Minority Report

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Minority Report
Human Rights Watch fights a civil war over Israel.
Benjamin BirnbaumApril 21, 2010 | 2:10 pm

On October 19 of last year, the op-ed page of The New York Times contained a bombshell: a piece by Robert Bernstein, the founder and former chairman of Human Rights Watch (HRW), attacking his own organization. HRW, Bernstein wrote, was “helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state.” The allegation was certainly not new: HRW had been under assault for years by American Jews and other supporters of Israel, who argued that it was biased against the Jewish state. And these attacks had intensified in recent months, with a number of unflattering revelations about the organization. In July, HRW found itself under fire when a Wall Street Journal op-ed noted that the organization had solicited donations in Saudi Arabia by trumpeting the criticism it faces from “pro-Israel pressure groups.” In August, the blogosphere leapt on one of the organization’s top Middle East officials for having once been part of a team that edited a radical anti-Israel journal. And, in September, HRW suspended one of the primary contributors to its reports on the wars in Gaza and Lebanon after his private hobby—collecting Nazi memorabilia-became public.

Still, to most readers of the Times last October, even those who closely followed debates over Israel, Bernstein’s piece would have seemed odd: It isn’t every day that the founder of a group turns so publicly on his own creation. What few people outside HRW knew, however, was that Bernstein’s op-ed was the culmination of a long struggle inside the organization that had turned increasingly acrimonious over the years. The debate revolved around a single question: Was the world’s most respected human rights group being fair to Israel? Bob Bernstein wasn’t the only person at Human Rights Watch who thought the answer was no.

http://www.tnr.com/article/minority-report-2

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1. For HRW, Israel is “low-hanging fruit”: The New Republic Adds Evidence of Bias

Following the publication of “Minority Report: Human Rights Watch fights a civil war over Israel” in The New Republic (May 13, 2010), NGO Monitor repeated its call for an independent investigation into the hiring practices, research priorities, methodologies, and biases of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) division at Human Rights Watch (HRW).

“The detailed evidence in this article highlights the deeply-rooted bias among senior HRW officials – this bias is destroying the moral foundation and universality of human rights,” commented NGO Monitor President, Prof. Gerald Steinberg.

The information presented in the TNR exposé repeats and reinforces NGO Monitor’s systematic research on HRW’s disproportionate resources devoted to the Arab-Israeli conflict. (In 2009, HRW publications on Israel comprised 28 percent of its total MENA output.) The article also provides more evidence of what led founder Robert Bernstein to condemn HRW’s role in turning “Israel into a pariah state.”

Among the salient quotes and points in the TNR article:

Bias: According to a colleague, Sarah Leah Whitson (who led HRW’s fundraising trip Saudi Arabia invoking the specter of the “pro-Israel” lobby) “definitely has no sympathy for the Israeli side... And she does… have a lot of personal identification with the Palestinian cause.”

Sarah Leah Whitson’s relationship with Norman Finkelstein (“…she brought him to HRW to discuss his 2005 book...”)<1>: “…I continue to have tremendous respect and admiration for him, because …making Israeli abuses the focus of one’s life work is a thankless but courageous task that may well end up leaving all of us quite bitter.”

Former HRW board member Edith Everett: “It seemed to me that there was a commitment to a point of view—that Israel’s the bad guy here.”

“We seek the limelight—that’s part of what we do. And so, Israel’s sort of like low-hanging fruit.”

Former MENA board member Steve Apkon “sensed a palpable hostility toward Israel among the HRW brass. He also began to feel that advisory committee meetings were not taken seriously by HRW staff. They were ‘dog-and-pony shows’ with ‘no room for dialogue.’”

Culture of suppression: “I’ve had staff members come to me and tell me off the record that they’re not happy with the way this particular thing is being done, but they’re not going to say anything,” said Sid Sheinberg, vice-chairman of the HRW board.

Robert James, a member of the MENA board: “Human Rights Watch has a more basic problem. . . . They cannot take criticism.”

Steve Apkon: “An organization that was founded to protect the most basic of human rights—freedom of speech… seems to have created within its own organization a disregard and intolerance for open dialogue.”

