HRW ignores widespread slavery in Mauritania

Italy's La Repubblica has a report on the phenomenon of widespread slavery in Mauritania.

Members of an anti-slavery NGO group were jailed for protesting the enslavement of two girls, aged 9 and 13.

"White Moors," who are ethnic Arabs, are enslaving nearly 600,000 "Black Moors" in Mauritania. Last month a UN special envoy noted that slavery is still a major problem in the Islamic country. Blacks who are former slaves and others  are living in real apartheid conditions, forced to live in black-only camps with poor services and suffering continued abuse from the Arab-Berber minority rulers.

Don't bother to try to find a single report on this phenomenon at the Human Rights Watch website. They don't even have a country listing for Mauritania, and their last full report on abuses in the country was written in 1994. The UN and the BBC can somehow find out about these practices, but Human Rights Watch is far more preoccupied with a certain country with a Jewish majority. (Amnesty, on the other hand, does a nice job on covering these crimes.)

UPDATE: NGO Monitor wrote about this issue a year ago.

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IHH and HRW: Two sides of the same coin

Israel's Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center has an important report showing that Turkey's IHH is not a "humanitarian organization" but is pushing a political, anti-Israel agenda.

Some of the aid IHH gave the Palestinians was humanitarian, intended to ease the physical distress of the Palestinian population and improve its economic standing. However, some aspects of the aid, as described in the booklet, also clearly have political implications, such as the large amounts of money and equipment given to the Hamas administration in the Gaza Strip, donations of money to the families of shaheeds in the Gaza Strip and the construction of houses (possibly of terrorist operatives) to replace those destroyed by Israel in Judea and Samaria. The donations help Hamas' civilian network, which supports terrorism, and its educational system in the Gaza Strip, which indoctrinates the younger generation with radical Islam and sets them on the path of terrorism ("resistance"). In addition, IHH waged a propaganda campaign in Turkey during the years before Operation Cast Lead, contributing to Turkish hatred of Israel and sympathy for Hamas.

This is not terribly surprising, but it is important for those who still consider IHH a "humanitarian aid" organization.

HRW just issued its umpteenth report criticizing Israel, a 171 page report called "Separate and Unequal" that relies on already biased NGOs to piece together a picture of Israel's discrimination against non-Israeli citizens in Judea and Samaria.

This report shows that HRW has essentially the same anti-Israel agenda that IHH does.

The agenda is clear from the photo on the cover of the report:

The Palestinian Arabs are living in poor, decrepit shacks while under the thumb of the evil settlers!

I just went through my photos to see if I could find any pictures of Israeli and Palestinian Arab communities in the same shot. Here's one from Efrat:

This is a lot more typical, but that wouldn't fit in with HRW's anti-Israel agenda. And, of course, there are plenty of Palestinian Arab mansions that dwarf every single Jewish-owned house in the area (click to enlarge):

There is plenty more to criticize in HRW's report, but the clear proof of its bias comes from its recommendations. HRW tells Western governments and businesses to essentially join the BDS movement and to ensure that products that are created in Judea and Samaria - only by Jewish-owned businesses - to be boycotted and labeled.

Going through every other report that HRW created in the past month, not once do they make recommendations to the world business community to punish a specific state nor do they make specific recommendations for any government to boycott real abusers of human rights.  In fact, their recommendations almost always call for the UN and interested governments to "insist" on human rights in the target country, or to "investigate" abuses, or to "press" government officials to act in certain ways, or to "monitor" allegations. I cannot find in any other HRW report any specific recommendations to target businesses and governments that way that HRW demands Israel be targeted, no matter how egregious or obvious the human rights abuses are. 

Human Rights Watch, when dealing with Israel, is not following a human-rights agenda, but rather a political agenda to delegitimize and punish Israel for often-imaginary abuses, while allowing governments that have real human rights abuses to pass without any specific recommendations to punish them. Which means that HRW does not treat Israel as a violator of human rights but as a political target.

Just like IHH.

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HRW, UN actually chide Hamas

Hamas has closed a lot of NGOs and charities over the past couple of years. But one organization they closed on November 30th has some powerful friends.

From Palestine Monitor, December 2:

The Sharek Youth Forum in Gaza City was forcibly closed by police on Tuesday. The forum’s liberal agenda had resulted in frequent clashes with the Hamas government prior to its closure. Sharek staff protest the action is illegal and unjust.

In the past seven months the group’s headquarters have been repeatedly raided and members of staff have been subjected to physical intimidation, harassment and threats. During this time, Executive manager Muheib Shaath has been summoned to 15 separate interrogations from internal security. A summer camp run by Sharek in partnership with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) was destroyed in May.

Sharek co-founder Sufian Mshasha told us the harassment and ultimate closure was “prompted by our agenda of democracy, social development, and our insistence on holding activities for both genders.” He claimed that “80-90%” of questioning of Sharek staff focused on their practise of mixing genders in their programmes.

The webpage of Sharek includes a large list of donors, including George Soros, the Carter Center, UNRWA, UNESCO, and Save the Children-Sweden.

So in this case, there is actually an outcry.

From UNSCO:

The United Nations Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator in the occupied Palestinian Territory, Maxwell Gaylard, today voiced his concern about the forced closure on 30 November by the local authorities in Gaza of all Gaza-based offices of the non-governmental organization Sharek Youth Forum.

“I am very concerned about the recent forced closing of Sharek Youth Forum in Gaza. Sharek is an important NGO partner of the United Nations in its work on behalf of children and the youth in Gaza”, Mr. Gaylard said.

From HRW:

Hamas authorities in Gaza should allow an organization that helps children and youth to reopen and penalize officials who have harassed its workers, Human Rights Watch said today. On November 30, 2010, Hamas authorities arbitrarily closed all of the Gaza offices of the group Sharek Youth Forum, which provides psychosocial and vocational support and operates summer camps and other programs for 60,000 Gaza children and youth.

Will Hamas cave now that one of their many anti-democratic actions bubbled to the surface?

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HRW calls on Syria to release teenage blogger

From HRW:

The Syrian government should immediately release Tal al-Mallohi, a 19-year-old high school student and blogger held incommunicado without charge for nine months, Human Rights Watch said today. She has been held by Syria's security services since being detained on December 27, 2009.

State Security (Branch 279), one of Syria's multiple state security agencies, summoned al-Mallohi to Damascus for interrogation in December and immediately detained her. Two days later, members of State Security went to al-Mallohi's house and confiscated her computer, some CDs, books, and other personal belongings. Since the arrest, the security services have not allowed her family to communicate with her and have not offered any explanation for the arrest.

"Detaining a high school student for nine months without charge is typical of the cruel, arbitrary behavior of Syria's security services," said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. "A government that thinks it can get away with trampling the rights of its citizens has lost all connection to its people."

It is unclear why the authorities have detained al-Mallohi. According to her family, al-Mallohi, who is in her last year of high school, does not belong to any political group. Some Syrian activists have expressed concerns that security services may have detained her over a poem she wrote criticizing certain restrictions on freedom of expression in Syria. Her blog, which contains poetry and social commentary, focuses mostly on the plight of Palestinians and does not address Syrian political issues. Her homepage shows a picture of Gandhi with the quote, "you will remain an example."

What is chilling about this case is that al-Mallohi seems to be just an ignorant young blogger. Her blog contains no passionate criticisms of anyone except Jewish Zionists. Her politics seems hardly outside the mainstream for Syrians.

She has three blogs.

The first one she simply titles "My Blog" and it contains some poetry and pro-Palestinian Arab articles. She includes a picture of Raed Salah, a leader of the Islamic Movement in Israel; some praise for Venezuela and Erdogan, a picture making George Bush look like Hitler and lots of ignorant stuff about Jerusalem and how Jews have no rights there whatsoever and Israeli crimes. She signed her more recent posts "A Palestinian."

