"Israel
The ACR (Annual Confidentiality Report) for Israel is arguably the most vetted, reviewed, edited, and “politicized”. According to numerous accounts of former State Department officials, the report for Israel was one of such complexity and sensitivity that it was elevated from the low-level drafters of the reports to the Assistant Secretary level or even higher up to the Secretary of State. Yvonne Thayer gives a more detailed account of writing the ACR on Israel.

‘Israel was always a difficult topic. […] Determining the final language on Israel was above my pay grade. My office was charged with checking facts, seeking additional sources to corroborate information, ensure objectivity, and fine tune accurate language. […] We worked hard to ensure the reports were thorough, verified, and honest. Some had classified annexes but the overall report was unclassified and released to the public. No one thought U.S. assistance to Israel for example or Egypt would be reduced under any circumstances. The process had waivers to get around levels of aid, military aid, and votes subject to human rights performance. Those decisions were tough and implementation was hardly consistent. My job was to provide an accurate picture. We might work through dozens of edits and disputes over how something was handled in a report. I would try to resolve issues with the relevant regional desk or office and we would turn over remaining issues for John [Shattuck] to address directly with his counterpart at the assistant secretary and sometimes the Secretary level.’

“Each year there were two or three issues that had to go to the leadership of the department to be resolved, and Israel was one of those issues each year” Bishop remembers. Stephen E. Palmer Jr. recalls that the Israel report ended up with “titanic struggles sometimes in the White House, or at least in the National Security Councils (NSC) Gilbert D. Kulick remembers that “every word was parsed and every comma was examined”. The language and the length of the report were part of the issue. The NSC was concerned of including too many cases. Members of the NSC were occasionally the ones who were drawing the lines of what could be included or not in the ACR for Israel, or even “slashing” the report’s length, “by as much as a third”. After there was kind of agreement for the report with the Department on “language for any one of a number of disputed issues within the reports [there are separate reports for Israel and the Occupied Territories]”, then “they would be sent to the NSC where they would effectively be gutted or at least substantially rewritten, which virtually never occurred with other reports”. So essentially in the case of disagreement, it was the NSC that had “the final word”. Internal US agencies were involved in the editing of the ACR on Israel.

Through a “mistake” made in the embassy, the Israelis were able to see drafts of the section on human rights in the ACR on Israel. Israel was actually very attentive to the ACRs. The Israeli embassy in Washington, DC “had a Human Rights bureau watcher who would come and try to pre-emptively explain to us why something nasty had happened in an attempt to justify it”. Bishop recalls that the efforts to influence the process would also include assisting the Assistant Secretary Richard Schifter organising “his trips to Israel when he would go out and talk with the generals and talk with the human rights groups”. Patt Derian recently confirmed that it is probably still true that “anything that goes to the State Department concerning Israel probably appears on an Israeli foreign minister’s desk before it appears on Foreign Service”. To the contrary, there was little interactions with the Palestinians. This lack of communication could be explained in different ways. On the one hand, Bishop remembers that while there are “obviously Arab groups in the United States and Palestinians groups in the United States, they rarely made their way to us”. On the other hand, there were also certain issues with designating groups as “terrorist” that would mean that no official contact with them could be made. As Bishop remembers, “there was certainly a prohibition at that time about talking with some groups, the PLO and people who were affiliated with the PLO. No American official could speak with them”. Richard Schifter confirms that “There is no doubt that there is a great deal of unfairness in how Palestinians are being dealt with in Israel”.

All objectivity is off in Israel ACR reports. The justification for overlooking certain issues was justified by the fact that Israel was a democratic political system with “a good legal system and courts that sometimes overruled nasty practices” and therefore the final report’s did not have to be so negative. Eicher admits that the language used in the ACR for Israel was different. One key element of the ACRs for Israel is to distinguish between Israel and the Occupied Territories. The first paragraph of the report clarifies this distinction. While Israel is a democracy, the Occupied Territories are under military occupation where there would “inevitably” be different human rights practices. Nadia Tongour describes this as “[p]ainful, because everything else was more or less negotiable”.
The ACR report on Israel was also known as the “Schifter report” during Schifter’s tenure in the Human Rights Bureau from 1985 to 1992. Schifter remembers that he was privately pressing the Israelis to comply with Human Rights standards. He recalls that he was critical of many Israeli practices remembering “telling Yitzhak Rabin how to run the army during what came to be known as the first Intifada” and he later found out that Rabin viewed him as an “American cop”. As Schifter explains, from the initial interview he had with the Secretary of State George Shultz they decided on a strategy to follow regarding the ACRs. They agreed what they “needed to do is cure the problems” that they “encountered rather than wringing” their “hands or shouting from the rooftops as to what” they “found wrong” For Schifter, there is value to publicly “denounce human rights violators only when it is clear that they are not listening to reason”. Schifter justifies the lack of public denouncement of Israel during the first Intifada, on the basis that Israelis were following his guidance to “end the practices of which they [US] disapproved”. So for Schifter, while he “had no doubt that there were human rights problems in Israel and the Occupied Territories”, he “believed that [US] should seek to address them in direct discussions with Israeli officials, and if [they] failed to get a prompt correction, should list them in our human rights reports”. For Schifter, human rights violations in the case of Israel should be understood within the context of being the “only democracy in the region” and especially when it is “under attack”. Yet, Schifter, argued that he was responsible to “adhere to a consistent standard in the final texts of all the reports, rather than judging Israel by standards that were significantly different from the standards applied to other countries”.

