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Short answer
“Breaking the Silence” presents itself as a human rights organization, but operates more like a foreign-funded PR machine targeting Israel. Their claims often rely on anonymous, unverifiable testimonies with no names, no dates, and no evidence.
Serious accusations are made without accountability, while they refuse to cooperate with the IDF or independent bodies for follow-up investigations. If truth were the goal, secrecy wouldn’t be the strategy. This isn’t activism — it’s calculated dubious defamation.
Long answer
“Breaking the Silence” presents itself as a human rights watchdog, but its methods are anything but credible. It relies almost entirely on anonymous testimonies, with no names, dates, units, or locations — making verification impossible. Even by their own admissions, many testimonies are collected years after the events, often based on hazy recollections. That’s not documentation; that’s narrative construction.
When asked for details to allow investigations, the organization refuses, claiming to “protect” its sources. This refusal has blocked IDF investigations into serious allegations. In one case, the watchdog group Ad Kan uncovered that Breaking the Silence was collecting sensitive security intel unrelated to human rights and sharing it abroad.
This raised red flags in the Israeli State Comptroller’s office.
This isn’t just misconduct — it poses a direct risk to national security.They claim to spark internal debate, but most of their efforts target foreign audiences from Europe to the U.S. In 2015 alone, over 60% of their funding came from foreign governments, not local donors. Their roadshows in Berlin and London often paint the IDF in the worst possible light — stripped of context, and with no chance for rebuttal.
Even some left-leaning Israeli journalists have exposed major flaws in their claims. In multiple cases, soldiers named in the anonymous accounts denied the events ever happened. Others said testimonies were heavily distorted or taken out of context.For a group preaching moral responsibility, they reject even the most basic standards of transparency.
Serious accusations demand serious scrutiny — not vague, unverifiable stories told in the shadows. If truth mattered, they wouldn’t hide behind secrecy and refuse to cooperate. “Breaking the Silence” has traded integrity for agenda.