There are barely any comments on her posts there.

Her second site, "Palestinian Villages," is supposedly a list of Arab villages destroyed by Israel and their history. It includes a picture of what looks like a variant of Greater Syria.

Her third site, called "Latters" (probably meant to be "Letters") might be the one that is problematic to Syrian authorities. In that blog she writes a series of letters to the human race about human rights and freedom. It is possible that there are some veiled references to Syrian repression in those letters, but, again, this blog was hardly read by anyone judging from the number of comments.

If Syria goes after teenagers whose childish views would be all but unnoticed otherwise, and whose deviation from the Syrian version of political correctness is this slight, then the Syrian regime is even more paranoid than I thought it was. Usually such extensive paranoia accompanies equally extensive feelings of insecurity.

Which means that every citizen of Syria must live in incredible fear.

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NYT, Lebanon and HRW hypocrisy

The New York Times mentions the new Lebanese law allowing Palestinian Arabs some new rights to employment - but notes that this supposed improvement is, in many way, only on paper:

The law lifts restrictions on Palestinians’ employment in the formal labor market, though they would still be officially treated as foreigners. They would be barred from working as engineers, lawyers and doctors, occupations that are regulated by professional syndicates limited to Lebanese citizens.

The NYT, of course, mostly avoids the main issue of full rights - which would include citizenship for those born in Lebanon. It also refers to them as "refugees," even though they are nothing of the sort. This section is telling:

“I am 51 years old, born and raised here, and this is the first time I feel like I am a human being,” said Abu Luay Issawi, who owns a grocery store in Mar Elias, a refugee camp in Beirut.

Electricity was out in the camp on Tuesday. No water was running, as is the case almost every day in Mar Elias, which is overcrowded and lacks basic infrastructure.

Mr. Issawi said he had graduated among the top of his class from Beirut Arab University more than two decades ago with a degree in engineering, but was never able to find a job here. “I don’t remember anything about engineering,” he said. “But it is nice to know that my son will have a better future.”

His neighbor interrupted him. “If I am going to live and die here, then I want all my rights,” Youssef Ahmad, 52, said.

The Times gratingly quotes a Human Rights Watch spokesman, who righteously claims that "This should be the start and not the finish line in the march toward achieving human rights for Palestinians."

In fact, Human Rights Watch does not want Lebanese Palestinians to have their full rights. For them to have full rights would involve the right to become full citizens of Lebanon if they so choose, and HRW is against that right.

HRW twists international law to make the "right of return" apply to descendants. In a remarkably convoluted argument, HRW says:

The right [to return] is held not only by those who fled a territory initially but also by their descendants, so long as they have maintained appropriate links with the relevant territory. The right persists even when sovereignty over the territory is contested or has changed hands. If a former home no longer exists or is occupied by an innocent third party, return should be permitted to the vicinity of the former home.

They link to their definition of "appropriate links". They first quote a UN committee comment on Article 12 of the International Covenant on civil and Political Rights:

Thus, the persons entitled to exercise this right can be identified only by interpreting the meaning of the phrase "his own country". The scope of "his own country" is broader than the concept "country of his nationality". It is not limited to nationality in a formal sense, that is, nationality acquired at birth or by conferral; it embraces, at the very least, an individual who, because of his or her special ties to or claims in relation to a given country, cannot be considered to be a mere alien. This would be the case, for example, for nationals of a country who have been stripped of their nationality in violation of international law, and of individuals whose country of nationality has been incorporated in or transferred to another national entity, whose nationality is being denied them.

Note that this in no way includes descendants.

HRW goes way beyond this:

In the view of Human Rights Watch, the clearest guidance in international law for defining the basis on which an individual can exercise a claim to return to his or her "own country" is provided by the convergence of the wording of the General Comments of the Human Rights Committee -- "an individual who, because of his or her special ties to or claims in relation to a given country, cannot be considered to be a mere alien"-- and the concept of a "genuine and effective link," which arose out of the International Court of Justice's Nottebohm case (2). While the Nottebohm case addressed the issue of nationality, the criteria that it sets forth are the most comprehensive, Human Rights Watch considers, for determining the existence of the right to return., it says :

"Different factors are taken into consideration, and their importance will vary from one case to the next: there is the habitual residence of the individual concerned but also the centre of his interests, his family ties, his participation in public life, attachment shown by him for a given country and inculcated in his children, etc."

The Nottebohm case did not in any way deal with the children of the person contesting his nationality.

Here is another case where HRW substitutes lex ferenda for lex lata - the law as they want it to be with the law as it is.

In their zeal to "protect" a non-existent "right of return" for Lebanese Palestinians who were born in Lebanon, Human Rights Watch is denying Palestinians in Lebanon their human rights to citizenship in the country of one's birth! Human rights are individual, not collective, but HRW is de facto adopting the Arab lie that "Palestinian unity" is more important than individual rights.

Yes, there are political issues involved in allowing hundreds of thousands of Sunnis to become citizens of Lebanon. Yes, there are political issues in the Arab world against the concept of naturalization of millions of people. But since when should HRW twist international law in order to justify these ultimately political decisions?

The entire issue is one of individual choice. If Palestinian Arabs in Lebanon are afraid that by becoming citizens, they would compromise on the miniscule chance that they would eventually be allowed to move to Israel and rebuild a village destroyed in 1948, they can choose not to become naturalized. History shows that most Lebanese Palestinians would become citizens in a minute if they could, and when HRW parrots Arab lies about how the "right of return" is more important than their rights to citizenship, then HRW shows itself to be a mere parody of a human rights organization.

Another issue is simple realism. The fact is that the majority of Lebanese Palestinians will never immigrate to "Palestine" or to Israel even with a peace agreement. The Lebanese will still insist on restricting the PalArabs' rights even afterwards. HRW, evidently, prefers the Arab cop-out of an unrestricted "right of return" and its concomitant sentencing of an entire population to misery rather than working to help them attain truly equal rights.

If Human Rights Watch really wanted to protect the human rights of these people, it would call on Lebanon to allow people born in that country to become citizens of that country should they so choose. Their choice to misinterpret international law instead says volumes about how HRW is, effectively, a political pawn of the Arabs.

(h/t BC)

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HRW's subjectivity; or, MENA Behaving Badly (Israelinurse)

I received this article from Israelinurse via email:

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Visitors to Jerusalem this month can pick up the latest free print edition of the English language magazine ‘This Week in Palestine’ from hotel lobbies and other points of distribution. In this June 2010 edition they will find a plethora of anti-Israel articles all of which reinforce the familiar narrative of Palestinians oppressed by Israelis, without any mention of Palestinian violence, the reasons for the construction of the anti-terrorist fence and checkpoints or the inter-factional fighting between Hamas and Fatah. The uninformed tourist’s heart will bleed after reading of children in Ramallah who have never had the opportunity to paddle in the Mediterranean Sea during the hot Middle East summer, but of course the various writers invariably neglect to mention that this is a result of the Oslo accords freely signed by Palestinian leaders and not just some spiteful action on the part of Israel.

Among the articles, most of which are designed to work at a purely emotional level and do not allow uncomfortable facts to distract from their message, is one entitled ‘Juthuruna’ http://www.thisweekinpalestine.com/details.php?id=3128&ed=183&edid=183  by Nadia Barhoum.

“Some mornings we would wake up to shots from the IDF firing range, just a few hundred feet from my aunt’s home. We could see the soldiers, filing one behind the other, aiming at actual cut-outs of bodies with bull’s-eyes drawn across their chests. The sound of the shots was jarring at first, and then slowly became ‘adi, just background noise. I would strangely begin to feel this way about many other aspects of life there; I began to notice the normalization of occupation: waiting hours to get anywhere, identity cards being demanded at every crossing, and the look of worry on Amti’sface when she knew that anyone was going to travel beyond the village. We could not live as we wanted there.” 

