The Human Rights Blog

Human Rights Watch's Double Standard on Israel and Palestine: A New Low on Gaza?

I thought this article was interesting, in part because Human Rights Watch is often accused by NGO Monitor, an organization whose sole function seems to be to attack any group that reports on human rights violations by Israel, is often complaining that HRW has a pro-Palestinian bias.

I'd be interesting in hearing opinions from visitors and subscribers, not just on any perceived bias one way or the other by HRW, but also on the greater issue of bias and perceived biases by all human rights & humanitarian groups. You can comment here or e-mail me.

One thing I will note is that every time I have commented on human rights violations by Israel, someone has accused me of being an anti-semite, not a pleasant thing at all.

Marga Lacabe
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By MOUIN RABBANI

The Middle East has always been a difficult challenge for Western human
rights organizations, particularly those seeking influence or funding in
the United States. The pressure to go soft on US allies is in some
respects reminiscent of Washington's special pleading for Latin American
terror regimes in the 1970s and 1980s. In the case of Israel such
organizations also face a powerful and influential domestic
constituency, which often extends to senior echelons of such
organizations, for whom forthright condemnation of Israel is anathema.

Given that Israel is reliant on US subventions and public goodwill to a
degree without precedent in the history of American foreign policy,
there is considerably more than vanity at stake. If Israel's stature in
the United States were to be reduced to that of South Africa during the
apartheid era, or Serbia during the Balkan wars, this would almost
certainly have material consequences for the "special relationship". It
is a reality very unlike that between the US and Saudi Arabia, for
example, in which the American public's longstanding contempt for the
House of Saud has proven basically inconsequential. In Israel's case,
image is a political resource of the first order, and its preservation a
matter of national security.

Until the mid-1980s, before which Israel's human rights violations ­
from deportation to area bombing and all in-between ­ were generally
several orders of magnitude worse than during the subsequent quarter
century, the human rights community simply ignored the question of
Israel. If challenged, organizations would respond that in view of
limited resources they had to go after serious violators, like Ba'thist
Iraq and Iran under the Shah, or hide behind an Israeli judiciary that
although essential to the machinery of occupation at least went through
the motions of oversight, or express fears of being tarred with the
brush of anti-Semitism (or all of the above). In private, such
justifications would be augmented by references to political pressures
and funding issues, often with a barb at one or more director or board
members' Zionist sympathies thrown in. That the first widespread
exposure of the systematic application of torture in Israel's prison
system was reported by the London Sunday Times rather than Amnesty
International was no mere coincidence.

The eruption of the Palestinian uprising in December 1987 made it
impossible for human rights organizations to continue relegating the
question of Israel to the backburner. With Israeli leaders like Yitzhak
Rabin publicly exhorting Israel's soldiers to "break the bones" of
unarmed Palestinian protestors, and television images that made it
impossible to explain away such barbarism as a mistranslated rhetorical
flourish, human rights organizations faced a real quandary: ignore the
question of Israel and lose credibility, or confront it and lose
support.

By and large they chose a third way, producing reports that were often
strong on documentation but exceptionally weak when it came to
conclusions and consequences. No less importantly, they adopted the
criteria of 'balance'. In effect, a Hubble telescope was deployed to
discover Palestinian actions that could in any way be considered
violations of International Humanitarian Law, with these subsequently
placed under an industrial-strength microscope. Treatment of Israeli
actions was rather more selective and careful. Primary issues such as
the legality of Israel's presence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, or
its settlement enterprise in the occupied territories were avoided;
detailed analysis of Israeli abuses, like deportation and summary
executions, that indisputably constituted "grave breaches" of the Fourth
Geneva Convention (the latter's equivalent of war crimes) steered clear
of unambiguous conclusions; and on the key issue of how to resolve the
human rights emergency, such reports typically ended with exhortations
to the Israeli government and military to show greater concern for
Palestinian rights ­ as opposed to demands that Western governments use
their various forms of aid to Israel as leverage to halt abuses.

