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Israel Lobby Watch
By PHILIP WEISS
09/03/06 "The
Nation" --- September 18, 2006 issue -- -For
progressives who are even mildly critical of Israel, a never-ending concern is
the response of the Jewish community. Generally, Jews are among the biggest
backers of liberal causes. But a common refrain from liberal Jews is that Hamas
and Hezbollah represent threats to Israel's very existence, and so conversations
about policy take on an emotional and religious character. "There's a deep
schizophrenia in some of the Jewish community, and people who are at the
forefront of every single rights issue, from racial justice in the United States
to the ethnic cleansing in Darfur--on Israel, it crumbles, and there is all this
hand-wringing," says Sarahleah Whitson of Human Rights Watch. "And everyone [who
is critical] is successfully marginalized."
The struggle for Jewish hearts and minds explains the latest battle in the
ideological war over the Middle East: the firestorm over Human Rights Watch's
reports from the Lebanon war. The New York City-based monitor issued a
couple-dozen reports during the conflict, some sharply critical of Israel for
killing civilians, and has had to fight a rear-guard action to maintain its
standing among American Jews.
The leading human rights organization in the world, HRW has a dry and thorough
manner that reflects its executive director, lawyer Kenneth Roth, who is given
to tweezerlike fact-finding and incisive conclusions, with a moral backbeat. The
restrained tone has allowed HRW to grow by half in the past five years and stay
firmly in the mainstream. When I asked him if he had a special connection to the
New York Times, which frequently cites its reports, Roth quipped, "There's a
phone in the drawer."
HRW has often been critical of Israel while showing respect for its security
concerns. For instance, it has condemned suicide bombing as a war crime and also
assailed Israel's actions in the occupied West Bank. On July 12 the Lebanon war
began, and soon escalated into a wholesale air attack by Israel on Lebanon (and,
yes, a rain of Hezbollah rockets on civilian targets in Israel). HRW's first
critics were the left, which felt HRW was twiddling its thumbs as hundreds died,
when it alluded delicately to "potential violations of international
humanitarian law" in a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. HRW did
not issue more forceful statements in the first two weeks of the war, Roth says,
because its two researchers couldn't get into southern Lebanon. Once they got
there and spent two days visiting villages, HRW issued a fifty-page report
August 3, accusing Israel of war crimes in its "indiscriminate" bombings. The
researchers had documented more than a third of the reported civilian deaths at
that time and could show that in none of 153 killings were Hezbollah forces or
weapons "in or near the area that the IDF targeted during or just prior to the
attack." HRW alleged a war crime after it visited Qana, the scene of
twenty-eight civilian deaths on July 30. There Israeli missiles had hit a
three-story house in which people were sheltering. Israeli officials later
stated that rocket fire had originated from the village three days before the
attack.
HRW's statements got international news coverage (if only two paragraphs in the
Times) but put the group in the cross hairs of the Israel lobby, notably in the
New York Sun. The Sun linked Ken Roth with Mel Gibson as an enemy of the Jewish
people and said his moral compass was "haywire." It is tempting to dismiss the
four-year-old Sun--whose most memorable contribution to American letters has
been its statement that Iraq War protesters were guilty of "treason"--as a
right-wing rag. Its backers include Manhattan Institute former chair Roger
Hertog and Bruce Kovner, chair of the American Enterprise Institute. But Kovner
is also chair of Juilliard, and the Sun is a sophisticated newspaper, with
extensive arts and sports coverage. As managing editor Ira Stoll says, the Sun
has influence; it represents the views of organized Jewish leaders. Among the
Sun's readers, says Stoll, are some of HRW's biggest financial backers. Indeed,
in an editorial the Sun said that Robert Bernstein, HRW's former chair, was
having "private agonies" over the group's reports and quoted Morton Zuckerman,
listed as a donor of between $25,000 and $99,000 in HRW's 2005 report, as saying
the reports on Israel were an "outrage.... Human Rights Watch has lost all moral
credibility."