Marc Garlasco: According to board members, Garlasco stated that “he had been pushed by HRW headquarters to focus on white phosphorous at the expense of topics he thought more deserving of attention because… it was regarded as a headline-generating story.”

Garlasco “thought that the organization had a habit of ignoring necessary context when covering war” and “that… Whitson and others at MENA had far-left political views.”

Garlasco “did not think Israel’s use of white phosphorous amounted to a war crime.” Yet HRW’s report Rain of Fire (March 25, 2009) alleged “the commission of war crimes,” and became the basis of similar claims in the UN’s Goldstone report.

Moral obfuscation: When Ken Roth was asked “about HRW’s refusal to take a position on Ahmadinejad’s threats against Israel, including his famous call for Israel to be ‘wiped off the map,’ Roth quibbled about the way the statement had been translated in the West.” TNR notes Roth’s view that “it was not HRW’s place to render judgments on such rhetoric.” And Whitson defended this, stating: “You know, that statement was also matched by Hillary Clinton saying that the Iranian regime should be destroyed or wiped off the map.”

Commenting on these revelations and admissions, NGO Monitor’s Gerald Steinberg concluded: “HRW’s bias is most pernicious in the Middle East division. Whitson and Joe Stork, who were anti-Israel campaigners prior to joining HRW, have employed a string of pro-Palestinian activists -- Lucy Mair, Darryl Li, Nadia Barhoum, Jamil Dakwar, and Arezo Yazd. HRW’s Palestinian tilt is even reflected in the office décor; and the norms of universal human rights are nowhere to be seen.”
http://www.ngo-monitor.org/article/for_hrw_israel_is_low_hanging_fruit_the_new_republic_adds_evidence_of_bias

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2. More of the original article...

In September 2000, HRW’s board of directors took a vote that still, a decade later, infuriates Sid Sheinberg, a legendary Hollywood mogul (he discovered Steven Spielberg) and current vice-chairman of the board. At the time, Bill Clinton was trying desperately to broker a peace agreement between Yasir Arafat and Ehud Barak, but one of the major sticking points was the right of return. It was an issue that even the most left-wing Israelis did not feel they could compromise on: If Palestinians were permitted to return to Israel en masse, it would imperil the country’s future as both a Jewish state and a democracy.

Sheinberg believed strongly that HRW had no business endorsing the right of return. “My view is that the most essential human right is the right to life,” he says. “And anybody who sees a deal about to be made where there’s been war for fifty or sixty years should think hard about shutting up.” The board, however, did not agree. “The vote was something like twenty-seven to one,” Sheinberg recalls. “Bob voted against me, for which he’s apologized on a number of occasions.” That December, Ken Roth, HRW’s executive director, would send letters to Clinton, Arafat, and Barak urging them to accept the organization’s position. The right of return, he wrote, “is a right that persists even when sovereignty over the territory is contested or has changed hands.”

But something telling had happened to Sheinberg immediately following the meeting in September. “I go to my apartment—I have an apartment in New York—and, when I get to my apartment, the phone starts to ring,” he recalls. “And I get a number of phone calls from a variety of board members who tell me, ‘Sid, we really agree with you ... but we didn’t want to go against management.’” Another board member, David Brown, confirms that he and others shared Sheinberg’s reservations, if quietly. “Sid is very vocal, but he wasn’t the only one,” he says. “There were a number of people upset.”

These tensions would fester within HRW in the years to come. “There are more people that have a concern about this on the board than the people who don’t have a concern about this think there are,” Sheinberg says. “I’m not the only one who’s concerned about this. And, by the way, it also includes certain staff members. I’ve had staff members come to me and tell me off the record that they’re not happy with the way this particular thing is being done, but they’re not going to say anything.”

