Human Rights Watch - Obsession with Israel

The Sunday Times (London) has just published an article

on Human Rights Watch's most controversial

ex-employee, Marc Garlasco (whose hobby was collecting

Nazi memorabilia). The article also nails HRW on their

obsession with Israel/Palestine above other conflict zones

in the world.
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 t’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.

(Originally set up as Helsinki Watch, the group’s original

brief was to expose abuses of human rights behind the iron

curtain.)

“Nowhere is this more evident than its work in the Middle

East,” he wrote. “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… than of any other country in the

region.”

Bernstein pointed out that Israel has “a population of

7.4m, is home to at least 80 human-rights organisations, a

vibrant free press, a democratically elected government, a

judiciary that frequently rules against the government…and

probably more journalists per capita than any other

country in the world… Meanwhile the Arab and Iranian

regimes rule over some 350m people and most remain

brutal, closed and autocratic”.

Bernstein concluded that if HRW did not “return to its

founding mission and the spirit of humility that animated it…

its credibility will be seriously undermined and its important

role in the world significantly diminished”. HRW’s response

was ferocious — and disingenuous. In their letters to the

paper, Roth and others made it sound as if Bernstein had

said that open societies and democracies should not be

monitored at all.
It turns out that even Garlasco was not as enthused about

the anti-Israel line of HRW as his bosses in New York

wanted him to be:
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.
Emphasis mine.