Roth responded to every attack the Sun printed. In one letter he spoke of
Israeli "slaughter" and wrote, "An eye for an eye--or, more accurately in this
case, twenty eyes for an eye--may have been the morality of some more primitive
moment." The comment was echoed in smears. The Sun printed a piece by Abraham
Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League saying that criticisms of the Bible are a
classic anti-Semitic stereotype, a diagnosis of Roth's motivation that Stoll
says he shares. "In my view unfortunately and dangerously, it's increasingly
respectable in mainstream circles to engage in old style anti-Jewish
stereotypes," says Stoll. (It seems Roth's personal history--he went into human
rights law in part because as a boy he had listened to his father's stories of
escaping Nazi Germany--is sinister camouflage.)
The Jerusalem Post and New York Daily News soon piled on. Never one to miss the
limelight, so did Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, who wrote on the
Huffington Post that HRW had invented facts. Dershowitz then invoked Jewish
solidarity: "Within the last month, virtually every component of the organized
Jewish community, from secular to religious, liberal to conservative, has
condemned Human Rights Watch for its bias."
Roth says that HRW was isolated in its role as Israel critic in part because the
prospect of the sort of vitriol he faced has scared other groups away from even
looking at the Middle East. HRW emergency director Peter Bouckaert explains, "We
always get attacked for our findings by the government involved. What makes this
case different is, it's not the government, it's the external lobby. We have a
difficult but positive dialogue with the Israeli government and the IDF. They
don't dismiss us as morally repugnant or irrelevant. They take our findings
seriously. The attacks are not about the facts, they're about insulating Israel
from any type of criticism."
Bouckaert says the attacks represent a real threat to HRW. "All we have is our
reputation for credibility and impartiality. We have a lot of Jewish donors and
funders, and I think Ken wants to be sure they don't think of us as not
impartial."
At the height of the criticism, HRW organized a conference call with Bouckaert
and two other researchers who were on the ground in the Middle East and members
of the HRW board, to explain their methods. "They made it clear that they
understood the political sensitivities and were bending over backward to be
impartial," says Michael Gellert, an HRW board member. So much bending over
backward can give a fact-finder a backache. Bouckaert says that Israel is "an
emotionally upsetting place to work" because while he sometimes feels outrage at
Israeli actions, he is compelled to report publicly in the most careful and
balanced terms. That pressure grinds researchers down. They leave or avoid the
subject, which is the aim of the critics. "We're one of the last ones standing
in the mainstream," says Whitson.
Remaining in the mainstream is vital to HRW. While Roth stuck to his guns on
Israel's "indiscriminate" bombings, and the organization repeatedly condemned
Israel's use of cluster bombs in civilian areas, it also seemed to go out of its
way toward the end of the war to blast both sides. The chariness alienated the
international left. Roel Bramer, a Dutch-Canadian, resigned from the board of
the Toronto chapter of HRW in August, saying its criticism of Israel was too
tepid. In a resignation letter, Bramer wrote, "Ken [Roth] is quoted as stating
that we abide by a 'fact/research-based application of international human
rights and humanitarian law'" and criticize governments on human rights grounds,
not political ones. "I feel that HRW should protest boldly and loudly against
this borderline genocide and the calamitous rubble and grief Israel has left
behind."
Roth does not appear to be too worried about his credibility on the left. He is
much more concerned about the right, even if that means fielding arguments about
whether the Bible is primitive. One board member, Shibley Telhami, an
Arab-American who is sometimes enraged by Israel's actions, says engaging the
pro-Israel community is vital to the organization's mission, and his own. "The
New York Sun is framing HRW in a context that resonates with a community that's
much broader.... What you have here is Democrats and Republicans, liberals and
conservatives, within the American political mainstream, not just the Jewish
groups, saying that this is about Israel's right to defend itself and let them
finish the job. But you've got to connect, so you think, What is the best mix of
effectiveness, credibility and principle? I struggle with that every day."
From:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14818.htm
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