Hassan—leading analysts, advocates, and scholars of Palestine policy and history. The series also included a discussion between Professor Steven Walt and Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man and Sarah Leah Whitson, authors of the recently published book From Apartheid to Democracy: A Blueprint for Peace in Israel-Palestine. This book seeks to provide a practical plan to end apartheid and occupation rule and lay the groundwork for democratic decision-making on the future governance of Israel-Palestine.

V. The Third Image: A Divided Society That Feels Misunderstood

International discourse often misses a third image: Israel as experienced from within, by Israelis themselves. This image matters for human rights analysis not because it softens accountability claims; it does not. It matters because analysis that erases internal diversity and internal contestation becomes incapable of being heard by those whose political choices matter most for changing policy.

Israel contains deep and unresolved internal divisions that are frequently invisible to outside commentary that treats “Israel” as a monolith. Some are demographic and cultural, including longstanding tensions between secular and religious communities, and between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jewish identities. Some are constitutional and institutional, including the struggle over the judiciary and the character of democratic checks and balances. The 2023 judicial crisis revealed these internal dynamics vividly: proposed changes to the Supreme Court’s role in reviewing government actions produced the largest sustained protest movement in Israeli history, with broad participation by civil society, business leaders, academics, and military reservists. Whatever one thinks of the protest movement’s limits—especially its partial disconnect from Palestinian rights—it demonstrated that large parts of Israeli society remain deeply invested in democratic constraints.

Our series From Pain to Hope? also included a panel discussion on “The Future of the Rule of Law” in Israel with Masua Sagiv, Roy Peled, and Avi Bell. Capturing much of the spread of views on this matter and thereby also highlighting the depth of the divisions in Israeli society, this panel examined the legal, political, and cultural forces reshaping Israel’s democratic foundations.

The Arab citizens of Israel—about one-fifth of Israel’s population—occupy an especially complex position: formally equal citizenship combined with persistent systemic discrimination, and a political identity shaped simultaneously by civic participation and by the broader Palestinian national question. This complexity cannot replace a human rights assessment of occupation policy, but it does complicate reductive accounts that portray all Israeli society as a single ideological subject.

The third image also includes the fact that Israeli civil society contains organizations that document rights violations under severe pressure, organizations like B'Tselem, Breaking the Silence, and Adalah. One of these organizations also is Physicians for Human Rights Israel, and one of our podcasts this year was with Tirza Leibowitz, its deputy director, about the organization's work. The existence of such organizations does not negate the violations; it identifies internal actors for whom human rights language is not foreign propaganda but a domestic moral and political vocabulary. A commentary that ignores those internal constituencies weakens the practical prospects of accountability by treating change as something that can only be imposed from outside.

A parallel point applies on the Palestinian side: Palestinian human rights organizations, lawyers, and grassroots movements also articulate rights claims in a domestic moral vocabulary and struggle for accountability from within their own society. A human rights approach that ignores those constituencies likewise underestimates the internal resources for change.

VI. October 7 and Its Aftermath: The Hardest Questions

A human rights assessment must begin the post October 7 analysis with clarity: Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups committed serious violations on October 7,including acts that constitute war crimes. These include the deliberate killing of civilians, hostage-taking, and other grave abuses that cannot be justified by political grievance or military logic. Israel has a right to defend itself against Hamas, but international law does not permit defending that right by disregarding core humanitarian principles such as distinction, proportionality, and precautions in attack.

The evidence from the Gaza war since October 2023 has been deeply troubling. OCHA reporting cites casualty figures from the Gaza Ministry of Health, and by 2025 these figures exceed fifty thousand killed. The scale of destruction to civilian infrastructure has been immense, and humanitarian access has been repeatedly restricted in ways documented by UN agencies and other monitors. The legal question is not whether civilian harm occurred—civilian harm occurs in every major urban war—but whether the pattern and scale of harm, and the policies governing aid and evacuation, can be justified under international humanitarian law.

The international legal response has produced two especially important institutional signals. The first is the ICJ proceeding under the Genocide Convention. In January 2024 the ICJ indicated provisional measures, based on the standards applicable at that stage, and ordered Israel to take steps within its power to prevent genocidal acts and to ensure humanitarian conditions consistent with the Convention’s obligations. Whether genocide will ultimately be found on the merits is contested; genocide requires specific intent, and legal debate on that element is serious and ongoing. But the existence of the ICJ order is not propaganda; it is a legal development that demands engagement, not dismissal. It should be clear that the Court’s judgment will depend on whether legal precedent and the evidentiary record warrant applying the term “genocide” to this context; nobody should expect the Court simply to dismiss the charge as entirely without initial merit.

The second signal is the ICC process. In May 2024, the ICC Prosecutor announced applications for arrest warrants for senior Israeli and Hamas officials. In November 2024, the ICC’s Pre‑Trial Chamber issued warrants of arrest for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and for Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al‑Masri (“Deif”), in the “Situation in the State of Palestine.” These are legal actions in an international criminal process; they can be criticized, but they cannot responsibly be waved away as equivalent to antisemitic mythmaking.

It is also important that internal Israeli critique exists even in wartime. There are many Israelis—including many who supported military action in response to October 7—who are deeply troubled by aspects of the conduct of the war. For those Israelis, the argument for accountability is not merely external condemnation; it is part of a domestic struggle over what kind of state Israel will be.

VII. The Hierarchy of Grief and the Crisis of Universalism

The Gaza war has exposed what on an earlier occasion I have called a hierarchy of grief. Universalism, as a moral commitment, demands that the suffering of any human being is equally significant. But politics and psychology produce thicker attachments to one’s own community, and media and diplomatic systems tend to amplify some suffering while rendering other suffering abstract.

