Middle Eastern countries have far worse human rights records than Israel.

Whether other countries in the region have poor human rights records is irrelevant to Israel's. But even on its own terms, the comparison is not in Israel's favor. No other state in the region was established through a settler-colonial project that ethnically cleansed over 800,000 Palestinians and destroyed more than 530 villages. No other state in the region is premised on the elimination and dispossession of other people. No other state in the region is committing a live-streamed genocide with total impunity.

The regional comparison also tells a very different story. Since its establishment in 1948, Israel has bombed or launched military attacks against at least 12 countries across the region while continuing to occupy Palestinian, Syrian, and Lebanese lands. A state with such a sustained record of regional colonial aggression cannot credibly claim moral superiority on human rights.

Israel routinely invokes the human rights records of neighboring states to portray itself as a regional haven for LGBTQIA+ rights, women's rights, democracy, and freedom of expression. Ironically, a 2025 comparative study of 22 countries across the region ranked Israel last overall in the very human rights categories it claims to champion.

Israel is the only state in the region that UN experts and major international and Israeli human rights organizations have concluded operates an apartheid system. Its leaders are wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity, it faces genocide proceedings before the International Court of Justice, and successive UN bodies have adopted over 1,000 resolutions addressing its systematic violations of international law. Yet instead of acting to end this impunity, the conversation is repeatedly diverted to the human rights records of other countries.

Israel's human rights record is not contingent on the records of other countries, but on the international law that governs all states. Human rights are universal, not comparative. Abuses in one country are irrelevant to abuses committed in another. At the same time, Israel is not simply another state with a poor human rights record. Reducing the issue to a series of "human rights abuses" obscures the colonial structure that produces these abuses and normalizes them as isolated violations rather than an ongoing project of settler colonialism.

This argument falsely implies that people across the region are passive toward the human rights abuses of their own governments. In reality, millions have resisted dictatorship, repression, corruption, and other human rights violations for decades, often being imprisoned, tortured, or killed.

At the same time, their struggles for justice have long intersected with the Palestinian struggle against Zionist colonialism, which threatens their own rights, freedoms, and self-determination.