Human Rights Watch Goes to War

[bemildred]

Longish, for all the lovers and haters of HRW.

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.

http://rinf.com/alt-news/contributions/human-rights-watch-goes-to-war/5201/