 

Heart string-tugging propaganda aside, this piece takes on a more sinister aspect when one realises that Nadia Barhoum works  for Human Rights Watch in New York in its Middle East and North Africa division (MENA).

 By now we are more than familiar with HRW’s less than objective reports on subjects such as Jenin  , the anti-terrorist barrier, the 2006 Lebanon war and Operation Cast Lead. We are aware that the infamous Goldstone Report  contains over 30 citations from HRW publications and that in 2009 HRW went fundraising in Saudi Arabia   using an anti-Israel platform. Many, including HRW’s own founder Robert Bernstein,  are concerned  by the moral poverty displayed by HRW which discredits the entire field of human rights organizations.

Apparently HRW has learned nothing from the recent scandals which sullied its name because here we have yet another one of its employees displaying blatant, if totally unsurprising , pro-Palestinian bias. Assuming that the folks at HRW actually read Barhoum’s CV before they hired her, they would be familiar with the fact that she was an active member in ‘Students for Justice in Palestine’ whilst at university and is on record as stating that the SJP’s “message . . . is to resist occupation and end the apartheid-like framework which is found in Palestine-Israel”. Not the sort of core stance conducive to the production of impartial, balanced reports upon the subject of the Israel/Palestine conflict, one would have thought. In fact, one has to take this train of thought one step further and try to imagine HRW hiring a known pro-Israel activist of any shade….

One may well ask if it actually matters that Nadia Barhoum has written a saccharine- sentimental article for ‘This Week in Palestine’, seeing as we are already familiar both with her personal political perspectives and those of the organization by which she is employed.  When one appreciates exactly where this tourist-aimed propaganda originates, one can see that it matters very much.  ‘This Week in Palestine’ is produced by the International Middle East Media Centre which was founded by the Palestinian Centre for Rapprochement between People (PCR). The PCR was founded by Ghassan Andoni and its Director is George Rishmawi; both of whom are co-founders of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) and indeed the PCR operates under the endorsement and guidance of the ISM . The ISM, as readers are aware, is one of the organizers of the ‘Free Gaza’ flotillas, including the last one which ended in bloodshed aboard the Mavi Marmara due to the inclusion among its participants of jihadist terror supporters seeking martyrdom.

So now we have the rather absurd and surreal situation in which Human Rights Watch has the gall to call for an ‘impartial investigation’ of the flotilla deaths whilst one of the employees in its Middle East division which issued the above statement co-operates with a publication linked to the organizers of that flotilla who have no qualms about welcoming into their ranks jihadists with a death wish and illegally transferring funds to a terrorist organization proscribed by the country out of which HRW operates.

HRW may well be within its rights to continue to weave its tangled web of anti-Israel propaganda, including the employment of staff with connections of various dubious shades and records of blatant anti-Israeli bias. Equally, the rest of the world is well within its rights to relate to HRW as the ridiculous joke it has become. The losers here are the unfortunate people in this world who really do need an impartial, fair and objective body to promote and protect their human rights because HRW’s record on Israel indicates without a shadow of a doubt that it no longer possesses the necessary qualities needed to be considered an apolitical human rights organization and therefore neither its reports nor demands can be granted credence.         

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HRW and AI: Substituting Lex Ferenda for Lex Lata

In a brilliant monograph written by Asher Fredman for NGO Monitor and JCPA, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch's seemingly factual statements regarding the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC) are examined - and found to be sorely lacking.

Fredman goes through the NGOs' writings concerning Operation Cast Lead and shows that their conclusions concerning the use of white phosphorus and UAVs do not reflect international law as it is (lex lata) , but rather how they would like international law to be (lex ferenda.)

Excerpts from the summary:

It is shown that the NGOs’ [1] descriptions of the means and methods of warfare contain numerous unwarranted assertions and unsubstantiated claims. In other cases, the NGOs present unrealistic depictions of the nature of modern combat, leading them to problematic evaluations of Israeli actions. It appears that these result at least in part from a lack of expertise in relevant areas.

From the legal perspective, it will be argued that the NGOs’ presentation of several key LOAC principles is inaccurate or incomplete. In other instances, AI and HRW present controversial interpretations of LOAC treaties as widely accepted customary law. This suggests that the NGOs may be engaged in “standard setting” [2] rather than in objective evaluations.

On white phosphorus (WP):

Among the findings are that:

LOAC, as reflected in state declarations and practice, recognizes the right of a commander to consider military needs, particularly force protection, when evaluating what actions and precautions are feasible in a given situation.

HRW’s claim that Israel could feasibly have used a different type of smoke obscurant to the same effect as WP is contradicted on several counts by military sources and weapons experts.

AI and HRW's arguments regarding the feasibility of using other means and methods to deliver WP are unsubstantiated and based upon information unavailable to the NGOs. Suggested alternatives may, in fact, have posed a greater danger to civilians.

Contrary to the claim that Israel’s use of WP was indiscriminate and hence unlawful per se, its use was “directed at a specific military objective” and therefore lawful under LOAC.

On the use of UAVs:

Among the findings are that:

The evidence AI and HRW present to establish their claims regarding the weapons platforms and munitions allegedly used is rendered questionable by military and defense industry sources. In a number of instances, the witness testimony relied upon heavily by the NGOs is contradicted by widely published media reports or the NGOs themselves.

AI and HRW present an unrealistic depiction of the factors influencing targeting decisions on the modern battlefield. They fall prey to the “allure of precision” that leads “those beyond the battlefield [to] impose unreasonable demands on the military or postulate norms that go beyond treaty or custom” (Schmitt, 2004, p. 466).

Israeli actions are judged based on hindsight, in contrast to LOAC standards as affirmed by the declarations of 13 countries when ratifying Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions.
The NGOs misrepresent LOAC definitions of legitimate military objectives. On the basis of this misrepresentation, they presume the absence of legitimate military objectives in the vicinity of a strike.

Once presuming the absence of legitimate military objectives, the NGOs assume that civilians injured in a strike were deliberately targeted. This allows them to ignore LOAC’s recognition of the possibility and lawfulness of proportional collateral damage in attacks on military objectives.

Conclusion:

The findings of this study indicate that at least in their reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, AI and HRW’s reports contain many factual inaccuracies and problematic presentations of international law. It is therefore suggested that AI and HRW, as well as other NGOs dealing with similar issues, carefully evaluate their areas of competency, and ensure that factual and legal assertions are made with the proper degree of expertise. It is further suggested that the NGOs take steps to maintain standards of objectivity and ensure that ideological predilections do not color their analyses. When claiming to evaluate the lawfulness of a party’s actions, the NGOs must not conflate lex lata (the law as it exists) with their preferred lex ferenda (what the law should be).

As I showed in AI's contradictory and HRW's bogus definitions of "occupation."

Policy-makers, diplomats, and journalists should more carefully scrutinize NGO-generated information. Subjecting NGO reports and statements to careful analysis will help ensure that these documents are produced at the highest standards. This would enable NGOs such as AI and HRW to most effectively fulfill their mission of promoting and protecting human rights.

Don't expect HRW or AI to respond in any substantial way. As we have seen, NGOs tend to get very shrill and defensive when light is shined on them.

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How about HRW's definition of "occupation"?

HRW also seems to contradict themselves about the definition of occupation, although not nearly as egregiously as Amnesty does.

When discussing whether Russia is occupying parts of Georgia in 2008, HRW writes:

Russia is bound by the law of occupation wherever it exercises effective control within the territory of Georgia without the consent of the Georgian state. Anywhere Georgian authorities are prevented from their full and free exercise of sovereignty - such as denying access for Georgian authorities including law enforcement and military forces - because of Russian presence, Russia is assuming the role of an occupying power for the purposes of international humanitarian law, and all its obligations towards the civilian population remain.