In much Western discourse, Israeli victims—especially of October 7—were individualized, named, and mourned. Palestinian victims were often rendered as numbers, or as symbols of collective tragedy. In some Arab and Muslim publics, a mirror asymmetry has operated: Israeli deaths have sometimes been minimized or justified as the deserved fate of an occupying society, while Palestinian suffering is foregrounded and personalized. These asymmetries corrode the possibility of a shared language of moral judgment. When every invocation of universal standards is immediately treated as disguised partisanship, universalism collapses into a competition of incomparable traumas.

The third image of Israel adds a further dimension: many of those killed on October 7 were from communities associated with Israeli civil society, the peace camp, and the democratic protest movement. Their deaths created a wound in the possibility of cross‑communal dialogue—especially when Israelis perceived that international observers had already decided what Israel represents and thus discounted Israeli grief as morally irrelevant. That perception does not justify violations in Gaza, but it helps explain the political and psychological terrain on which any human‑rights‑based persuasion must operate.

A central structural fact about the Israel/Palestine situation is the long-standing failure of international accountability mechanisms to function consistently. The United States has used its Security Council veto repeatedly in relation to Israel; a UN document notes that the United States vetoed thirty-two resolutions critical of Israel since 1973. The effect has been to weaken the Security Council’s ability to act as the central enforcement body of the international order in this domain.

This pattern is not unique to Israel/Palestine. Yemen, Tigray, Sudan, and the Uyghur situation all illustrate how universal norms often “bite” selectively depending on power, alliance, and geopolitical salience. The Israel/Palestine case, however, is unusually documented and unusually visible. If credible allegations of atrocity crimes in a conflict of this visibility can be insulated indefinitely from meaningful enforcement by political alignment, then the claim that universal norms constrain power is not merely violated; it is evacuated of credibility. In that sense, accountability in Gaza is not only about Gaza. It is about whether the international legal order retains any capacity to function as law rather than as rhetoric.

VIII. What Human Rights Require

A genuine human rights framework requires commitments that current discourse often fails to sustain.

First, universality: human rights apply to everyone equally. Israeli civilians have the right to life and security; Palestinian civilians have the right to life and security. Hostages have rights that are violated by their continued captivity. A human rights framework that attends only to Palestinian suffering or only to Israeli suffering is not a human rights framework.

Second, proportionality of scrutiny: scrutiny should be proportionate to conduct, and no state should be systematically shielded from scrutiny for reasons unrelated to its rights record. The fact that some UN bodies have historically scrutinized Israel disproportionately does not justify the opposite distortion; the remedy for disproportionate scrutiny is consistent standards, not the abandonment of scrutiny.

Third, integrity of legal categories: genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and apartheid are legal terms with specific elements. Their application requires evidence-based analysis rather than slogan. Calling everything genocide dilutes the concept; refusing even to consider whether genocide might be occurring, simply because the claim is politically inconvenient, betrays the purpose of the Genocide Convention. The only credible stance is to follow evidence and law where they lead.

Fourth, complexity without evasion: Israel/Palestine is historically complex. Complexity is real and must be taken seriously. But complexity is not a license to suspend judgment about specific acts and policies that violate clearly established norms.

Fifth, engagement with internal constituencies: the third image highlights that Israeli civil society contains actors struggling for democratic accountability and human rights from within. Those actors are not props for external arguments; they are among the most plausible domestic agents of change. A human rights community that engages only in external denunciation while ignoring internal democratic and rights-oriented constituencies weakens its own prospects.

IX. Concluding Thoughts on the Three Images

All three images are true, and none cancels the others. Israel’s role as refuge and as an expression of Jewish self-determination is real and morally weighty. Palestinian dispossession, occupation, and rights violations are real and morally weighty. Israel’s internal division, democratic struggle, and civil society critique are real and politically consequential. Holding these images together means that people who primarily identify with one of them will likely find parts of this assessment deeply uncomfortable; that friction is not a defect of the framework but a consequence of refusing to let any single image silence the others.

What these images require of each other is tension without silencing. Jewish historical persecution does not justify violating Palestinian rights. Violations of Palestinian rights do not delegitimize Jewish national self-determination. Security threats do not suspend humanitarian law. Internal complexity does not exempt state conduct from scrutiny. And the scrutiny state conduct demands does not justify reducing Israelis to a monolith or treating Israeli grief as morally irrelevant.

The path forward includes elements that can be stated clearly even when their achievement is uncertain. A durable ceasefire and the unconditional release of remaining hostages are human rights necessities. Humanitarian aid must be restored to levels consistent with the rights of civilians, and restrictions that produce civilian deprivation must be judged by legal standards rather than excused by political loyalty. Accountability processes at the ICJ and ICC should be allowed to proceed without political interference. A credible political process aimed at Palestinian self-determination must be treated not as a distant aspiration but as an urgent priority, because the indefinite continuation of occupation is incompatible with any human rights settlement.

The third image adds a specific implication: the international human rights community should support, rather than ignore, the internal Israeli constituencies fighting for democratic accountability. Engagement should be principled and unsentimental—no romanticizing, no exemption from critique—but it should recognize that internal democratic struggle is not a distraction from human rights but one of the conditions of their realizability.

The three images of Israel are all true. Holding them together—without allowing any one to silence the others, and without allowing intimidation to substitute for argument—is the only intellectually honest and humanly adequate response to one of the most painful and consequential human rights situations of the present.