April 11th, 2010 by NGO Monitor Staff | Category: Human Rights Watch

On April 11, 2010, Human Rights Watch (HRW) published its sixth report on the Gaza War, “Turning a Blind Eye: Impunity for Laws-of-War Violations during the Gaza War.” This is yet another example of HRW’s obsessive and disproportionate focus on Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict, at the expense of the daily human rights violations in other regions. In comparison, HRW has issued only a single report on the actions of the Iranian regime following the elections.

This tendentious 62-page publication also presses HRW’s campaign on behalf of the Goldstone report, and follows 40 such statements since April 2009. Goldstone was a member of HRW’s board, has a close personal relationship with Kenneth Roth, and his appointment, as well as the systematic bias in the UN report, closely reflect HRW’s agenda.

“Turning a Blind Eye” repeats the standard and unsupported HRW/Goldstone claim that “Israeli forces either failed to take all feasible precautions to verify that the targets were combatants, apparently setting an unacceptably low threshold for conducting attacks, or they failed to distinguish between combatants and civilians and to target only the former.” HRW’s recommendation, once again, is to single-out Israel via “international prosecutions” and referral “to the International Criminal Court in The Hague.”

As in its other “reports” on Gaza, “Turning a Blind Eye” claims facile equivalence between Iranian-supported Hamas attacks and Israeli defense of its civilian population, and goes on to disproportionately focus on alleged Israeli “violations.” Twenty-seven pages address Israel, versus nine pages on Hamas. (Other pages include an essay on “the duty to investigate,” recommendations, and other general material.)

Despite the forced resignation of HRW’s “senior military analyst,” Marc Garlasco, this report repeats Garlasco’s allegations as if they were credible and uncontested. HRW’s other reports on the Gaza war (“Rain of Fire,” “Precisely Wrong,” “White Flag Deaths”) have been shown to be highly problematic, both in terms of the facts and the pseudo-legal claims.  While HRW asserts that “The IDF’s conclusions …contradicted the findings of Human Rights Watch”, the evidence shows that HRW’s “findings” are political and not substantive.

Similarly, this HRW publication again references unverifiable allegations from local political NGOs (B’Tselem, PCHR, Al-Mezan, PCHR), without independent confirmation. An organization whose research methodology consistently violates professional standards for human rights fact-finding is in no position to question the “thoroughness and impartiality of the [IDF] investigations.”  (HRW has no methodological claims in the short section on Hamas, highlighting the moral absurdity of the comparison with Israel.)

The ongoing campaign against Israel, using the language of human rights, and led by MENA division heads Sarah Leah Whitson and Joe Stork, reinforces founder Robert Bernstein’s conclusion that HRW is acting immorally in using its power to turn Israel into a pariah state.

Instead of promoting the Goldstone campaign to indict Israel, HRW should concentrate on setting its own house in order. In addition to Bernstein’s denunciations, the organization’s moral failures have been documented in NGO Monitor’s “Experts and Ideologues”, Jonathan Foreman’s Sunday Times (UK) report (“Nazi scandal engulfs Human Rights Watch,” March 28, 2010), the expose on the Saudi fundraising dinner, and elsewhere.