If Russia exercises effective control of access to an area, such as a so-called buffer zone, even if it grants access to some authorities, for example, Georgian police, it is still bound by its obligations to the civilian population to ensure public safety and welfare and permit humanitarian access.

The examples given in the first paragraph necessitate a presence of troops in the actual territory. The second paragraph, where such troops are not present, is ambiguous: HRW says accurately that there is a still an obligation for humanitarian access but it pointedly does not say that this is considered a legal occupation. The two issues are separate, as legal blockades (for example) must allow basic needs to get through but do no indicate an occupation.

However, in regards to Gaza, HRW has been explicit that Israel remains an occupier since Israel first announced the disengagement:

“The removal of settlers and most military forces will not end Israel’s control over Gaza,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Executive Director of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa Division. “Israel plans to reconfigure its occupation of the territory, but it will remain an occupying power with responsibility for the welfare of the civilian population.

“Under international law, the test for determining whether an occupation exists is effective control by a hostile army, not the positioning of troops,” Whitson said. “Whether the Israeli army is inside Gaza or redeployed around its periphery and restricting entrance and exit, it remains in control.”

Again, this is not a direct contradiction, but the first source (written in 2008, after HRW was already committed to the definition about Gaza written in 2004) does imply that "effective occupation" means troops on the ground.

However, the ICRC is also explicit in its definition of occupation - and proves that HRW is wrong.

The ICRC has a document that describes belligerent occupation, and it says clearly:

Occupation ceases when the occupying forces are driven out of or evacuate the territory.

It would be interesting to hear whether any HRW official or Amnesty, for that matter) could be quoted as saying that they disagree with the ICRC. 


By the way, the US Army and Navy Field Manual 27-5, Section 1-1b, has its own definition of occupied territory that is also at odds with HRW:

The term “occupied territory” is used to mean any area in which military government is cxerciscd by an armed force. It does not include territory in which an armed force is located but has not assumed supreme authority.

There is one thread of consistency throughout this research: by any definition of occupation that pre-dates Israel's disengagement, there is no way that Israel is legally occupying Gaza. Apparently, some NGOs have felt it necessary to redefine a very specific legal term to apply to Israel ex post facto. 

This, of course, calls into question the objectivity of these NGOs altogether.

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HRW's latest folly

HRW continues in its tradition of putting Israel in the worst possible light.

Their latest 100+ page report is about damage to civilian property in Gaza during Cast Lead/Operation Oil Stain.

Here is a part of the report about the Izbt Abd Rabo neighborhood:

Many residents who lived on or near Zimmo Street and who left the area between January 5 and January 12 said their homes and those of their neighbors had not suffered serious damage at that time, and that the closest fighting was at least 500 meters away to the west, beyond the borders of Izbt Abd Rabbo. By January 18, when residents returned to their homes, they found virtually the entire eastern half of the neighborhood, including scores of houses as well as hundreds of dunams of land, had been razed by Israeli forces.

The finding that most of the destruction in the neighborhood occurred after the initial phase of the offensive is corroborated by satellite imagery analysis performed by the UN Operational Satellite Applications Programme (UNOSAT), which identified destroyed or severely damaged buildings in Izbt Abd Rabbo over time, based on damage visible in satellite photographs. UNOSAT found that only 11 buildings in the neighborhood were destroyed or severely damaged between December 27, 2008 and January 6, 2009, but that 330 buildings were destroyed or severely damaged from January 6 to 19 – a thirty-fold increase in destruction that occurred after the IDF had apparently established control of the area.[61]

OK, assuming that these dates are accurate...

Palestinian fighters had launched rockets from the surrounding open areas prior to the offensive, residents said. Residents told Human Rights Watch that border observers (murabbetein) from Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups were present in Izbt Abd Rabbo frequently before the conflict, and that armed groups had used open areas nearby to launch rockets at Israel. Hashem Dahalan, 49, speculated that Israeli forces “destroyed many more houses in the eastern part of the neighborhood than the west because the fighters who came to this area in the past [operated in] the east.” [62] At least one house that was destroyed early in the conflict had an escape tunnel leading to another house, Dahalan said. While Hamas militants made use of the area, he added, few lived there: “Only six of the destroyed houses belonged to Hamas.” Another resident, Mahmoud Rajab Abd Rabbo, told Human Rights Watch of tunnels in Jabal Kashif and Jabal ar-Rayes, the hills to the north and south of Izbt Abd Rabbo, respectively.[63] From residents’ accounts, Palestinian armed groups may have used some houses in Izbt Abd Rabbo as cover before or after launching rockets from nearby areas or for other military purposes.

Houses that Palestinian fighters were using as cover, which concealed tunnels, or that otherwise comprised military objectives were subject to lawful attack. Residents said that such buildings constituted a very small minority of the houses in Izbt Abd Rabbo. Human Rights Watch is unaware of any evidence that could lead the IDF to reasonably conclude that more than a small fraction of the houses that it destroyed in the area could have constituted military objectives, even assuming that the IDF considered it lawful to destroy houses that militants were likely to use in future attacks (in addition to houses whose destruction was likely to yield a concrete and definite military advantage during the conflict, as permitted by the laws of war). The wholesale destruction of entire blocks of buildings, even if some could have been lawfully destroyed, would still amount to wanton destruction under the laws of war.

HRW is ignoring a basic fact about the operation: Hamas' major goal.

Hamas didn't expect to win militarily. It had one, overarching strategic goal: to kidnap IDF soldiers.

If this neighborhood hosted Hamas houses and tunnels hidden among the regular civilian residences, that meant that IDF troops who were in control of the area were in grave danger of being kidnapped.

This is a different kind of war, and HRW ignores this key aspect of it. The assertion that only a small percentage of houses belonged to Hamas is irrelevant to this scenario, unless the IDF knew ahead of time with certainty which houses those were.

The UN Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict noted that, according to an article published by an Israeli NGO, “Izbat Abd Rabbo and the nearby areas of Jabal al-Kashef and Jabal al-Rayes appear to have been among the locations in Gaza which saw the most intense combat during the military operations.”[65] In one incident, the article stated that on the evening of January 9, 2009, “three RPG rockets and machine guns are fired against a house where IDF soldiers took up positions in the Ezvet Abd Rabbo region in the eastern sector of Jabalya.”[66]...

Human Rights Watch was unable to determine the number of Palestinian fighters and Israeli soldiers killed or wounded in fighting in Izbt Abd Rabbo. We interviewed several residents who said that Israeli attacks killed at least six fighters in Izbt Abd Rabbo by January 6. Cross-checking lists of fatalities compiled by the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR), a non-governmental organization based in Gaza, and the Israeli NGO B’Tselem, indicates that at least four militants (all Hamas) were killed in Izbt Abd Rabbo on January 3, 12, and 18 (two fatalities).[68]

Actually, 1 militant was killed on the 3rd, and one on the 4th. After the IDF controlled the area, one was killed on the 14th. Two were killed on the 17th and 4 militants were killed on January 18th.

We have no idea how much non-fatal fighting there was during the other days. However. there was clearly fighting in this area that was under IDF control during this time, and the IDF needed to be concerned about how the terrorists were hiding.

HRW is assuming that the "military advantage" that Geneva allows is traditional - destroying buildings that could be used for lookouts or for hiding weapons, for example. In this case the military advantage was to take away Hamas' military objective - which was to violate the laws of war to purposefully kidnap enemy combatants! In this case, every house in the area that militants pop up has the potential of being militarily critical.

Given that this was Hamas' military goal, the IDF is justified in neutralizing it. One could argue whether they went overboard, but given that militants were certainly in the neighborhood while the IDF was there shows that they had effective hiding places - places that the IDF was obligated to root out.