In the process any sense of context, of this being a struggle for
freedom by a dispossessed and occupied people against a colonial army ­
a context that in other cases the human rights community communicated so
well ­ was entirely lost. All the more so because Israel was
systematically spared the type of rhetoric and denunciations typically
deployed with respect to similar situations in other continents and
domestic repression in Arab states. If it was an approach that left
neither the victims nor apologists of Israeli human rights violations
satisfied, it at least met their minimal requirements ­ unprecedented
exposure for the Palestinians, continued impunity for Israel. More
importantly, it enabled the human rights organizations in question to
navigate the storm and emerge relatively unscathed.

The Oslo agreements of 1993 provided a welcome development in this
respect. Henceforth, 'balance' could be maintained by releasing reports
on both the Israeli and Palestinian Authority judiciary, discrimination
against Arabs in Israel and of violence against women in the occupied
territories, torture in Israeli as well as Palestinian prisons. The idea
of an overarching regime of occupation primarily responsible for both
sets of violations ­ a concept that came so naturally when discussing
the brutalities inflicted on the residents of South Africa's ethnic
homelands ­ rarely entered into the fray.

The onset of the Al-Aqsa Uprising in September 2000 posed a new set of
challenges. Israel's image was once again under unprecedented pressure
on account of its savage attacks on Palestinians throughout the occupied
territories, while committed staff on the ground ­ motivated by a
combination of genuine concern and professional honor ­ exercised
significant pressure on human rights organizations to step up to the
plate. At the same time, particularly after September 11, 2001, such
organizations were under massive pressure by right-wing and pro-Israeli
forces ­ the latter of whom often tended towards the liberal end of the
spectrum ­ to toe the line. Nowhere was this more true than at Human
Rights Watch, an American organization that by the late 1990s had
emerged as the industry leader.

In the years since 2000, HRW pursued a consistent ­ and consistently
effective ­ formula: criticize Israel, but condemn the Palestinians.
Challenge the legality of an Israeli aerial bombardment, preferably in
polite, technical terms, and vociferously denounce the Palestinian
suicide bomber in unambiguous language ­ especially when raising
questions about the latest Israeli atrocity. In HRW publications,
explicit condemnations and accusations of war crimes were almost wholly
monopolized by Palestinians. With Israeli citizenship a seeming
precondition for the right to self-defense, the right to resist was for
all intents and purposes non-existent.

Where ­ as with the obliteration of a good portion of the Jenin Refugee
Camp in 2002 ­ accusations of Israeli war crimes could not be avoided,
HRW diluted these by just as prominently reporting that it did not find
evidence of much worse atrocities. Its major report on the issue, Jenin:
IDF Military Operations, was several months later 'balanced' by Erased
in a Moment: Suicide Bombing Attacks Against Israeli Civilians.

One need only compare the titles of these two reports to surmise which
party to the conflict stands accused of perpetrating "atrocities" that
HRW "unreservedly condemns", "war crimes", and indeed "crimes against
humanity"; in which of the two cases HRW repeatedly demands that all
those with command or operational responsibility ­ and they are many
indeed ­ face "criminal liability"; whose nationHRW's finding no
evidence of command responsibility, face
"accountability" for not preventing the acts of others, as well as
for "significant political responsibility for the deliberate killing of
civilians"; and whose actions HRW concludes "are among the worst crimes
that can be committed, crimes of universal jurisdiction that the
international community as a whole has an obligation to punish and
prevent".

A comparison of the two reports' covers might also help readers judge
whether it was Israel or the Palestinians who are merely referred for
further examination: "Every case in the report listed below warrants
additional thorough, transparent, and impartial investigation, with the
results of such an investigation made public. Where wrongdoing is found,
those responsible should be held accountable".