Human Rights Watch was a product of the cold war. During the 1970s, Bernstein—who was president and chairman of Random House—had become interested in the plight of Soviet dissidents like Andrei Sakharov and Natan Sharansky. In 1978, three years after the United States and the Soviet Union signed the Helsinki Accords (which included language on human rights), Bernstein established Helsinki Watch, a group dedicated to monitoring human rights violations behind the Iron Curtain. In 1981, Helsinki Watch was joined by Americas Watch, which sought to expose the abuses of Latin American dictators, many of them quietly supported by the Reagan administration. “We were raising money from the right for Helsinki Watch and from the left for Americas Watch,” Bernstein remembers. Helsinki Watch and Americas Watch would become just two stars in a constellation of regional “watch committees,” all of which were brought under the Human Rights Watch umbrella in 1988. By the time Bernstein stepped down as chairman a decade later—he is now founding chairman emeritus—HRW had become a major force in international politics. Today, the group has a budget of $44 million, conducts research on about 90 countries, and churns out dozens of reports per year. It dispatches staffers to monitor human rights abuses around the globe, putting pressure on dictatorships like China, Sudan, and Cuba, as well as on democracies like the United States. To take just one example, it was frequently cited for its work exposing the horrors of Saddam Hussein’s regime. It is widely considered the gold standard in human rights reporting—an organization whose conclusions nobody can afford to ignore.

Bernstein—now a gregarious octogenarian—had always considered himself a friend of Israel; but, for a long time, he didn’t follow events there particularly closely. Any Zionism on his part manifested itself mostly in regular contributions to the New Israel Fund—a left-wing NGO that finances Israeli human rights groups. But, as the Second Intifada erupted, following the failure of the Oslo process, Bernstein began paying closer attention to HRW’s work on Israel. And he didn’t like what he was seeing.

With Palestinian suicide bombings reaching a crescendo in early 2002, precipitating a full-scale Israeli counterterrorist campaign across the West Bank, HRW’s Middle East and North Africa division (MENA) issued two reports (and myriad press releases) on Israeli misconduct—including one on the Israel Defense Forces’ assault on terrorist safe havens in the Jenin refugee camp. That report—which, to HRW’s credit, debunked the widespread myth that Israel had carried out a massacre—nevertheless said there was “strong prima facie evidence” that Israel had “committed grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions,” irking the country’s supporters, who argued that the IDF had in fact gone to great lengths to spare Palestinian civilians. (The decision not to launch an aerial bombardment of the densely populated area, and to dispatch ground troops into labyrinthine warrens instead, cost 23 Israeli soldiers their lives—crucial context that HRW ignored.) It would take another five months for HRW to release a report on Palestinian suicide bombings—and another five years for it to publish a report addressing the firing of rockets and mortars from Gaza, despite the fact that, by 2003, hundreds had been launched from the territory into Israel. (HRW did issue earlier press releases on both subjects.)

In the years to come, critics would accuse HRW of giving disproportionate attention to Israeli misdeeds. According to HRW’s own count, since 2000, MENA has devoted more reports to abuses by Israel than to abuses by all but two other countries, Iraq and Egypt. That’s more reports than those on Iran, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Syria, Algeria, and other regional dictatorships. (When HRW includes press releases in its count, Israel ranks fourth on the list.) And, if you count only full reports—as opposed to “briefing papers,” “backgrounders,” and other documents that tend to be shorter, less authoritative, and therefore less influential—the focus on the Jewish state only increases, with Israel either leading or close to leading the tally. There are roughly as many reports on Israel as on Iran, Syria, and Libya combined.

HRW officials acknowledge that a number of factors beyond the enormity of human rights abuses go into deciding how to divide up the organization’s attentions: access to a given country, possibility for redress, and general interest in the topic. “I think we tend to go where there’s action and where we’re going to get reaction,” rues one board member. “We seek the limelight—that’s part of what we do. And so, Israel’s sort of like low-hanging fruit.”

Bernstein, however, had started HRW primarily to reach for the high-hanging fruit—closed societies where human rights reporting was lacking. He was not opposed to HRW criticizing Israel. But, with the country already host to dozens of well-staffed human rights organizations—not to mention a vibrant free press and an activist Supreme Court that frequently restrained government and military policies—he questioned the wisdom of devoting more attention to the Jewish state than to countries with far worse human rights records and many fewer self-correcting mechanisms. And so, he reached out to someone who could help him look at HRW’s work with fresh eyes. In 2005, he introduced Roth to Steve Apkon, the founder of a nonprofit film center that had hosted the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in recent years. Apkon—a mild-mannered 48-year-old who formerly worked on Wall Street and was an active supporter of Seeds of Peace, a program that seeks to foster friendships between Israeli and Palestinian youth—was invited to serve on MENA’s advisory committee, which met every few months. As Apkon understood it, the committee had a variety of functions, one of which was to provide input on MENA’s work. While Apkon had no problem with—indeed, supported—the idea of ferreting out Israeli human rights abuses, he quickly sensed a palpable hostility toward Israel among the HRW brass. He also began to feel that advisory committee meetings were not taken seriously by HRW staff. They were “dog-and-pony shows” with “no room for dialogue,” he recalls. “It was quite exasperating to a number of people there.”