I guess HRW's military experts didn't think of this. Oh, that's right - their only military expert already left HRW.

They're just winging it.

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TNR on HRW

The New Republic has a report about the problems at Human Rights Watch.

While it is critical of HRW, the article is not a hatchet job by any means - it gives much needed context. Yet when all is said and done, it is clear that there is a strong anti-Israel bias at HRW, and there has been for a long time:

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 [Bernstein] 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.”

Author Benjamin Birnbaum managed to quantify HRW's obsession with Israel and to interview many staffers at HRW:

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.”

The 2006 Lebanon war is a perfect example of HRW's jumping to criticize Israel without checking all the facts, but its reluctance to do the same for other regional actors:

During the third week of the five-week war, the organization published a report on “Israel’s indiscriminate attacks against civilians. (A report on Hezbollah rocket fire would not come out for another year, although, again, HRW did issue press releases on the subject in the interim.) The report said there was evidence suggesting that, in some cases, “Israeli forces deliberately targeted civilians.” Critics, such as Alan Dershowitz and Bar-Ilan University Professor Avi Bell, jumped on the report and related documents, arguing that some of their assertions were highly questionable. HRW ceded no ground, accusing Dershowitz and Bell of “armchair obfuscations.” But, when it issued its more comprehensive report on Lebanese fatalities a year later, the organization admitted that the first report had indeed gotten key facts wrong. For example, an Israeli strike in the village of Srifa—the second-deadliest attack described in the first report—turned out to have killed not “an estimated 26 civilians” (as HRW had originally claimed) or “as many as 42 civilians” (as Roth later wrote), but 17 combatants and five civilians. “[E]yewitnesses were not always forthcoming about the identity of those that died, and in the case of Srifa, misled our researchers,” HRW wrote. Elsewhere in the new report, HRW acknowledged that the original had missed mitigating factors that cast some Israeli strikes in a different light.

Yet at the time they were adamant about their methods, just as we saw in their dismissal of criticisms about their 5 long reports bashing Israel for Operation Cast Lead:

Robert James—a businessman, World War II veteran, and member of the MENA advisory committee who has been involved with HRW almost since its inception—calls the group “the greatest NGO since the Red Cross,” but argues that it is chronically incapable of introspection. “Bob is bringing this issue up on Israel,” he says. “But Human Rights Watch has a more basic problem. ... They cannot take criticism.”

A parenthetical section of the article is interesting:

When I asked Roth in a February interview at his office 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—“there was a real question as to whether he actually said that”—then told me that it was not HRW’s place to render judgments on such rhetoric: “Let’s assume it is a military threat. We don’t take on governments’ military threats just as we don’t take on aggression, per se. We look at how they behave.

This from the same person who misquoted Israeli leaders specifically to support his specious assertions that Israel intended to indiscriminately kill civilians in Gaza!

The article goes on to note the irony that two of the people at HRW who were the least anti-Israel were Richard Goldstone and Marc Garlasco.

Sarah Leah Whitson is mentioned as having inherent biases againt Israel (she has a poster of a film humanizing suicide bombers hung up in her office) even as she is described as being one of the more competent leaders of their Middle East division. Her dependence on Garlasco as a supposed military expert is telling:

Whitson told me that Garlasco (who was one of only a handful of people at HRW with military experience) brought unique skills to the organization and enhanced its credibility. “He could look at the plumes in the sky and know exactly what weapon that was,” she says. “He could look at a canister and know what kind of a munition it was. He could look and see where the guidance system is.”

This is far from the truth, as at the same time that HRW specifically criticized the IDF on not being able to distinguish between rockets and oxygen canisters in a video during a war when split-second decisions must be made, but their own "military experts" didn't notice the differences for six months.

Garlasco comes off as the most sympathetic figure at HRW:

Garlasco had larger critiques of HRW. He thought that the organization had a habit of ignoring necessary context when covering war, he told Apkon; and he told multiple sources that he thought Whitson and others at MENA had far-left political views. As someone who didn’t have strong ideological commitments of his own on the Middle East, this bothered him. “When he reported on Georgia, his firm feeling was he could report whatever he wanted,” says one source close to Garlasco. “And, when he was talking to headquarters, the feeling was, let the chips fall where they may. He did not feel that way dealing with the Middle East division.” In addition, Garlasco alleged in conversations with multiple people that HRW officials in New York did not understand how fighting actually looked from the ground and that they had unrealistic expectations for how wars could be fought. To Garlasco, the reality of war was far more complicated. “He looks at that organization as one big attempt to outlaw warfare,” says the person close to Garlasco.

The entire report is well worth reading.

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HRW followup

The Times (UK) article on HRW that I quoted from last week had a number of inaccuracies and other parts that HRW took exception to:

A Magazine article, “Explosive Territory” (March 28) by Jonathan Foreman, mostly about Human Rights Watch’s (HRW) work on Israel, requires clarification and correction. The magazine said that HRW had not published any report on the post-election abuses in Iran when in fact the organisation published one in February this year. Marc Garlasco, the former senior military analyst for HRW, was not the only person in the organisation who had military experience; a number of the HRW staff have military expertise. In the 20-year Kashmir conflict HRW has published nine reports, not four as the article stated. One HRW researcher has had articles published by the Palestinian pressure group Electronic Intifada without her permission but was not directly employed by that group, as the article suggests. Although HRW never produced a full report about the shelling at the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp in 2007 it did write three press releases, not one as the article stated. We regret the errors. Mr Foreman quoted a critic of HRW saying the group “cares about Palestinians when mistreated by Israelis but is less concerned if perpetrators are fellow Arabs”. In fact Human Rights Watch has reported on abuses of Palestinians by the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, Iraq, Kuwait and Jordan. Mr Foreman cited unnamed sources that said Mr Garlasco resented what he felt was pressure to sex up claims of Israeli violations. HRW and Mr Garlasco both say HRW never pressured Mr Garlasco to change his findings. We are happy to clarify HRW’s position.

NGO Monitor comments on the corrections in the same link:

HRW’s “corrections” to Foreman’s expose raise more questions and create more confusion, while avoiding core issues like credibility, bias against Israel, and the Garlasco gag order.

1) They claim that “a number of the HRW staff have military expertise” – what does this mean regarding credibility of combat analysis? Basic training, some time in front of a computer, etc. does not provide the “military experience” necessary to assess actions and weapons (drones, WP, etc.) in Afghanistan, Gaza, Lebanon or Iraq. There is still no information to assess Garlasco's qualifications as HRW's "senior military analyst."

2) Regarding the employment of Lucy Mair in the anti-Israel MENA division: “One HRW researcher has had articles published by the Palestinian pressure group Electronic Intifada without her permission….” Mair published more than one article in EI. These have been on line for seven years, with no record of any objection by her. HRW’s response does not alter Foreman’s point that Mair was a highly visible anti-Israel propagandist before being hired by HRW.

3) Detailed HRW reports and accompanying media campaigns are not comparable to short press releases, whether on Kashmir or Palestinian terror. Reports indicate a major investment, while stand-alone press releases are quickly forgotten, as detailed in NGO Monitor research.

4) HRW officials assert that they “never pressured Mr. Garlasco to change his findings,” but they refuse to explain inconsistencies and changing “forensic” analysis in Gaza Beach and other examples.

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Sunday Times slams Human Rights Watch

The Times (UK) has a beautiful article that nicely exposes the problems at Human Rights Watch, starting with the Garlasco affair that I helped expose, but showing that Garlasco was just a symptom of a much deeper problem.

Excerpts:

When the story broke that one of the organisation’s most prominent and vocal members of staff might be a collector of Nazi-era military memorabilia it felt like some sort of sexual scandal had erupted in the Victorian church. For a lobbying group accustomed to adulatory coverage in the media, it was a public-relations catastrophe.