Needless to say the press release accompanying Erased in a Moment did
not, as in the case of the Jenin report, use the opening paragraph to
shift discussion to more sensational allegations for which no evidence
could be found ­ such as "HRW researchers were unable to substantiate
published claims by prominent advocates of Israel that Palestinian
suicide bombers have been lacing their explosives with AIDS, hepatitis
and rat poison". Its summary did however focus extensively ­ in fact
primarily ­ on the person of Yasir Arafat, even though most suicide
bombings were carried out by rival organizations and HRW concluded he
was not involved in attacks carried out by his Fatah organization. It
was presumably a simple coincidence that HRW's highly critical account
of the late Palestinian leader ­ occupying significantly more space in
the report summary than Hamas and Islamic Jihad combined ­ was published
at the height of the Bush administration's campaign for Palestinian
regime change.

Moving forward, and in an incident that might otherwise be considered
comic, HRW in November 2006 went so far as to denounce Palestinians who
refused to vacate homes threatened with imminent aerial bombardment,
rather than the state bent on obliterating their houses, as war
criminals. By the time it retracted its claims in a rare recantation ­
the howls of outrage from less partisan lawyers and human rights
professionals were simply too loud to be ignored ­ the damage had
already been done.

Interestingly, Palestinians were denounced by HRW on the legally correct
(but in this case factually inaccurate) assumption that "It is a war
crime to seek to use the presence of civilians to render certain points
or areas immune from military operations or to direct the movement of
the civilian population or individual civilians in order to attempt to
shield military objectives from attack". Yet HRW's 2002 report, In a
Dark Hour: The Use of Civilians During IDF Arrest Operations which,
according to the accompanying press release, "documents how the IDF
routinely has taken civilians at gunpoint to open suspicious packages,
knock on doors of suspects, and search the houses of 'wanted'
Palestinians during its military operations", pointedly declines to
define human shielding as a war crime. Indeed, the only differences
between the documented 2002 cases and falsely alleged 2006 incidents are
that the former were conducted by Israel and reached the level of
systematic practice.

In 2006 HRW additionally leveled war crimes charges against Palestinian
militants who captured Gilad Shalit ­ a uniformed soldier on active duty
­ on the grounds that they intended to exchange him for Palestinians
imprisoned by Israel. Consequently, the main and clearest finding of
"Israel: Gaza Offensive Must Limit Harm to Civilians" (June 28,
2006), is that "A hostage is a person held in the power of an adversary
in order to obtain specific actions, such as the release of prisoners,
from the other party to the conflict … which is a war crime under the
laws of war". Against this apparently unprecedented act in the annals of
military history, Israel's own actions, which included the mass arrest
of Palestinian parliamentarians and in some respects resembled a test
run for Israel's latest onslaught on the Gaza Strip (and which were the
alleged subject of the press release), elicited only legal exegesis,
shorn of meaningful conclusions.

More recently, the organization has issued a fatwa that any Arab
launching a projectile at an Israeli target is by definition a war
criminal, because such rockets and mortars are ­ unlike the
state-of-the-art shells and missiles fired by Israel at apartment
blocks, schools, hospitals, and UN facilities ­ not precision-guided and
therefore according to HRW incapable of distinguishing between a
military and civilian target. Such gunners can also not hide behind the
excuse that they hit an empty field or even that they successfully aimed
at and struck a legitimate military target; for HRW it is the act of
using yesterday's weapon rather than its impact that defines the crime.
(There is, parenthetically, no record of HRW condemning Israel or the US
of committing war crimes by virtue of using unguided projectiles).

Asked about this rather bizarre state of affairs, every current and
former HRW staff member spoken to over many years ­ most of them in
rather senior positions - point at least two fingers at HRW director
Kenneth Roth's affinity for Israel. At least as important, apparently,
is Roth's exceptional ability to divine the political wind, and do
whatever is necessary to ensure that HRW retains the resources and
credentials to remain the industry leader. It is that rare case where
principle and opportunism merge rather than collide. (While Roth
undoubtedly has allies on the organization's board and among its staff
for his approach to the question of Israel, these are easily outnumbered
by critics who would like to see a more uniform standard applied by
their organisation).