MUCH MORE....
http://www.tnr.com/article/minority-report-2

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3. ‘Badly distorting the issues’ (from Robert Bernstein, founder of HRW)

The founder of Human Rights Watch delivered a lecture lacerating the organization he had established for moral failures in its treatment of Israel.

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During my 20 years at Human Rights Watch, I had spent little time on Israel.

It was an open society. It had 80 human rights organizations like B’Tselem, ACRI, Adalah, and Sikkuy. It had more newspaper reporters in Jerusalem than any city in the world except New York and London. Hence, I tried to get the organization to work on getting some of the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, particularly free speech, into closed societies – among them, the 22 Arab states surrounding Israel. The faults of democratic countries were much less of a priority not because there were no faults, obviously, but because they had so many indigenous human rights groups and other organizations openly criticizing them.

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I also met with NGOs including Jessica Montell of B’Tselem, passed an evening with my dear friends Natan and Avital Sharansky, and spoke with many journalists and government officials. I visited Sderot, the town most shelled by Hamas and other terrorist groups in Gaza. I came back convinced more than ever that Human Rights Watch’s attacks on Israel as the country tried to defend itself were badly distorting the issues – because Human Rights Watch had little expertise about modern asymmetrical war. I was particularly concerned that the wars were stopped but not ended – so they became wars of attrition.

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In talking about Arabs, I want to be clear. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in 40 years of human rights work, it’s that you must separate the people that you’re talking about from their government. When a totalitarian or authoritarian government are the rulers, the people, whatever they believe, are shut down – shut down hard – and only the views of the government rule, while those with other views are imprisoned, tortured, exiled – anything to silence them.

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The fact that the UN has been unable to stop this build-up of arms, in the two places that Israel has voluntarily left, is a huge international failure. It is difficult to see how anyone can promise Israel security without addressing the situation.

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Let me make perfectly clear that nobody, certainly those who have spent our lives in human rights, want any civilian death (or for that matter, soldier’s death) to occur. Certainly not avoidable ones. However, if by chance, Human Rights Watch is wrong in their analyses of the deaths in the Gaza war and blaming Israel for deaths that are really the collateral damage of war, think of the damage that’s been done to Israel. On Thursday, November 4, a report came out that Fathi Hamad, the Hamas administration’s Interior Minister, revealed that as many as 700 Hamas military- security operatives were killed during Operation Cast Lead. The number, consistent with Israel’s examination, is significantly higher than the numbers given by Hamas and used by the Goldstone Report. It would indicate that about 60 percent of those killed in the war were actively engaged and not civilians – despite Hamas’s tactic of embedding itself in the civilian population of Gaza. If this report holds up, it will be interesting to see if the Goldstone Report and Human Rights Watch reports are reevaluated by them – all of which took the Palestinians’ figures as fact.

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I am going to bring up the right of return only briefly because it is so complicated. The right of return is endorsed by Human Rights Watch and other human rights organizations – unless I have missed something.

They realize that there is not going to be a return of people, but that there will be compensation and that the right must be recognized. To me, it is the same philosophy that leads them to not taking sides in a war – the theory that one mandate decision is suitable for all occasions. I believe that the Arab decision to keep refugees in labor camps for 60 years along with the UN decision to have a different definition of refugee of Palestinians has made a mockery of what was intended.

The right of return for all refugees is defined as being only for the people who actually left their country. However, the definition of a Palestinian refugee is different. It is for those who left Israel, their children born in exile, and for all of their heirs.

