I have written about Human Rights Watch and its relationship with Israel beforehand. The New York-based organization has repeatedly been easy toward Israel and its numerous war crimes. And it’s not a surprise why. HRW is after all an American organization and in the United States anyone or any institution that criticizes Israel comes under a watershed of attacks by pro-Israel fanatics. During the 2006 Israeli war on Lebanon, HRW was vilified for its mild critique of Israeli actions.

During the past Gaza offense, HRW was notoriously timid in its analysis of the conflict. Insiders at HRW say that the organization did not to offend donors who are pro-Israeli so they crafted their reports in the most mild language achievable therefore whitewashing Israeli crimes that killed over 1,300 people, of whom over 400 were children.

Mouin Rabbani, a contributing editor to Middle East Report and part of the International Crisis Group who is based out of Amman, has recently written a forceful critique of HRW which elaborates as to why the institution is sorely in need of a backbone.

“The Middle East has always been a difficult challenge for Western human rights organizations, particularly those seeking influence or funding in the United States. The pressure to go soft on US allies is in some respects reminiscent of Washington’s special pleading for Latin American terror regimes in the 1970s and 1980s. In the case of Israel such organizations also face a powerful and influential domestic constituency, which often extends to senior echelons of such organizations, for whom forthright condemnation of Israel is anathema.

Given that Israel is reliant on US subventions and public goodwill to a degree without precedent in the history of American foreign policy, there is considerably more than vanity at stake. If Israel’s stature in the United States were to be reduced to that of South Africa during the apartheid era, or Serbia during the Balkan wars, this would almost certainly have material consequences for the “special relationship”. It is a reality very unlike that between the US and Saudi Arabia, for example, in which the American public’s longstanding contempt for the House of Saud has proven basically inconsequential. In Israel’s case, image is a political resource of the first order, and its preservation a matter of national security.

Until the mid-1980s, before which Israel’s human rights violations — from deportation to area bombing and all in-between — were generally several orders of magnitude worse than during the subsequent quarter century, the human rights community simply ignored the question of Israel. . . . In private, such justifications would be augmented by references to political pressures and funding issues, often with a barb at one or more director or board members’ Zionist sympathies thrown in. That the first widespread exposure of the systematic application of torture in Israel’s prison system was reported by the Sunday Times rather than Amnesty International was no mere coincidence.

The eruption of the Palestinian uprising in December 1987 made it impossible for human rights organizations to continue relegating the question of Israel to the backburner. With Israeli leaders like Yitzhak Rabin publicly exhorting Israel’s soldiers to “break the bones” of unarmed Palestinian protestors, and television images that made it impossible to explain away such barbarism as a mistranslated rhetorical flourish, human rights organizations faced a real quandary: ignore the question of Israel and lose credibility, or confront it and lose support.

By and large they chose a third way, producing reports that were often strong on documentation but exceptionally weak when it came to conclusions and consequences. No less importantly, they adopted the criteria of ‘balance’. In effect, a Hubble telescope was deployed to discover Palestinian actions that could in any way be considered violations of International Humanitarian Law, with these subsequently placed under an industrial-strength microscope. Treatment of Israeli actions was rather more selective and careful. Primary issues such as the legality of Israel’s presence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, or its settlement enterprise in the occupied territories were avoided; detailed analysis of Israeli abuses, like deportation and summary executions, that indisputably constituted “grave breaches” of the Fourth Geneva Convention (the latter’s equivalent of war crimes) steered clear of unambiguous conclusions; and on the key issue of how to resolve the human rights emergency, such reports typically ended with exhortations to the Israeli government and military to show greater concern for Palestinian rights — as opposed to demands that Western governments use their various forms of aid to Israel as leverage to halt abuses.

In the process any sense of context, of this being a struggle for freedom by a dispossessed and occupied people against a colonial army — a context that in other cases the human rights community communicated so well — was entirely lost. All the more so because Israel was systematically spared the type of rhetoric and denunciations typically deployed with respect to similar situations in other continents and domestic repression in Arab states. If it was an approach that left neither the victims nor apologists of Israeli human rights violations satisfied, it at least met their minimal requirements — unprecedented exposure for the Palestinians, continued impunity for Israel. More importantly, it enabled the human rights organizations in question to navigate the storm and emerge relatively unscathed.

In the years since 2000, HRW pursued a consistent — and consistently effective — formula: criticize Israel, but condemn the Palestinians. Challenge the legality of an Israeli aerial bombardment, preferably in polite, technical terms, and vociferously denounce the Palestinian suicide bomber in unambiguous language — especially when raising questions about the latest Israeli atrocity. In HRW publications, explicit condemnations and accusations of war crimes were almost wholly monopolized by Palestinians. With Israeli citizenship a seeming precondition for the right to self-defense, the right to resist was for all intents and purposes non-existent.” Read full text.

Kenneth Roth, president of HRW, responded:

“I mean, first of all, his claim about, you know, pressure from US funders is just pure fiction. I mean, Human Rights Watch, in the last four or five years, when we’ve, I think, been most criticized for our work about Israel, where we’ve been, you know, denouncing war crimes by Israel, we’ve doubled in size. It has had zero impact on our funding. And we’ve been very fortunate in that we have attracted a group of funders who believe in the principles that we uphold and understand you can’t have principles for the rest of the world and not apply them to Israel. So we’ve built an organization that can survive that kind of criticism and has very well. Thank you very much.
And second, we don’t hesitate at all to call Israeli actions war crimes when they are. I mean, it’s obviously easier to denounce as a war crime, say, Hamas’s efforts to shoot rockets into civilian areas. That’s, you know, blatantly obvious. It doesn’t take a huge investigation to figure that one out. Israel, it does take more of an investigation. If they are firing into a civilian area, you need to figure out what were they shooting at, could they have hit it deliberately, were they using the right weaponry. Yes, these are more complicated investigations. But if you look, for example, at the investigation that Human Rights Watch did in southern Lebanon, we were very capable of deeply criticizing Israel and calling things war crimes when they were. We have a long history of that.
So these sorts of criticisms—I mean, frankly, we get them from both sides. You know, the people who reflexively support Israel regardless say that we must be biased against Israel, and we hear that all the time. People like Mr. Rabbani, who, you know, think we can never do enough, want to criticize us from the other perspective.
Final point, he says that we don’t uphold the right to resist. And that again—I don’t even know where he’s coming from there. Human Rights Watch never takes a position on why a war is fought, regardless of the side. We look at only how a war is fought. We apply the Geneva Conventions, and we say, you know, whatever your cause is, whether it’s suppressing terrorism or fighting for an end to occupation, that’s your business. Our business is to look at how you fight and, as objectively and carefully as possible, to hold both sides to the requirements of the Geneva Conventions. That’s what we do, day in and day out.”

Scholar As’ad Abukhalil states that Roth is lying about not considering pro-Israel donors when writing reports.

“I have received from an insider at Human Rights Watch communication in which the issue of “pro-Israeli funders” was discussed by none other than Kenneth Roth himself.”

I Report, You Decide