Human Rights Watch is one of two global superpowers among the world’s myriad humanitarian pressure groups. It is relatively young — established in its current form in 1988 — but it has grown so quickly in size, wealth and influence that it has all but eclipsed its older, London-based rival, Amnesty International.

Unlike Amnesty, HRW, as it is known, gets its money from charitable foundations and wealthy individuals — such as the financier George Soros — rather than a mass membership. And, also unlike Amnesty, it seeks to make an impact, not through extensive letter-writing campaigns, but by talking to governments and the media, urging openness and candour and backing up its advocacy with research reports. It is an association that is all about influence — an influence that depends on a carefully honed image of objectivity, expertise and high moral tone. So it was perhaps a little awkward that a key member of staff was found to have such a treasure trove of Nazi regalia.

Every year, Human Rights Watch puts out up to 100 glossy reports — essentially mini books — and 600-700 press releases, according to Daly, a former journalist for The Independent.

Some conflict zones get much more coverage than others. For instance, HRW has published five heavily publicised reports on Israel and the Palestinian territories since the January 2009 war.

In 20 years they have published only four reports on the conflict in Indian-controlled Kashmir, for example, even though the conflict has taken at least 80,000 lives in these two decades, and torture and extrajudicial murder have taken place on a vast scale. Perhaps even more tellingly, HRW has not published any report on the postelection violence and repression in Iran more than six months after the event.

When I asked the Middle East director Sarah Leah Whitson if HRW was ever going to release one, she said: “We have a draft, but I’m not sure I want to put one out.” Asked the same question, executive director Kenneth Roth told me that the problem with doing a report on Iran was the difficulty of getting into the country.

I interviewed a human-rights expert at a competing organisation in Washington who did not wish to be named because “we operate in a very small world and it’s not done to criticise other human-rights organisations”. He told me he was “not surprised” that HRW has still not produced a report on the violence in Iran: “They are thinking about how it’s going to be used politically in Washington. And it’s not a priority for them because Iran is just not a bad guy that they are interested in highlighting. Their hearts are not in it. Let’s face it, the thing that really excites them is Israel.”

Noah Pollak, a New York writer who has led some of the criticisms against HRW, points out that it cares about Palestinians when maltreated by Israelis, but is less concerned if perpetrators are fellow Arabs. For instance, in 2007 the Lebanese army shelled the Nahr al Bared refugee camp near Tripoli (then under the control of Fatah al Islam radicals), killing more than 100 civilians and displacing 30,000. HRW put out a press release — but it never produced a report.

Such imbalance was at the heart of a public dressing-down that shook HRW in October. It came from the organisation’s own founder and chairman emeritus, the renowned publisher Robert Bernstein, who took it to task in The New York Times for devoting its resources to open and democratic societies rather than closed ones.

He said: “It broke my heart to write that article… Of course open societies should be watched very carefully, but HRW is one of the very few organisations that is supposed to go into closed societies. Why should HRW be covering Guantanamo? It’s already covered by a lot of other organisations.”

Associates of Garlasco have told me that there had long been tensions between Garlasco and HRW’s Middle East Division in New York — perhaps because he sometimes stuck his neck out and did not follow the HRW line. Garlasco himself apparently resented what he felt was pressure to sex up claims of Israeli violations of laws of war in Gaza and Lebanon, or to stick by initial assessments even when they turned out to be incorrect.

In June 2006, Garlasco had alleged that an explosion on a Gaza beach that killed seven people had been caused by Israeli shelling. However, after seeing the details of an Israeli army investigation that closely examined the relevant ballistics and blast patterns, he subsequently told the Jerusalem Post that he had been wrong and that the deaths were probably caused by an unexploded munition in the sand. But this went down badly at Human Rights Watch HQ in New York, and the admission was retracted by an HRW press release the next day.

Since the Garlasco affair blew up, critics of Human Rights Watch have raised questions about other appointments. An Israeli newspaper revealed that Joe Stork, the deputy head of HRW’s Middle East department, was a radical leftist who put out a magazine in the 1970s that praised the murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. In 1976 he attended an anti-Zionist conference in Baghdad hosted by the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

Stork’s boss, Sarah Leah Whitson, and most of his colleagues in the Middle East department of Human Rights Watch, also have activist backgrounds — it was typical that one newly hired researcher came to HRW from the extremist anti-Israel publication Electronic Intifada — unlikely to reassure anyone who thinks that human-rights organisations should be non-partisan. While it may be hard to find people who are genuinely neutral about Middle East politics, theoretically an organisation like HRW would not select as its researchers people who are so evidently on one side.

While HRW was dealing with the fallout from the Garlasco affair, it was already on the defensive as a result of criticism of a fundraising effort in Saudi Arabia, one of the world’s worst human-rights violators. This involved two dinners for members of the Saudi elite in Riyadh, at which Sarah Leah Whitson curried favour with her hosts by boasting about HRW’s “battles” with pro-Israel pressure groups, such as NGO Monitor.

I asked the HRW executive director Kenneth Roth about the controversy that surrounded the Saudi dinners. He said: “Because somebody is the victim of a repressive government, should they have no right to contribute to a human-rights organisation?” Even if they had been invited, few victims would have been able to make the dinners — most Saudi dissidents are either in prison or live abroad in exile.

This is exactly the hubris and doubletalk that we have seen time and time again from HRW over Garlasco. There is zero evidence that the Saudi fundraising dinner had a single Saudi dissident or critic in attendance, yet HRW defends itself as if that was the focus of the dinner - not to line its pockets with money from people who share its loathing for Israel.

Many of those on the left of the human-rights “community” may feel conflicting emotions when it comes to dealing with radical Islam, as if the former is somehow a dangerous distraction from the real struggle. In 2006 Scott Long, the director of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights programme at Human Rights Watch, attacked the British campaigner Peter Tatchell, accusing him of racism, Islamophobia and colonialism for having the temerity to lead a campaign against Iran’s executions of homosexuals — a campaign that Long believed was unconstructive and based on “a Western social-constructionist trope”.

Human Rights Watch does perform a useful task, but its critics raise troubling questions that go beyond Garlasco’s hobby or raising money from Saudis. Why put such effort into publicising alleged human-rights violations in some countries but not others? Why does HRW seem so credulous of civilian witnesses in places like Gaza and Afghanistan but so sceptical of anyone in a uniform?

It may be that organisations like HRW that depend on the media for their profile — and therefore their donations — concentrate too much on places that the media already cares about.

HRW’s reaction to the scandals has perhaps cost it more credibility than the scandals themselves. It has revealed an organisation that does not always practice the transparency, tolerance and accountability it urges on others.

The only thing that this article didn't mention was HRW's crude use of sockpuppets to defend itself during the Garlsaco affair.

Read the whole thing.

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HRW again makes baseless claims against Israel

In Human Rights Watch's latest press release, the organization claims that Israel is not conducting "thorough and impartial investigations" concerning Operation Cast Lead.

While the military is conducting ongoing investigations, officials did not provide information showing that these will be thorough and impartial or that they will address the broader policy and command decisions that led to unlawful civilian deaths, Human Rights Watch said.

"Israel claims it is conducting credible and impartial investigations, but it has so far failed to make that case," said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director for Human Rights Watch. "An independent investigation is crucial to understand why so many civilians died and to bring justice for the victims of unlawful attacks."

...

The Israeli military has thus far examined specific incidents but not broader policies that may have caused civilian casualties in violation of the laws of war, Human Rights Watch said.

"The Israeli investigations so far have looked mostly at soldiers who disobeyed orders or the rules of engagement, but failed to ask the crucial question about whether those orders and rules of engagement themselves violated the laws of war," Stork said. "For those decisions and policies, senior military and political decision-makers should be held responsible."

HRW is being disingenuous again.