Thus, while in every other case in the world, the refugee numbers go down over time, the number of Palestinian refugees has gone up. The original 600,000 is now up to 4 million worldwide, all claiming the right of return. While human rights organizations feel that the principle should be recognized, why do they not question the special status recognized for Palestinian descendants which makes solving the problem difficult, if not impossible? In the last few weeks, Jordan, with more Palestinians than the West Bank, withdrew rights they had previously given Palestinians which would have allowed them to remain in Jordan. If there is a Palestinian state, there will be 4 million – most in refugee camps in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, many of whom have not been given any citizenship.

Since it is clear that they will not return to Israel but may receive compensation, will the Arabs be asking that 4 million people be returned to the West Bank and Gaza? Might human rights organizations be looking into this now? Another factor that has not been dealt with is that the 800,000 Jews who left Arab countries and went to Israel immediately received citizenship and while they do not want a right of return, it is reported that they left over twice the amount of worldly goods in the Arab countries than the Arabs leaving Israel. What, if any, adjustments should be made to recognize this? All such movements of population are both sad and difficult when they are made necessary by intolerance and hate. But, actually, the world has tried desperately to do its part by paying the substantial costs of the refugee camps for over 60 years – reportedly over $13 billion with perhaps a quarter of it paid by the U.S. and little paid by the Arab countries.

If human rights organizations wish to be involved in this issue, it should not merely simplify it by saying that they accept the right of return – including the special refugee designation – of Palestinians as a principle.

The last point that human rights organizations, it seems to me, have avoided, and where they could be very helpful, whether it is in their mandate or not, is to start talking about what kind of second state is going to be next to Israel. And do the Palestinians have any responsibilities in talking about that? When Yelena Bonner Sakharov went to Oslo two years ago to represent her deceased husband at what was to be a celebration of Nobel Peace Prize winners, she asked, “What kind of a state is going to be next to Israel? Judenfrei, free of Jews, just as Hitler would have wished?” No Jews, of course, is only one of the human rights abuses that would exist in the state next to Israel, where open borders should be a desirable outcome.

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Certainly those who disagree with me may think I am too harsh on Human Rights Watch’s Middle East policies and point out that they are doing good work elsewhere. They are! But the Israeli-Palestinian peace process has become such a crucial issue. I believe that unless human rights organizations correct some of the things discussed tonight, their authority in the rest of the world will be questioned.

The polarization takes place when one party dismisses another by simply saying that a view is “pro-Palestinian” or “pro-Israel.”

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“The hypocrisy and double standards of the international human rights organizations reflect the disappearance of clear moral criteria that alone can guard human rights. A refusal to see the difference between free and totalitarian societies, between a state at peace and a state at war against terrorist regimes, undermines the universal values on which a claim to human rights is based.”

He adds: “A commitment to human rights is above all a commitment to democracy and freedom and to the right to defend them. To equate all cultures, to refuse to distinguish between those that are democratic and those that are not, is the profoundest betrayal of human rights. . . It is acceptable to hold democracies up to a higher standard as long as you recognize that democracies, by definition, are already maintaining higher standards.”

And he also says: “In its refusal to distinguish democratic from nondemocratic regimes, the human rights movement undercuts its own commitment to democratic freedoms and itself becomes a tool of undemocratic powers.”

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However, if the West Bank starts to compete with Israel in building rather than destroying, they will have better lives for themselves, and to their surprise, they will have the free world, including Israel, helping them. The campuses of America should be thinking harder about what human rights organizations are doing. Are they helping the peace process? In closing, let me make a statement to whichever students choose to listen: When I was in Israel, I talked to 18 year-olds, both boys and girls, who were not going to college but instead were going into the army for three years and then for one month a year until 45 or 50 years old. They’ve been doing this for 60 years. And most of them have faced some kind of danger during that period. They are not involved in the peace process. They are involved in the defense of their country and have to hope that their government will avoid war.

I also think of the Palestinian 18 year-olds – particularly those in Gaza who can’t get jobs because their economy is not thriving. I believe it is not thriving specifically because their government is bringing in arms and Israel is trying to stop them. And their government is preaching genocide. Many of these students can’t afford college and that leaves jihad as their only opportunity. If college students can help bring the human rights movement back to trying to make the Universal Declaration of Human Rights truly universal in the Middle East, they will be making a valuable contribution.

http://www.jpost.com/Features/InThespotlight/Article.aspx?id=196646