The question of having any ACR for Israel that could have a detrimental impact on any kind of US foreign assistance has been off the table. “As far as taking any punitive action against Israel because of its human rights practices, that was out of the question as far as U.S. policy went”. That, Eicher explains, has been due to “other policy consideration taking precedence over human rights”.
We need to be careful, however, to consider a uniform front by US officials in Israel when it came to submitting the ACR reports. The process of drafting the ACR for Israel included two often conflicting feeds from the US Consulate in Jerusalem and the US Embassy in Tel Aviv. The case of Alexandra Uteev Johnson is indicative of that conflict. Officers admitted that the staff in the American Consulate in Jerusalem “would not always agree with Embassy personnel in Tel Aviv on certain aspects of the report”.

Alexandra Uteev Johnson was the vice-consul and post visa officer in the Consulate and wrote two reports in 1978 alleging that Israeli authorities systematically used torture techniques to interrogate Palestinian prisoners. The cable was leaked to the press. There are allegations that she arranged that text to get to the press. She was also accused of being so “emotionally embroiled” in that case that she “had clearly became very partisan”. As the visa officer in the Consulate, Johnson interviewed 29 Palestinians while processing their visa applications. She argued that “all 29 individuals described to [her], in varying degree of detail, interrogation sessions in which they were beaten or otherwise tortured by their interrogators”. She saw a “pattern or a system” of physical abusive practices. Johnson was briefly engaged to one of the 29 Palestinians. In February 1978 at the request of Donald Kruse, the deputy principal office of the consulate, Johnson prepared a summary of the cases.

In May 1978, Johnson sent a cable, later designated “Jerusalem 1500”, to the Secretary of State in Washington, DC with the subject “Torture of Arab Prisoners in Jerusalem and the West Bank”. Few months later, in November 1978, Johnson sent a second cable later designated “Jerusalem 3239” with the subject “Treatment of Security Suspects on West Bank”. At the cable, Johnson’s report was introduced with a disclaimer that although the consulate “does not necessarily agree with all the deductions and conclusion” of Johnson’s report, “the weight of evidence points to the validity of her general conclusion that physical mistreatment is systematically used on many Arab Security suspects interrogated in the West Bank”. The introduction then goes on to state that the stories “cannot be corroborated firsthand” and that this is “a problem general in human rights reporting”. The introduction concludes that “contents of this cable along with references should be taken into account in preparing for Congress the required Annual Human Rights Section on Israel”.

Soon the cables were leaked to the press and the story appeared in the front cover of “The Washington Post” on 7 February 1979 just few days before the public release of the ACRs. As the Washington Post wrote the previous year, the ACR for Israel held that “we know of no evidence… that Israel follows a consistent practice or policy of using torture”. Yet, the upcoming report was about to state that “The accumulation of reports, some from credible sources, makes it appear that instances of mistreatment have occurred”. Few days later the Post clarified that the quotes from the ACRs were somehow handled inaccurately because in both years there was an acknowledgement of “instances” of mistreatment. Alexandra Uteev Johnson essentially was fired as she did not get tenured. State Department officially denied that “her reporting was the reason for her failure to receive tenure” but Johnson believed that she “was fired because of her human rights reporting”. As New York Times reported after an extensive inquiry, “Johnson’s harsh conclusions about Israeli police methods were not substantiated”. Yet, the ACR for Israel stated that “as a result of an accumulation of evidence, there seemed to be ‘instances’ of mistreatment of prisoners detained for questioning in security cases”.

On 18 February 1979 Johnson spoke to the Committee of Foreign Relations of the US Senate. She argued that “‘Jerusalem 3239’ sparked an internal State Department debate over the contents of the human rights report”. The conversation started in December 1978, according to Johnson, with the consul in Jerusalem, Michael H. Newlin “pressing for some reference to the idea that Israeli torture might be a systematic practice”, while the Embassy in Tel Aviv opposed that “basing their views on routine Israeli denials”. That debate, Johnson held, was reflected also in Washington, DC when the Human Rights Bureau supported the Consulate position, while the State Department’s “Israel desk” supported the Embassy position. In the end, “the carefully worded published report could be quoted by both sides as a victory. It did allude to charges that Israeli torture is a systematic practice, but stated only that some In 18 February 1979 Johnson spoke to the Committee of Foreign Relations of the US Senate. She argued that “‘Jerusalem 3239’ sparked an internal State Department debate over the contents of the human rights report”. The conversation started in December 1978, according to Johnson, with the consul in Jerusalem, Michael H. Newlin “pressing for some reference to the idea that Israeli torture might be a systematic practice”, while the Embassy in Tel Aviv opposed that “basing their views on routine Israeli denials”.

That debate, Johnson held, was reflected also in Washington, DC when the Human Rights Bureau supported the Consulate position, while the State Department’s “Israel desk” supported the Embassy position. In the end, “the carefully worded published report could be quoted by both sides as a victory. It did allude to charges that Israeli torture is a systematic practice, but stated only that some instances of mistreatment have occurred”. Yet, Johnson argued that there was “no substantive change from last year’s human-rights report”. She argued that while the State Department “privately praised her cables”, it “virtually ignored them in the language of the public human rights report”. Johnson afterwards published a book about Israeli human rights practices.” –
“Human Rights, Imperialism, and Corruption in US Foreign Policy” by Ilia Xypolia, 2022