Apparently, no one from HRW read the original Cast Lead investigation report. In that report there were exhaustive descriptions of how IDF actions were entirely consistent with international law. HRW never responded to that report; it never answered its arguments; and as far as I know it never even referred to it.

This is not surprising. HRW bases much of its criticism of Israel (and other countries) on a bizarre, restricted interpretation of international law. With incredible hubris, HRW assumes from the outset that its interpretations are sacrosanct and inherently correct. Yet when Israel comes out with its own interpretation, that is consistent with the Geneva Conventions and other accepted sources of customary international law, HRW doesn't bother to answer with legal arguments: instead, it ignores them and insists that their own interpretations are the ones that the world must adhere to.

HRW is engaged in a massive misdirection, a sleight-of-hand so that it will not have to defend its own mistakes in the law. And it needs to do this for its very existence, because if HRW's version of international law is shown to be incorrect, every single report it has issued on that basis would need to be re-evaluated. So instead, HRW goes on the offensive and fails to address any substantive criticism. (As we have seen, HRW does not have the ability to investigate itself with any degree of objectivity, and it reacts to criticism in ways that can only be described as childish.)

Meanwhile, Israel's ongoing investigations are ongoing and taking literally thousands of man-hours. An IDF source described it to me this way:

These investigations are exhaustive and a logistical nightmare. The investigators talk to everyone involved, from the soldiers, to the commanders in the field, all the way up the chain of command. And almost all of the incidents can involve different branches of the army which require debriefings at every level (i.e. air force, tank unit, and ground force like paratroopers, and then also the southern command, and the intelligence unit, etc). so each incident, to investigate properly requires hundreds of hours of interviews, material and footage reviews, comparison with additional intelligence, and with past investigations done within the units themselves regarding the incidents in question etc.

I've already shown that these investigations are independent, and the people running them do not report to the IDF infrastructure - the very definition of independence. And when new evidence comes up, as HRW claims in the Al Bader flour mill case, the investigators re-open the cases.

Or would HRW prefer that the IDF re-invade Gaza to get first-hand forensics?

As a footnote, HRW again mentions the supposed "fact" that the Hamas police were not a legitimate target. I have shown that at least 75% of the police killed were members of the Al Qassam Martyrs Brigades, the organization responsible for a majority of attacks on Israel. I have shown that the Al Qassam Brigades as well as Hamas themselves do not distinguish between the police and the militants. Even Goldstone quotes the Hamas police as mentioning that "Police officers received clear orders from the leadership to face the enemy, if the Gaza Strip were to be invaded." (He then dismisses that very statement.) Anyone can look at the incredible PTWatch site and see first-hand the detailed obituaries that terror groups wrote to memorialize the police and other "civilians" killed during Cast Lead, including details of their terror careers and the dates that they joined the terror groups.

HRW does not address these findings, nor any other substantive criticism of their logic and methodology. HRW has no ability to defend itself or look at its own claims objectively. It appears that HRW's Joe Stork is engaging in a bit of projection when he accuses the IDF of something that applies far better to himself.

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HRW slams Jordan - but avoids slamming the Arab world

Human Rights Watch just wrote a report slamming Jordan for arbitrarily revoking the citizenship of a few thousand Palestinian Arabs. I had covered the phenomenon here as well as Jordan's absurd defense of the practice.

What is interesting is HRW's legal arguments against Jordan's actions. After the organization goes into detail on the right to nationality, it adds this paragraph:

Prevention of statelessness

In addition to the prohibition on arbitrary deprivation of nationality, the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness provides additional guidance on situations in which nationality must not be withdrawn: states must not "deprive a person of his nationality if such deprivation would render him stateless."[28] To the contrary, article 1 of the convention stipulates that a state "shall grant its nationality to a person born in its territory who would otherwise be stateless."[29] The convention also declares that states must not "deprive any person or group of persons of their nationality on racial, ethnic, religious or political grounds" and that a "transfer of territory shall include provisions designed to ensure that no person shall become stateless as a result of the transfer."[30] Jordan has not yet acceded to this convention. It is, however, a party to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which requires it to "respect the right of the child to preserve his or her identity, including nationality."[31]

Jordanians of Palestinian origin whose nationality is withdrawn become stateless because, under international law, Palestine in 2009 is not a state and has not been one at any time since Jordan's independence.[32]

While it is true that HRW's legal arguments are a bit of a stretch - as they mention, Jordan never accepted the Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness and indeed most nations did not, including the US (Israel did) - nevertheless it is interesting that HRW is using it as a basis for an argument that what Jordan is doing is wrong.

Because by that very same argument, every Arab country is equally wrong by refusing to grant citizenship to people of Palestinian origin born in their countries - who now number in the millions. Not only is the Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness being violated, but also the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which states:

Article 7

1. The child shall be registered immediately after birth and shall have the right from birth to a name, the right to acquire a nationality and. as far as possible, the right to know and be cared for by his or her parents.

2. States Parties shall ensure the implementation of these rights in accordance with their national law and their obligations under the relevant international instruments in this field, in particular where the child would otherwise be stateless.

Article 8

1. States Parties undertake to respect the right of the child to preserve his or her identity, including nationality, name and family relations as recognized by law without unlawful interference.

As HRW notes earlier, "Palestine" is not a nation that is recognized under international law, which means that between the two conventions, every Arab nation is violating international law by refusing to allow children of Palestinian Arab origin to become citizens. (Even if you expand the definition of "nationality" and "identity" to include Palestinian Arabs, keeping children stateless is proscribed in this Convention.) Practically every nation on the planet has ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child. (Somalia and the US are the only exceptions, UNICEF explains why here.)

Human Rights Watch is not afraid to take on Jordan in defense of Palestinian Arab rights to a nationality. Do they have the guts to take on the entire Arab world - including the Palestinian Arab leadership who oppose the naturalization of their own people in other countries, against their will?

The legal and moral arguments are identical. But it is a lot less politically correct.

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HRW's Roth tries to weasel out of his libel

I wrote last week about HRW's Ken Roth's article vilifying Israel as a nation that uniquely hates human rights and that goes out of its way to trample the rights of its enemies.

One of the things he wrote was a purposeful misinterpretation of a statement by Tzipi Livni, which he used as justification for his sick thesis. He falsely wrote that she said that the IDF should not distinguish between Gaza civilians and terrorists, when in fact she said that Israel should not distinguish between Arab and Jewish victims of terror.

NGO Monitor traced the history of how Livni was misquoted and found that it originated in a similar accusation by Al Haq, a European-funded Palestinian Arab NGO. That libel then spread to other Palestinian NGOs, to Al Jazeera and finally to HRW which quoted it in its Rockets from Gaza report last August - in a transparent attempt to balance its rare criticism of Hamas with a calumny against Israel. The entire episode shows in a clear light how HRW's fact-finding methodology is flawed and biased, when they cannot even be bothered to read the original source of the quote and instead rely on biased and false interpretations from Palestinian Arab NGOs with a clear agenda against truth.

Now, Roth is backtracking. His article has been edited to take out Livni's quote, and to add a correction that, unbelievably, still doesn't admit the error:

On January 7, 2010, Human Rights Watch has updated this article following suggestions that the quote of former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni ("On my way here I heard that Hamas declared the man killed by a rocket in Ashkelon ‘one of the Zionists' despite being an Israeli Arab. They don't make a distinction, and neither should we.") is ambiguous on whether she meant that Israel will not distinguish between combatants and civilians. Other statements from Livni and former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert support the argument, and one from Olmert has been added here.

The quote was not ambiguous at all, but as we have seen in the pasdt, HRW - that bastion of uncovering the truth - will do whatever is necessary to paper over its own mistakes.

