[R-G] Human Rights Watch Goes to War

[Anthony Fenton]

Mouin Rabbani on Human Rights Watch and the Gaza Massacre

Human Rights Watch Goes to War
http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=11&ar=2667
02.01.2009 | Original (.doc)
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 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 honour --  
exercised significant pressure on human rights organizations to step  
up to the plate. At the same time, particularly after 11 September  
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 national leader must,  
despite HRW'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 delve 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" (28 June 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 organisation'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 25 January 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 30  
December 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  
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".

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. Too clever by half, 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 30 December 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 12 January, "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 16  
January, "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 21 January, 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 16 January, 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 other 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 is 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