First, a brief point to illustrate that the op-ed was not about principle. My last post did not touch on the last paragraph of Bernstein’s piece, which challenged the credibility of information gathered by Human Rights Watch. Bernstein wrote:

But how does Human Rights Watch know that these laws have been violated? In Gaza and elsewhere where there is no access to the battlefield or to the military and political leaders who make strategic decisions, it is extremely difficult to make definitive judgments about war crimes. Reporting often relies on witnesses whose stories cannot be verified and who may testify for political advantage or because they fear retaliation from their own rulers. Significantly, Col. Richard Kemp, the former commander of British forces in Afghanistan and an expert on warfare, has said that the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza “did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare.”

On the KABOBFest mailing list, Fadi made the strong observation that, “in one paragraph, Bernstein managed to dismiss the findings of HRW because HRW was not present during the assault, he dismisses Palestinians as witnesses essentially because they are Palestinian, and yet he manages to submit as support for Israel’s behavior in Gaza an argument from some guy who also was never there.”

I would also add that Israel prevented human rights researchers on fact finding missions, including those from the UN working on the Goldstone report, from entering Gaza in the first place. So this is not the result of poor research but rather blockades put together by Israel itself.

That said, Fadi’s latter point–that by quoting a random military commander Bernstein uses as supporting evidence the very kind of evidence that he criticizes HRW for–shows Bernstein’s inconsistency and the propaganda goals of the article.

But why Human Rights Watch? An informed person offers the following three explanations: (1) HRW has a small donor base that comprises people who are not progressive on Palestine; (2) appeasing these donors has always been a source of pressure for the organization; (3) HRW is thus seen as a low hanging fruit compared to other human rights organizations that release similarly critical reports on Israel (like Amnesty International or the National Lawyer’s Guild) but have much more reliable funding sources.

The crusade has been led by the Israel foreign ministry-linked “NGO Monitor,” which we have parodied in the past. NGO Monitor has stepped up its attacks since the release of the Goldstone report, which poses a serious threat to Israel’s legitimacy, not institutionally but on a mass scale. Other propaganda firms that advocate on Israel’s behalf have connected the dots. One day after Bernstein’s op-ed Peter Altman of BlueStarPR made an announcement that Goldstone was “a lie, a sham, and dangerous.” The three prongs of his argument were: (a) the same quotation by Richard Kemp in Bernstein’s article claiming that Israel took great care not to kill 1400 Palestinians (despite killing them); (b) the same op-ed by Bernstein; (c) material attacking the credibility of Richard Goldstone. Predictably, none of it challenged the truth of Goldstone and HRW’s findings, including things like:

• “Attacks in the Samouni neighbourhood in Zeitoun, south of Gaza City, including the shelling of a house where soldiers had forced Palestinian civilians to assemble;”
• “Seven incidents concerning ‘the shooting of civilians while they were trying to leave their homes to walk to a safer place, waving white flags, and, in some of the cases, following an injunction from the Israeli forces to do so;”
• “The targeting of a mosque at prayer time, resulting in the death of 15 people.”

Interesting to note is the conflation of Human Rights Watch with the UN Fact Finding Mission on Gaza and the ensuing Goldstone report. Those taking on HRW are taking on Goldstone in the same breath. The mission is clear: to deflect the most powerful international scrutiny Israel has ever faced for human rights violations. The tactics are shameful ad hominem and innuendo. Among its tactics are misrepresenting HRW employees who have collected WWII paraphernalia, attacking HRW for having Palestinian employees (see NGO Monitor on Staff/Board Members), and now, organizing with old HRW personalities to further coerce the organization into abandoning its important line of inquiry into Israeli human rights violations. As possible as it is to attack Bernstein’s claims as well as Goldstone’s detractors on the merits, we must, at the same time, be mindful that powerful interests are at stake. This discussion is taking place against the backdrop of shady back room power plays and the most dubious kinds of pressure and intimidation.

Correction/Clarification: An earlier version referred to “old HRW employees” but Bernstein was not an employee. Rather he was chair of the board. Additionally the claim that NGO Monitor et al are organizing with him should be clarified. It is not evident that a direct collaborative relationship exists, however they are all part of a campaign with similar talking points and aims, which is to protect Israel from scrutiny. The reference to the Palestinian employees at HRW is supplemented by NGO Monitor’s infamous one-line criticism that an advisory board member is “a Palestinian-American.”

While it is not difficult to see the weaknesses in Bernstein’s outdated and reprehensible version of human rights, his intervention raises the question of whether Palestinians have human rights, and whether that is all they have. With a liberation movement that has been strangled to death by corruption, collaboration and repression, international activists rely increasingly on the discourse of human rights rather than the discourse of liberation. Bernstein’s column, as objectionable and incoherent as it is, should provoke us to consider the benefits and limitations of this strategy.

Bernstein’s opinion that we should overlook Israeli human rights violations is not new. It belongs to another era in history, an era in which not only is it the White Man’s burden to enforce rights, but also to decide what they are and who gets them. Bernstein explains that as chair of HRW he “sought to draw a sharp line between the democratic and nondemocratic worlds, in an effort to create clarity in human rights.” However, he does not explain why or how this distinction is functionally useful. Furthermore he does not explain what kind of “clarity” is thus produced. To limit the scope of human rights work according to such a meritless distinction that is nothing more than a reflection of Bernstein’s political prejudices actually guts the entire normative framework of human rights.There is nothing universal about human rights if some actors can violate them with impunity. What would it mean to exclude Western countries from the ambit of human rights work in the age of Guantanamo, Abu Ghreib, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Gaza siege? Such an inconsistency opens the door to the old accusation that human rights activists have double standards when it comes to Palestine. Bernstein’s arbitrary distinction creates confusion and inconsistency, not clarity.

