Founder says Human Rights Watch wrong on Israel
Robert Bernstein, the founder of Human Rights Watch, argues in The New York Times that the organization has lost its way when it comes to criticizing Israel:
As the founder of Human Rights Watch, its active chairman for 20 years and now founding chairman emeritus, I must do something that I never anticipated: I must publicly join the group’s critics. Human Rights Watch had as its original mission to pry open closed societies, advocate basic freedoms and support dissenters. But recently it has been issuing reports on the Israeli-Arab conflict that are helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state.
At Human Rights Watch, we always recognized that open, democratic societies have faults and commit abuses. But we saw that they have the ability to correct them — through vigorous public debate, an adversarial press and many other mechanisms that encourage reform. ...When I stepped aside in 1998, Human Rights Watch was active in 70 countries, most of them closed societies. Now the organization, with increasing frequency, casts aside its important distinction between open and closed societies.
Nowhere is this more evident than in its work in the Middle East. The region is populated by authoritarian regimes with appalling human rights records. Yet in recent years Human Rights Watch has written far more condemnations of Israel for violations of international law than of any other country in the region.
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In a perfect world, I would have no problem with Israel being called on the carpet for its mistakes.
However, ours world is far from perfect, and every percieved misdeed or mistep Israel takes is used by the forces bent on the destruction of the Jewish state and the Jews generally, as a weapon in their war against the Jews.
Unless or untill world bodies like the U.N., and the so-called human rights organizations find a way to cure themselvs of their collective anti-Semitism, it is incumbent upon everyone wishing to see Israel and the Jews survive to defend her in the propoganda war—all the time, to anyone who will listen.
What has ruined Israel’s integrity is the occupation. While Israel is a democracy and the only democracy in the Middle East, the settlement policies of the government portrays the fact that Israel is an occupying power and has no intention of relinquishing that power. The fact that the continuous building in occupied lands despite the appeal to freeze settlements by President Obama destroys Israel’s credibility and is not conducive to peace-making. Human rights abuses against Palestinians committed by the illegal settlers is shameful and the Goldstone Report must be viewed in this context as well. Two wrongs do not make a right - Hamas terror and Israeli illegal settler terror.
Shimon Klein:
There were no “Jewish illegal settlements” in Yehuda and Shomron until after three wars against the Jewish state., and decades of refusal (which continues to this day) to accept a Jewish state in their neighborhood.
What is wrong with you? What’s wrong with Jews settling and building in the above areas? Arabs constitute 20% of Israeli population. Kicking them out would be an act of brutality and racism, wouldn’t you think so? Then why do you support the racist policy of Judenrein “West Bank?” Why do you join anti-Semites in supporting them in their Nazi-like animus against Jews?
P.S. By morally equating Hamas with “Israeli illegal settlers” you show your lack of morality.
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Alan Jay Weisbard
10/20/09 11:55 AM
Mr. Bernstein’s comments surely come with a heavy heart.
Human rights organizations play an important role in the contemporary world. As President Obama’s regrettable decision not to meet with the Dalai Lama at this time suggests, considerations of realpolitik will always constrain the behaviors of big powers whose interests are necessarily complex and, sometimes, contradictory. (Israel’s precarious course on maintaining its currently frayed relationship with Turkey while responding to claims regarding the Armenian genocide is another example.) Ideally, human rights organizations should be less compromised by conflicting political agendas. Sadly, that is often not the case.
As one who has been publicly critical of some of Israel’s actions on the human rights front, both domestically and internationally, I share Mr. Bernstein’s frustrations that the organization he founded with high hopes, as well as a number of other human rights NGOs, have focused their criticisms hugely disproportionately on Israel, by far the region’s most democratic polity and most open and vibrant civil society, and have averted their eyes from far worse transgressions elsewhere in the region and around the world. This disproportion severely reduces the credibility of these organizations among fair minded observers sensitive to human rights concerns, reduces their ability to effect positive change within Israel’s imperfect but nonetheless democratic system, and aids efforts to delegitimate Israel on the international stage, a development contrary to efforts to induce Israelis to take necessary risks for peace. It also perpetuates a failure in the West to hold Palestinian and other Arab (and Iranian) regimes to international standards of human rights performance, and patronizes their leadership and populations as somehow “beneath” what is expected of others.
My own belief is that those who love Israel and seek a positive democratic and peaceful future for the State and (all) its people should hold Israel to high standards of behavior. But this must be done with some understanding and compassion for the situation Israel finds itself in (for which both Israel and its adversaries bear responsibility), and with balanced and proportionate recognition of other human rights failures, both by those in Israel’s neighborhood and by other far less democratic regimes around the world.
I thank Mr. Bernstein for his statement, and his devotion to the cause of human rights over the decades.
--The Wise Bard