By Daled Amos
With the ongoing talk about apartheid, I was reminded of a report that
targeted Israel for war crimes.
Not the B'tselem report.
Not the HRW
report.
Not even the Amnesty International report.
Instead, I was reminded of the 2009 Goldstone Report.
Of all the issues and topics that were going back and forth back then, one
thing that stood out in my mind was the denial -- the denial from one of the
judges on the Goldstone commission.
Desmond Travers, a retired Irish Army colonel, was part of the
United Nations Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict. Whatever else
Travers may have contributed to the group, one thing he seemed to make it his
job to do was offer implausible deniability.
Yes, implausible deniability
In an interview at the time with the Middle East Monitor, Desmond Travers came up with the following response to Hanan
Chehata:
So far, no substantive critique of the report has been received?
Well, one of the easiest ways to rebut a criticism is to deny that it was
ever made (this was back in the day, before it was fashionable to rebut
criticism by accusing the other person of being a racist).
Among the papers and articles that came out rebutting the Goldstone Report
on issues of law, fact and bias were those from:
o The Israeli government
o Alan Dershowitz
o David Matas (international human rights lawyer)
o Richard Landes (historian and author)
o Yaacov Lozowick
(historian)
o CAMERA
o Intelligence and Terrorism Resource Center
[As well as EoZ.]
But you would never know it from Travers, who made it his business to assure
everyone that there was nothing to see -- no criticism, no errors of fact
and no controversy in the definition and application of the law.
Fast forward to 2021.
When the HRW report came out, the group apparently adopted the same strategy
of denying that anyone could come up with a credible critique of what they
wrote. On July 9, 2021, Omar Shakir,
HRW's Israel and Palestine Director, tweeted:
One week later,
Shakir repeated his claim in an interview with Al Jazeera:
Strawmen?
Anne Herzberg, a legal advisor for NGO Monitor, notes
the irony in Shakir's use of the term:
Moreover, the invocation of “strawmen” is ironic, given that neither Shakir
nor Roth provided any identification of who or what those strawmen might be,
in order to avoid having to refute the substantive arguments.
More to the point, Shakir claims that he did not receive "almost any"
counter-arguments on questions of law or definitions.
He is ignoring
Eugene Kontorovich's paper, which oddly enough does address the issues of both law and
definitions that Shakir claims are lacking -- as well as addressing errors
of fact. Kontorovich has
a shorter post
as well.
CAMERA is apparently guilty of the kind of ad hominem attacks that Shakir
condemns. They note that Joe Stork, HRW's Deputy Director for Middle
East and North Africa who joined the group in 1996:
Before being hired by HRW, Stork openly supported Palestinian terror attacks
against Jewish civilians, and opposed any and all peace treaties between
Israel and Arab states.
But pointing out the anti-Israel bias of Stork is done as the context for
the factual errors in the HRW report that follow in CAMERA's analysis.
Joshua Kern, a lawyer in international law who has defended clients at the
ICC, also wrote
one of those posts criticizing the HRW report that Shakir missed. One of the points he makes is that the report appears to water down the
concept of "domination" in the context of apartheid from outright
"supremacy" down to an Israeli policy designed “to engineer and maintain a
Jewish majority in Israel” and to “maximize Jewish Israeli control over land
in Israel and the OPT” (A Threshold Crossed, p. 49). Kern notes
With respect to Israel, a policy intended to safeguard the Jewish character
of the State and to protect its citizens’ security scarcely reflects the
racism of baasskaap [an Afrikaans term for "supremacy"]. On the contrary,
recognition of Israel as a Jewish State has been integral to how the
international community has addressed issues arising from the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict since 1947 at the latest (when the General
Assembly recommended partition between the “Jewish” and “Arab” States). [emphasis ]
Will Human Rights Watch now condemn the UN General Assembly as encouraging
apartheid?
So how is it Shakir can claim that he is not aware of challenges to the HRW
report?
Herzberg may have the answer.
She notes that
in the actual report, Shakir's role in creating the report is mentioned:
Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine Director at Human Rights Watch, was
the lead researcher and author of this report. [emphasis added]
Yet in
a symposium last year
designed to allow for HRW and critics of its report to confront each other
-- Shakir was not to be found. Instead, Clive Baldwin and Emilie Max
provided HRW's response.
According to the report, Baldwin is a senior legal advisor at HRW who
provided program and legal review, while Max is a consultant who
contributed research.
So Shakir is the lead person responsible for the report -- yet did not show
up to actually answer for it. Lawyers who had a secondary role in
creating the report were there instead.
No wonder Shakir has no idea of the challenges to his report.
Monday, July 18, 2022
Elder of Ziyon