And what was the quote that they added from Olmert that they say proves Israel's intentions to wantonly kill civilians? It is added in parentheses:

As Ehud Olmert, prime minister during the war, reportedly said in January 2008 about the Gaza blockade, Israel would not create a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, but "[t]here is no justification for demanding we allow residents of Gaza to live normal lives while shells and rockets are fired from their streets and courtyards at Sderot and other communities in the south."

Olmert repeated the notion after the war, reportedly telling his cabinet that, "The government's position was from the outset that if there is shooting at the residents of the south, there will be a harsh Israeli response that will be disproportionate."

The fact that Olmert said that the response will be disproportionate does not in the slightest way imply that Israel intended to target civilians.

So the only quote they are left with is Olmert's quote that the residents of Gaza will not "live normal lives" - during a blockade.

As with the Livni quote, HRW is falsely juxtaposing the quotes together to imply something that was not said. The first quote was about the blockade, the second one was about the war.

Is HRW now saying that Israel, under the Geneva Conventions, is obligated to provide Gaza residents with cement and pipes and potassium nitrate that can be used for rockets against Israeli civilians, so as not to inconvenience them? Because that sure seems to be HRW's standard by quoting Olmert the way they did.

Even if Olmert had said his statement about the war, is that the new standard for HRW's interpretation of the Geneva Conventions they pretend to uphold - that wars should not affect the lives of the people who live in a war zone?

As usual, HRW raises the bar in its misinterpretation of Geneva to create circumstances where it is literally impossible for a nation to defend itself, especially against an enemy that purposefully and deliberately hides amongst civilians.

This is the tragedy of Human Rights Watch. Their admirable intention to protect civilians has turned into a twisted parody of reality, where wars are by definition inherently evil and where the human rights of the citizens of democracies are less important than others', where democratic nations are held to standards that are literally impossible to uphold, where the parts of the Geneva Conventions that justify circumstances of attacking civilian areas are constricted by the willful misinterpretation of the zealous and biased as to become invisible.

And HRW's leaders are willing to lie to accomplish their agenda.

(h/t t34zakat)

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HRW's Ken Roth shows his bias against Israel

HRW's Ken Roth goes out of his way to bash Israel in the latest proof (as if any was needed) that HRW has lost all sense of objectivity concerning the Jewish state.

The Geneva Conventions—the bedrock of the laws of war and one of the world’s most widely ratified treaties— turned 60 this month. But one government was not celebrating. In fact, Israel had already launched a campaign to undermine these essential rules for protecting civilians caught in war.

Notice how he writes that "one government was not celebrating," implying that Israel is the world's biggest violator of human rights and every other government besides Israel was celebrating the Geneva Conventions.

In fact, the ICRC has a page showing various countries' markings of the anniversary. Israel is represented there. But Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, Qatar, the UAE and practically every other Arab state save Lebanon and Iraq are not listed. His rhetorical excess in the very first paragraph of this screed is simply a lie.

Shortly after a UN fact-finding mission led by former South African Justice Richard Goldstone issued a report this fall lambasting Israel (and Hamas) for war crimes, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu instructed his government “to examine the facilitating of an international initiative to change the laws of war in keeping with the spread of terrorism throughout the world.” Israeli officials said the laws of war tied the hands of democratic governments.

There may be an argument that international law does not stop democratic governments from defending their citizens appropriately, but NGOs like HRW consistently choose to interpret those laws in ways that indeed do hamstring free governments. Either way, the idea that international law does not account for modern terrorism is not unique to Israel, unlike Roth's implication.

Israel is understandably frustrated by the difficulty of fighting Hamas, an urban-based armed group that indiscriminately attacks Israeli civilians. But the kind of asymmetric warfare that typifies combat with terrorist and other armed groups is nothing new. It was widespread at the time of the adoption of the Geneva Conventions in 1949, as illustrated by the militant Zionist group Irgun’s fight against the British colonial rule of what was then Palestine. And it continued during the many wars of national liberation of the 1950s to 1970s.

Roth has a plethora of examples of terrorist groups to choose that existed before 1949 - and he specifically chooses the Jewish Irgun. And while the Irgun did perform some horrible terror attacks against civilians, they were not the cornerstone of the organization's efforts, unlike modern Arab terror.

And as Yisrael Medad points out, a much more appropriate example would be the Arab terror wave of the 1930s. This terror was met with a huge British response, of dynamiting entire areas of the old cities of Jerusalem and Jaffa to facilitate fighting the terrorists - and making thousands of Arabs homeless.

The Geneva Conventions and their additional protocols have long imposed strict rules on the conduct of hostilities designed to protect civilians from the hazards of these conflicts. These rules apply to governments and armed groups alike, regardless of who is the defender or the aggressor.

And what provisions, pray tell, does international law have to punish armed groups who are not signatories to any of the international law conventions? Declaring that Geneva applies to Hamas or Al Qaeda as much as it applies to the United States or Britain or Israel is simply not true, because there is no way to enforce it, and therefore it can be ignored with impunity. Moreover, terror groups are not even subject to moral pressure, as they justify their very terror with moral arguments. This statement is either breathtakingly naive or an outright lie.

In fact, Israel’s problem is not that the rules are inappropriate for asymmetric conflict, but that the government chose to ignore them in Gaza. As the Goldstone report pointed out, when the Israeli military used such weapons as heavy artillery, flechettes, and white phosphorous (which causes horrible burns) in densely populated areas of Gaza, and when it authorized the massive destruction of civilian infrastructure, it flouted the law. No other Western military doctrine today would permit such indiscriminate attacks or deliberate destruction.

The IDF released a 159 page report on Cast Lead, and that was just an initial response. Notwithstanding what Netanyahu asked his government to investigate (which is very ambiguous), the IDF's report was based exactly on international law and it described many of the major incidents of the war in that very context. In other words, the IDF didn't argue that international law did not apply to Gaza - it argued that it did not violate international law at all.

Goldstone only selectively quoted the IDF document and did not address the IDF's legal defense of its actions at all. As far as I can tell, HRW never wrote a paper showing the flaws in the IDF's legal reasoning.

From the IDF perspective, the problem is not international law - the problem is the narrow way that groups like the UNHRC and HRW choose to interpret that law, invariably to the detriment of democratic actors.

If Roth would have spent his time actually answering those arguments, this essay might have had some value. Instead, he reverts to flawed HRW arguments - and he falls back on equally flawed Goldstone arguments - that use international law to single out and demonize one nation.

It is hardly worth mentioning that the US and allied actions in Iraq and Afghanistan have resulted in far more civilian deaths, on a wider scale, than anything Israel has done.

...[A]s the foreign minister at the time, Tzipi Livni, said during a wartime debate in parliament: “On my way here I heard that Hamas declared the man killed by a rocket in Ashkelon ‘one of the Zionists’ despite being an Israeli Arab. They don't make a distinction, and neither should we." With culpability running to such senior levels of government, it is no surprise that Israel wants to rewrite the rules.

Here we see Roth's bias, and disregard for the truth, in a clear light. The article he quotes indicates that Livni's comments were towards Arab MK Ahmad Tibi, who had just said that he is more saddened by innocent Arabs being killed by the Hamas attack than he is for Jews being killed, because he is an Arab. Roth tries to make it sound as if Livni is saying that the IDF should not distinguish between civilians and terrorists.

Israel’s view that one prevails in asymmetric warfare by pummeling rather than protecting civilians is not only illegal but also counterproductive.

This is again a purposeful lie, one that ignores and almost belittles Israel's almost superhuman attempts to avoid civilian casualties in a war that Hamas deliberately started to maximize the deaths of its own people. The cell phone calls, the flyers warning civilians (and terrorists) what targets are coming next, the rockets redirected away from civilians at the last second - all of those show Roth to be a liar, and his characterization of Israel in this sentence as having a policy of "pummeling civilians" is nothing short of slander.

This piece is simply a hatchet job by an organization that long ago has lost its own moral compass in regards to Israel.

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