Thus, in a 2006 missive to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on
the eve of her Mideast sojourn at the height of Israel's US-sponsored
onslaught on Lebanon, Roth, in perhaps the outstanding act of political
courage during the Bush years, insisted on drawing her attention to the
war crimes being perpetrated in the conflict ­ by Hizballah. According
to several senior HRW employees, Roth subsequently tried to arrange for
a critic who questioned HRW's partisanship to be fired by filing a
written complaint to the critic's director.

As a case study of HRW's response to the question of Israel, its
publications during the recent Israeli onslaught on the Gaza Strip - all
of which were consulted on www.hrw.org on January 25, 2009 ­ only
confirm the pattern discussed above, and in some respects go beyond it
as well.

True to form, HRW's first pronouncement on the conflict, issued on
December 30, 2008 and entitled "Israel: Artillery Poses Risk to Gaza
Civilians", despite its brevity meticulously documents relevant Israeli
practice and the cost it has exacted in Palestininian life and limb.
That said, there is no condemnation to be found. "In assessing the
legality of the IDF's artillery fire under international humanitarian
law, or the laws of war", it politely concludes, "it is necessary to
determine for each attack whether it was targeted at a specific military
objective; whether the weapon used could be aimed with sufficient
accuracy to differentiate between the military objective and civilians;
and whether the anticipated civilian casualties were not
disproportionate to the expected military gain from the attack".

Turning next to a subject entirely unrelated to the publication's
title ­
namely Palestinian rocket attacks ­ the arcane technical analysis
suddenly comes to a screeching halt. Rather than 'if on the one hand,
but then on the other', we read the following: "Human Rights Watch has
repeatedly condemned the launching of rockets at population centers in
Israel by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups. The rockhighly
inaccurate, and those launching them cannot accurately target
military objects. Deliberately firing indiscriminate weapons into
civilian-populated areas, as a matter of policy, constitutes a war
crime".

For good measure HRW that same day released "Israel/Hamas: Civilians
Must Not be Targets". On the one hand, "Human Rights Watch investigated
three Israeli attacks that raise particular concern about Israel's
targeting decisions and require independent and impartial inquiries to
determine whether the attacks violated the laws of war. In three
incidents detailed below, 18 civilians died, among them at least seven
children". Indeed, "Some other Israeli targets may have also been
unlawful under the laws of war".

Yet, on the other hand, "Human Rights Watch has long criticized
Palestinian rocket attacks against Israeli civilians - most recently, in
a public letter to Hamas on November 20
(http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2008/11/20/letter-hamas-stop-rocket- attacks).
The rockets are highly inaccurate, and those launching them cannot
accurately target military objects. Deliberately firing indiscriminate
weapons into civilian populated areas, as a matter of policy,
constitutes a war crime".

Nevertheless by the following day, in the lengthy "Q&A: Hostilities
between Israel and Hamas" Hamas leaders were no longer being led to a
war crimes tribunal in HRW chains. Confronted with evidence too
overwhelming to ignore that Israel was deliberately firing much greater
quantities of precision-guided weapons not only into civilian-populated
areas, but directly at the civilian population and to much greater
effect, HRW was confronted with a stark choice: accuse Israel of war
crimes, or change Hamas's rap sheet. It prudently opted for the latter,
accusing Israel only of "indiscriminate attacks in violation of the laws
of war".

For the rest of the conflict, Hamas was able to "deliberately fire
indiscriminate weapons into civilian populated areas, as a matter of
policy", with total impunity, not once being denounced by HRW for
committing war crimes. Roth apparently believed no one would notice this
sudden about-face.

As the devastation of the Gaza Strip continued apace, and the death toll
reached horrific levels, it was becoming increasingly clear that
civilians were very much in Israel's crosshairs. In an orgy of organized
savagery entire families were obliterated with the press of a button;
refugees were herded into buildings, the premises shelled, and survivors
denied medical care and essential supplies for days afterward; UN
facilities, including the UNRWA headquarters and schools transformed
into safe havens (whose precise coordinates and functions were
communicated to the Israeli military) were repeatedly bombed; women and
children seeking refuge with white flags raised were summarily gunned
down; and entire neighborhoods were systematically razed to the ground.
Yet, from HRW's perspective, none of these acts ­ whether individually
or collectively ­ merited the same characterization that had until
December 30, 2008 been routinely meted out to their Palestinian
adversaries.

