Norman Finkelstein, November 29:
How has Human Rights Watch responded to the [Gaza] challenge?
It criticized Israel for destroying Gaza’s only electrical plant, and also called on Israel to “investigate” why its forces were targeting Palestinian medical personnel in Gaza and to “investigate” the Beit Hanoun massacre.
On the other hand, it accused Palestinians of committing a “war crime” after they captured an Israeli soldier and offered to exchange him for Palestinian women and children held in Israeli jails. (Israel was holding 10,000 Palestinians prisoner.) It demanded that Palestinians “bring an immediate end to the lawlessness and vigilante violence” in Gaza. (Compare Amira Hass’s words.) It issued a 101-page report chastising the Palestinian Authority for failing to protect women and girls. It called on the Palestinian Authority to take “immediate steps to halt” Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel.
Were this record not shameful enough, HRW crossed a new threshold at the end of November.
After Palestinians spontaneously responded to that “unknown voice on a cell phone” by putting their own bare bodies in harm’s way, HRW rushed to issue a press release warning that Palestinians might be committing a “war crime” and might be guilty of “human shielding.” (“Civilians Must Not Be Used to Shield Homes Against Military Attacks”)
In what must surely be the most shocking statement ever issued by a human rights organization, HRW indicted Palestinian leaders for supporting this nonviolent civil disobedience:
“Prime Minister Haniyeh and other Palestinian leaders should be renouncing, not embracing, the tactic of encouraging civilians to place themselves at risk.”
The international community has for decades implored Palestinian leaders to forsake armed struggle in favour of nonviolent civil disobedience. Why is a human rights organization now attacking them for adopting this tactic?
Is it a war crime to protect one’s home from collective punishment?
Is it human shielding if a desperate and forsaken populace chooses to put itself at deadly risk in order to preserve the last shred of its existence?
Indeed, although Israeli soldiers have frequently used Palestinians as human shields in life-threatening situations, and although HRW has itself documented this egregious Israeli practice, HRW has never once called it a war crime.
It took weeks before HRW finally issued a report condemning Israeli war crimes in Lebanon. Although many reliable journalists were daily documenting these crimes, HRW said it first had to conduct an independent investigation of its own.
But HRW hastened to deplore the nonviolent protests in Gaza based on anonymous press reports which apparently got crucial facts wrong.
Why this headlong rush to judgment?
Reminds me of this lecture I attended recently on human rights and the laws of war. The lecturer was trying to argue that it is lawful for a belligerent to target a building filled with civilians if militants are firing rockets from it (the key requirement is ‘military necessity’ – if a target is one of military necessity then you can shoot at it). She bemoaned the fact that some people thought this was illegal, but if only they realised that the laws of war are not interested in preventing conflict, only regulating it. The laws of war regulate death and destruction rather than outlaw them, in other words. That happens to be true, but the laws of war aren’t exactly verses of the Bible.
I think she was trying to emphasise her point by using that example, rather than trying to be an apologist for, say, Israel’s bombings in Lebanon. But you’ve got to wonder what type of cute world people like that live in when they’re so blindly, narrowly and naively focused on their area of expertise. Hope the parallels with HRW in that story are clear…
Speaking of HRW a friend and I used to play a silly game a while back when we’d fwd each other the most obscure conflict press release sent out by Human Rights Watch. There must be immense pressure on bodies like HRW to be seen to be do-gooders. Unfortunately that often means making glib indictments quite removed from reality.