What Does "Disproportionate" Look Like?

There was a little chatter this week that the Biden Administration, as part of its initiative to combat antisemitism, might give a positive mention to the "Nexus" document. Little ol' Nexus! Who knew!

This news has generated pushback from the rightward elements of the Jewish community, including -- this is a right-wing campaign in 2023, after all -- comparing Nexus to Chinese authoritarianism and spuriously tying us to pedophilia.* What fun.

I might weigh in on this broader controversy. But this post is more about a sidebar to the debate.

One prominent portion of Nexus that has been flagged in these conversations is how we treat "double standards". Nexus, unlike JDA, does not say that it is okay to hold Israel to a double-standard. However, it says that the mere fact of "disproportionate attention to", or differential treatment of, Israel, is not per se proof of a problematic double-standard. People pay "disproportionate attention" to Israel for all sorts of reasons, and many times its completely benign. There certainly are cases where that attention is problematic; but there are many cases where said attention in no way justifies drawing an inference of a problematic double-standard.

AIPAC, ZOA, NGO Monitor, APN, Adalah, the American Task Force on Palestine -- all of these focus on Israel more than other countries, and that's their prerogative. It is neither weird nor sinister for a Jewish or Palestinian organization to devote more attention to human rights issues in Israel compared to China or the Crimea or Zimbabwe, and nobody actually thinks otherwise. One can, I think, fairly contrast the case of AIPAC or Adalah with, say, the UNHRC -- a body which would struggle to articulate a neutral reason for focusing overwhelmingly on Israel but does so anyway. There the antisemitism objection carries significantly more force. Again, the Nexus document provides additional gloss and detail that can help fairly instantiate the IHRA rule, avoiding opportunistic deployments where the mere fact that a Palestinian organization is talking predominantly about Palestinian issues is held out as an antisemitic "double-standard".

In short, Nexus observes that it's not the attention alone that proves a double-standard; something more than that is required. This argument is pretty hard to gainsay, in my view, and it's been amusing to watch some folks on Twitter jackknife wildly between being enraged at how "clearly wrong" Nexus is for saying that disproportionate attention is not per se proof of antisemitism to, when given the example of AIPAC or the Kohelet Forum (which is disproportionately criticizing Israel's judiciary setup far more than it attacks those of other countries), being enraged at how clearly right Nexus is.

But all of this raises the question: what does disproportionate attention even look like?

For example, one of my interlocutors last night gave three examples of human rights groups whose Twitter feeds evinced what he deemed a clearly antisemitically-disproportionate concentration on Israel: Human Rights Watch, Amnesty, and Ken Roth's personal feed.

This is something I hear a lot, and I've often wondered about. It is certainly possible that such groups really do focus on Israel to a wildly excessive degree (I'm familiar enough with the practices of the UNHRC -- which regularly is passing more resolutions about Israel than all other countries in the world combined -- to feel comfortable saying the charge fits for them, for instance). But it's also plausible that certain observers who care primarily about Israel -- pay disproportionate attention to it, we might say -- will only notice a group like HRW talking when it's talking about Israel, in which case, yes, it will seem like it does nothing but talk about Israel. But that's a function of one's own attention span, not HRW's conduct.

So last night, I actually went through these three Twitter feeds -- @HRW, @Amnesty, and @KenRoth -- to see what "disproportionate" looked like. Here's what I did:

• For HRW and Ken Roth, I looked at all their tweets this week up until about 3 AM last night. For Amnesty, which tweeted less frequently, I looked at all their tweets for the month of May.
• For each tweet, I marked which country was primarily being criticized (virtually all the tweets were critical, there were few if any instances of a country being praised). If multiple countries were being criticized in roughly equal forms ("Keep X and Y off the Security Council"), I coded the tweet as criticizing both. But if the tweet was primarily about one country, with a second country being more background, I only coded the former (e.g., a tweet about US border policies that mentions Mexico still would only be coded as the US).
• Total number of tweets may be slightly inaccurate given some tweets covered multiple countries.
• I also separately noted tweets that didn't focus on any country, but rather a specific issue area (like the death penalty).
• Finally, I counted threads as a single tweet. But multiple tweets in a row about a single country (unthreaded) were each counted separately.

Here's what I found:

Human Rights Watch:

• HRW had about 60 tweets/mentions in the relevant time period, which criticized 31 countries. 
• Of those tweets, 1 was primarily about Israel.
• The most commonly targets in this time period were Indonesia, Poland, and Belarus, each of which had five mentions. 
• Other multiples include Vietnam (3), Afghanistan (3), Myanmar (3), Pakistan (3), the UAE (2), and Egypt, (2).

Ken Roth

• Ken had about 80 tweets/mentions in the relevant time period, which criticized 31 countries.
• The most common target for Ken were China and Russia, with 13 mentions each.
• Israel was the third-most common target, with seven mentions.
• Other multiples included India (6), Sudan (4), Belarus (3), Syria (3), Myanmar (3), Saudi Arabia (2), Ethiopia (2), Greece (2), Turkey (2).