For that reason Bernstein’s criticism of HRW sounds more like a way of letting Western countries off the hook when it comes to human rights than a way of protecting the integrity of human rights work. With regards to Israel’s cowardly and barbaric attacks in Gaza, Bernstein asserts–once again obscuring his true claims with innuendo–that “there is a difference between wrongs committed in self-defense and those perpetrated intentionally.” Bernstein does not ever tell us what that difference is. Indeed, his circular claim actually defeats itself, as he admits that both kinds of acts can actually be “wrongs”–which is the job human rights researchers are tasked with anyway.

Israel ironically strikes the same tone when it responds to allegations that its military campaigns leave entire populations devastated in violation of international norms. The claim that Israel acts exclusively in self-defense cannot stand, but whether as Bernstein claims there is a difference between self-defense and intentional attack, and whether these are actually mutually exclusive categories, is irrelevant to the question of whether or not a wrong has been committed. The human rights framework must only be concerned with the latter question if it is to have any coherency. Unless Bernstein suggests that the ends always justify the means, thereby eliminating the usefulness of human rights, he actually offers nothing of substance to explain why human rights organizations should turn a blind eye to Israeli crimes. The evidence of Israel’s guilt is mounting, but Bernstein and the Israeli propaganda machine do not even try to rebut it. They simply ask we ignore it.

Bernstein’s plea that we ignore Israeli human rights violations is outrageous, but so too is the historically inaccurate tale he tells about Israel. For example, he blames Hamas and Hizballah for “depriving Palestinians of any chance for the peaceful and productive life they deserve” even though Palestinians were deprived of this “chance” decades before Hamas and Hizballah, which is not Palestinian, even existed. Both of these organizations were created to respond to Zionist violence and dispossession in Palestine and Lebanon. Israel precipitated them. Nevertheless Bernstein characterizes Israel as “the repeated victim of aggression” without providing any historical evidence for his claim. No country in the contemporary Middle East has started as many wars as Israel, nor does any country have so powerful an arsenal that is actively and continuously in use. Yet because Israel falls into Bernstein’s arbitrary category of “open” societies, it should be, by nature, immune from scrutiny by human rights organizations. Such immunity cannot stand if human rights organizations are to have any credibility or if human rights are to exist as more than a tool of imperialist interventionism.

As Bernstein’s example discloses, the idea of human rights has a shadow history of colonial-like attitudes that arbitrarily exclude certain groups and classes of people from their scope. While organizations like Human Rights Watch have taken a new direction, international solidarity activists must continue to ask themselves what the appropriate role of human rights is when it comes to Palestine. Even if we reject Bernstein’s imperial school of thought on human rights, we must still recognize that even the scope of alternative human rights analysis is severely limited. The Palestinian struggle has more grievances than a human rights analysis can address or remedy. Indeed, reports by Human Rights Watch and other organizations demonstrate their insufficiency when they repeatedly create a moral equivalency between Israeli apartheid and Palestinian freedom fighters.

We must therefore keep in mind that, while the evidence convincingly shows that Israel is an egregious violator of Palestinian human rights, that human rights alone are not sufficient for the cause of Palestinian liberation, and that the political solidarity front must be expanded so that it encompasses a discourse far broader than that offered by the human rights project. Any role that human rights will play in a solidarity movement must be transformative of the environment in which it operates, rather than confined by it. By this sense it should be obvious that a solidarity movement has more to contend with than the logistics of US aid to Israel and the Israeli regime, but also all those other discursive and institutional limitations that restrict modes of political mobilization and expression. Many activists and intellectuals restrict themselves to human rights claims when it comes to Palestine because they believe this is the “safest” or most “promising” course of action, but the same environment that produces that situation must also be challenged if a robust solidarity movement is to emerge. Otherwise, we will end up with little more than the corrupt political lobbies and fangless NGOs that we see before us.

According to our research, NGO Monitor is a political effort meant to distort and discredit research about human rights violations carried out by Israel. It is aimed primarily at Human Rights Watch. A recent article by YNet News, which includes dozens of unverified claims by NGO Monitor, underscores this claim.

Our public call, this blog post, cites NGO Monitor’s disproportionate attention to research performed by experts at Human Rights Watch. Among its missteps is a reference to Palestine between quotations (“Palestine”), denying Palestine’s right to exist.

It is clear that NGO Monitor’s credibility is tainted by the conclusary nature of its mission: “NGO Monitor’s objective is to end the practice… of exploiting the label ‘universal human rights values’ to promote… anti-Israel agendas.” It does not consider the possibility that the so-called anti-Israel agenda is merely an attempt to stop Israel’s flagrant disregard for universal human rights values.

We think that in light of this myopic view, and NGO Monitor’s established record of singling out Human Rights Watch, there is an urgent need for an independent and comprehensive review to put a firm end to NGO Monitor’s moral bankruptcy. Like Judge Richard Goldstone, we believe that “a culture of impunity in the region has existed for too long,” and we believe this impunity has extended to various pro-Israel apologists and character assassins like those at NGO Monitor. The time has come for it to end.