April 1st, 2009 by NGO Monitor Staff | Category: Al Haq, Human Rights

Amnon Rubinstein’s powerful op-ed in the Jerusalem Post, “My own humanitarian crisis,” captures the distressing double-standards that human-rights NGOs apply in the Israeli-Arab conflict:

Any Israeli taken prisoner by terrorists there will not enjoy any human right accorded under international law, and his relatives and friends will not know anything about him. No human rights organization - including the Israeli ones - will utter a word of protest or demand that the International Red Cross be allowed to visit the prisoner.

NGO Monitor research into NGO silence and inactivity about Gilad Shalit demonstrates the truth of this claim.

Another manifestation of this phenomenon is the lack of NGO outrage regarding the Palestinian reactions to a Jenin youth orchestra performing for Holocaust survivors in Haifa. According to news reports, the head of the orchestra has been denied entry into the Jenin refugee camp, her instruments have been confiscated, and the music studio sealed off. Her crime? Making a gesture of goodwill and peace towards Israelis and Jews. (Update: Ha’aretz reports that the “PA expel[led]” her from the West Bank.)

NGOs do not hesitate to support Shawan Jabarin, the director ofAl-Haq, whose movement has been curtailed by Israel due to his senior position in the PFLP terror organization. NGOs vigorously protest house demolitions and sealing of Palestinian buildings by the Israeli government (even if the structures are illegal). When the alleged violations are committed by Israelis, there is no hesitation or silence.

Either NGOs have adopted the Palestinian narrative entirely, and accept the rejectionist agenda that prevents peaceful co-existence; or, paternalistically, NGOs do not expect any better from the Palestinian population, and do not expect human rights to be preserved in the Palestinian Authority.