As part of its response, the organization simply feigned ignorance.
"Israel's refusal to grant access to Gaza for all international media
and human rights monitors since the fighting began on December 27", it
complained on January 12, "has limited severely the flow of information
and investigation from impartial observers into events on the ground".
"Human Rights Watch," it had the cheek to report on January 16, "is
unable to conduct full investigations into alleged laws of war
violations by either side because of Israel's continuing denial of
access to Gaza". This despite the fact that the Gaza Strip was saturated
with Arab journalists, local and international humanitarian staff,
medical personnel including several Europeans, and approximately 1.5
million residents most of whom had at least intermittent access to
telecommunications. Yet none of these, apparently, met the criteria of
credible witness. Indeed, HRW's main and almost exclusive source of
reliable information consisted of staff located on the Israeli side of
the boundary on account of Israel and Egypt's ban on entry to the Gaza
Strip.

HRW's insistence on the most scrupulous standards of quality control for
information emanating from the Gaza Strip, while in principle laudable,
stands in rather sharp contrast to its operations in Ba'thist Iraq,
where much more severe restrictions didn't preclude the organization
from concocting stories about babies thrown out of incubators and
issuing detailed accounts of genocide. Similarly, even during the Gaza
conflict HRW had no problem lending its imprimatur to reports of state
repression of pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and
Tunisia ­ countries in which it was also denied access. "Gaza Crisis:
Regimes React with Routine Repression", issued on January 21, didn't
hesitate to assert as fact various beatings and arrests in the darker
parts of the Middle East, using precisely those forensic methods deemed
insufficiently impartial in the Gaza Strip. Nor did denial of access
prevent HRW from denouncing such regimes for throwing not one but two
shoes at their people ­ a wholly appropriate turn of phrase but also the
type of rhetoric one never sees deployed when addressing the question of
Israel.

At several points HRW's coverage of the conflict descended to the level
of obscenity. On January 16, in a press release entitled "Israel: Stop
Shelling Crowded Gaza City", the organization once again provides an
accurate account, based primarily on the testimony of HRW senior
military analyst Marc Garlasco, of the facts ­ in this case Israel's use
of heavy artillery against the centre of Gaza City, including the
shelling of UNRWA headquarters with white phosphorous. Yet rather than
conclude that a war crime had been perpetrated, or even suggest that the
time may be ripe for investigation and accountability, the microphone is
handed to Israel's Prime Minister: "Ehud Olmert apologized for the
attack, but said Israeli forces had come under fire from the UN
compound. 'It is absolutely true that we were attacked from that place,
but the consequences are very sad and we apologize for it', he said".

Curiously, UNRWA officials, who are quoted elsewhere in the press
release describing the attack, are not cited as "categorically rul[ing]
out any possibility that militants had been firing from the compound,"
as they had to the Associated Press and other media. Nor is the lay
reader informed about the legality of the attack even if Olmert's
version of events was substantiated, or of the consequences in terms of
accountability even if he was genuinely saddened and apologetic. Indeed,
the only reference to an investigation is to the one HRW was purportedly
unable to conduct.

Further down the same press release reports: "Israeli fire also hit the
al-Shurouq tower, which houses media outlets such as Reuters,
al-Arabiyya Television, and al-Hayat newspaper, causing substantial
damage and wounding at least two journalists … Media organizations had
provided the Israeli military with the GPS locations of all their
offices. Israeli forces told the media that they had come under fire
from the building". Seemingly, the recently pardoned war criminals of
Hamas successfully transformed the building into the headquarters of
their rocket battalion without even being noticed by the dozens of
journalists and their dozens of cameras in, on and around the building -
though a more likely explanation is that the journalists, all of them
Arab, fail to meet Roth's standards for "impartial observers into events
on the ground".