Amnesty

• Amnesty had about 63 tweets/mentions in the relevant time period, which criticized 16 countries (keep in mind that, because Amnesty tweeted less frequently, its time period was longer -- the entire month of May).
• For what it's worth, had I looked at Amnesty's tweets just for this week, it would have had only eight, none of which were about Israel.
• Amnesty was far more likely than HRW and Ken to tweet about general issues rather than country-specific incidents and policies. Sixteen of its tweets were about general policies, including six on the death penalty, four on LGBTQ rights, two on press freedom, two on social security, and one each on women's rights and climate change.
• Amnesty's most common target was Israel, with 16 mentions. The next-most common target was Iran, with five.
• Other multiples included the USA (4), Sudan (4), Pakistan, (4), Uganda (3), Peru (3), Kenya (2), and Russia (2).

So what do we draw from all of this -- assuming for sake of argument that the time period I drew from was representative? Are these groups actually paying disproportionate attention to Israel, or is it an artifact of the relevant observers only caring about them when they talk about Israel?

I would say the results are mixed. For Human Rights Watch, where just 1/60 mentions were about Israel, I think it is pretty hard to maintain that Israel is being subjected to some sort of unfair "double-standard" based on the amount of attention it received. Notice, though, one still could argue that it is receiving "disproportionate" attention -- there are 195 countries in the world, and yet Israel received 1/60th of the attention! Or one could say that giving Israel equal attention to Russia (which also had one mention), or the lack of a mention for China in this time period, is "disproportionate" given Russia and China's graver current offenses (though if that's the argument, how much more of a basis of complaint do the Poles, Indonesians, and Belarussians have!). 

Still, to the extent that this sort of treatment is what's being deemed "disproportionate", I think Nexus is clearly correct in rejecting the notion that there's anything per se antisemitic about it. And to the extent that some persons perceive HRW as focusing "obsessively" about Israel to the exclusion of other countries, that seems (again, assuming this period was representative) almost certainly attributable to those observers only paying attention to HRW when it talks about Israel.

For Amnesty, by contrast, 16/63 mentions were about Israel -- 3x more than the next closest rival of Iran. Here, I think the claim of genuinely problematic "disproportionate" attention is at least more colorable. While we can argue whether this is antisemitic or not, with Amnesty it does seem like the perception that it focuses disproportionately on Israel in a potentially problematic way does seem like it is warranted -- it isn't just an artifact of the listener's own slanted priorities. I will note, though, that in terms of "disproportionate attention", even Amnesty lags behind the UNHRC, which again has historically targeted in Israel in more than half of its entire body of work! Amnesty's 16/63 -- roughly 25% -- looks positively charitable in comparison!

Finally, Ken Roth is somewhere in the middle. Israel is the focus of his attention more than many other countries, but not all of them -- it stands behind both Russia and China. Is this a case of a problematic "double-standard"? It doesn't seem so -- Israel doesn't "stand out" alone on a precipice like it does for Amnesty, it is treated similar to other countries that Ken also thinks are human rights violators. One could again cherry-pick and say "well, what of Cuba -- Ken didn't talk about them at all in this period -- and they're a human rights violator too!" But this is not actually a workable standard -- political discourse simply does not work like this, where every commentator is talking about every potential token of injustice in complete equal proportion.

Relatedly, I've definitely heard the claim that given how much worse Russia and/or China is than Israel, it is "disproportionate" to focus on Israel even equally (or here, considerably less than equally) to those countries. But that sort of argument seems almost impossible to operationalize in practice, in part because it's subjective, in part because it's clearly not the case that there either is or should be a 1:1 correlation between some sort of universalist rubric of gravity-of-offense and attention paid. That's not how political discourse works, and it's not how it can possibly work. Indeed, I daresay that few think of applying that sort of standard in any case but Israel's (and even here -- does anyone say that any attention paid to Palestinian terror is prima facie "disproportionate" if it is not dwarfed by attention paid to far greater atrocities like the Myanmar genocide? Again, this just isn't workable). This, again, ratifies Nexus' instinct to not let "disproportionate" alone suffice; as the sort of conduct that is being called "disproportionate" is not actually behavior that can reasonably be indicted as problematic.

In all these cases, of course, it could be that the relevant coverage is antisemitic for other reasons ("disproportionate" is not the only basis for calling something antisemitic, after all). But to the extent one wants to argue that the allegedly "disproportionate" coverage of these groups validly generates an inference of antisemitism, that's hard to warrant at least for HRW and Roth, though it may be for Amnesty. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is both some truth to the notion that some groups focus on Israel in an obsessive or wildly off-kilter fashion, but it is also true that this belief has caused some observers to assume that this sin is more widespread and ubiquitous than it actually is, and make accusations of problematic disproportionality in cases where it can't really hold together.

* Lest you think the latter is some egg-profile Twitter account with 54 followers and a shiny new blue checkmark, it actually came from Shmuley Boteach. So not too far from an egg-profile Twitter account with 54 followers and a shiny new blue checkmark.