Advantageous comparison: Israel’s response to allegations of human rights violations

Human rights NGOs, UN bodies, and governments often criticize Israel for its military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and its treatment of the Palestinian people. This article examines Israel’s public diplomacy used in defense against these charges, in light of the technique of advantageous comparison, a form of implicatory denial whereby an actor defends itself against criticism by claiming others are worse or by arguing that a worse actor, usually an adversary, left them with no choice. It is a way of disengaging from moral boundaries. We first find that Israel’s core assumption of unfair criticism does not fare well when its record of respect is assessed using systematic human rights data covering the 1981–2018 period. Further, using a corpus of over two million tweets scraped from accounts involved in Israeli public diplomacy from 2007 to 2023, we find reliable evidence of Israeli use of advantageous comparison. Indeed, Israel used at least three different forms of advantageous comparisons: framing what another actor did as worse than what Israel did; blaming the blamer, a form of attacking those making allegations; and a utilitarian calculus. We also find that a human rights report’s release may trigger such tweets.