The press release then states, ""Human Rights Watch is unable to conduct
full investigations into alleged laws of war violations by either side
because of Israel's continuing denial of access to Gaza. Hamas and
Palestinian armed groups have also violated the laws of war by
continuing to fire unguided Qassam and Grad rockets at population
centers in Israel." Once again, HRW insists on having it both ways: If
violations can only be alleged pending confirmation by exhaustive
investigations in situ, how can a mere reference to the type of weapon
used by one party prove sufficient for finding that it has in fact
committed such violations? By the time the reader gets to the final
paragraph of the press release, a recommendation to Israel to "Collect
and analyze data regarding Palestinian civilian casualties from
artillery shelling in order to assess the harm to civilians caused by
the use of artillery in particular locales and situations, and thus to
base targeting decisions on a proper weighing of foreseeable civilian
harm", the reader could be forgiven for reading this as an exhortation
for further Israeli shelling to ensure sufficient data are collected.

The low point of HRW's coverage of Israel's onslaught on the Gaza Strip
was not its consistent refusal to apply a single standard ­ whether
legal or rhetorical ­ to Israel and the Palestinians, nor its effective
contribution to Israeli impunity, but rather a personal betrayal of an
HRW colleague in his hour of greatest need.

"On the afternoon of January 3, 2009", according to HRW's "Israel:
Investigate Former Judge's Killing in Gaza" (issued on 9 January), "an
Israeli bomb or missile from an F-16 jet fighter killed the two Gazans
at the al-Ghoul farm, northwest of Beit Lahiya and close to Gaza's
border with Israel. Akram al-Ghoul was a judge who worked in the
Palestinian Authority courts and resigned after Hamas took over the Gaza
Strip in June 2007. He is the father of Fares Akram, Human Rights
Watch's research consultant in Gaza. Mahmoud al-Ghoul, 17, was a
student".

One aspect of the question of Israel on which HRW has pulled
considerably fewer punches than others concerns internal investigations
conducted by the Israeli military. Only two days before it issued the
above press release, in fact, in a separate press release entitled
"Gaza: Israeli Attack on School Needs Full Investigation", the
organization noted that according to its previous studies of the matter,
"IDF investigations into alleged laws-of-war violations, when they have
occurred, have been deeply flawed … To Human Rights Watch's knowledge,
Israel never conducted impartial and thorough investigations of those
[previously recounted] incidents or held any of its military personnel
accountable. During Israel's last major ground offensive in Gaza in
March 2008, Human Rights Watch found that Israeli forces committed
several targeted killings and other serious violations of the laws of
war. To date, no IDF investigation has taken place in these cases".

Yet how did Kenneth Roth and the world's leading human rights
organization respond to the killing of their colleague's father and
relative? "Human Rights Watch today called on the Israel Defense Forces
(IDF) to conduct a thorough and impartial investigation into the deaths
by an Israeli airstrike of Akram al-Ghoul, 48, and Mahmoud Salah Ahman
al-Ghoul, 17, the father and cousin of Human Rights Watch's research
consultant in Gaza. In a letter to Brig.-Gen. Avichai Mandelblit, IDF
Military Advocate General, Human Rights Watch urged the military to
investigate the attack, make the results of the investigation public,
and prosecute any persons it finds to have acted in serious violation of
international humanitarian law". HRW didn't even bother to go through
the motions of calling for an "independent" investigation of the killing
of their Arab informant's father.

In doing so, HRW chose to pursue justice for a colleague by steering his
case into what they better than perhaps any others know to be
meaningless dead end. The impression that the murder of Fares Akram's
father was instrumentalised by HRW to lend a much-needed veneer of
respectability to the Israeli military's investigations of itself is
particularly reprehensible.

(Mouin Rabbani is a Contributing Editor to Middle East Report.)

Posted by marga at February 12, 2009 8:42 AM | TrackBack