The central claim is false and reflects ongoing bias. Amnesty’s statement entirely ignores harsh condemnations of this ruling by Israeli government officials from across the spectrum – President Shimon Peres, Prime Minister Netanyahu, ministers, the speaker of the Knesset, members of Knesset – the Israeli media, prominent rabbis, and Israeli NGOs.

President Peres declared, “The state of Israel is composed of Jewish citizens and non-Jewish citizens, and we all have the same rights, which include the right to practice any religion.” Prime Minister Netanyahu has said, “Such things cannot be said, not about Jews and not about Arabs. They cannot be said in any democratic country, and especially not in a Jewish and democratic one. The state of Israel rejects these sayings.”

This episode, in fact, demonstrates the strength of Israeli democracy. Discriminatory statements are rejected through democratic processes, a free press, and free speech by other citizens and leaders. Unfortunately, this is an exception, particular in the Middle East, where racist speech and policy are rarely condemned by biased groups such as Amnesty International. Instead of criticizing Israel, Amnesty should welcome the rigorous public debate that has followed the ruling.

But close analysis demonstrates that Enderlin chose the worst possible example, the worst possible individual, and the worst possible organization to illustrate his point.

1. Garlasco’s initial “analysis,” which was weakly based on “forensic evidence” provided by Palestinian “security officers” and technical claims beyond his expertise, was publicized prematurely in a press conference aimed at increasing HRW’s exposure and embarrassing the IDF. Garlasco’s account was contradictory and changed several times over the course of a week (for more details, see “Experts or Ideologues? The Gaza Beach Incident 2006“).
2. After reviewing more reliable evidence, Garlasco reportedly “praised the IDF’s professional investigation into the blast” and concluded that “We do not believe the Israelis were targeting civilians.” The Palestinian narrative of the incident, which Enderlin was advancing, was rejected by HRW.
3. Garlasco’s account then reversed, yet again. HRW issued a press release ignoring Garlasco’s prior comments and quoting him as saying: “An investigation that refuses to look at contradictory evidence can hardly be considered credible…The IDF’s partisan approach highlights the need for an independent, international investigation.”
4. It is also unclear why Enderlin chose such a controversial figure to make his case. Garlasco’s military “expertise” is highly questionable, and he was forced to resign from HRW following the revelation of his obsessive collection of Nazi memorabilia. HRW also imposed a gag order when Garlasco was forced out.
5. HRW reports on Israel have no credibility. The “Gaza Beach Incident,” like HRW’s promotion of the al-Dura narrative, demonstrates the ideological and political bias that permeates its Middle East and North Africa division.

The contradictions of Garlasco and HRW’s statements reflect the confusion surrounding the Gaza Beach incident, and the manner in which simplistic approaches from NGOs and journalists are incapable of achieving clarity or truth. Perhaps, though, it is not surprising that Enderlin, whose own credibility and integrity have been challenged, would turn to his colleagues with the same problem.
—
* On September 30, 2000, France 2 reported that Israeli soldiers shot and killed Muhammad al-Dura, a 12-year old Palestinian. Iconic images of al-Dura’s death, filmed by France 2 cameraman Talal Abu Rahmeh who was also the only witness, were shown worldwide, inflaming the Palestinian violence, and this was used to justify further attacks. Based entirely on this single source, major news organizations repeated the accusation and blamed Israel for “deliberately target[ing]” the child, and did not consider the evidence that this incident had been staged. An Israeli investigation showed that al-Dura could not have been killed by the IDF (based in part on the angles made by the bullet holes) and France 2 refused to release the unedited video footage. This incident came to be known as the “al-Dura myth.”
** On June 9, 2006, seven or eight civilians, including a number of children, were killed in an explosion on a Gaza beach. Palestinian officials accused the Israeli army of targeting the civilians with artillery fire. NGOs, including HRW, adopted the Palestinian claims and used the opportunity to attack Israel politically. Media reports repeated the unverified allegations, without examining the credibility or plausibility of the sources.

In other words, in HRW’s make-believe world, Hamas, which has no qualms about blatantly violating the rights of residents in Gaza, or murdering citizens of the “enemy” Israel, would immediately punish the perpetrators of rocket and suicide attacks against Israelis, if only the US, Israel and the UN would grant recognition.

HRW’s patronizing policy towards terror groups, which excuses them from conforming to universal moral norms, is particularly strong in the Middle East and North Africa division. As shown in NGO Monitor’s systematic analysis, this division, led by Sarah Leah Whitson and Joe Stork, displays a consistent bias that is antithetical to human rights.

The New York Times mentions the new Lebanese law allowing Palestinian Arabs some new rights to employment - but notes that this supposed improvement is, in many way, only on paper:

The law lifts restrictions on Palestinians’ employment in the formal labor market, though they would still be officially treated as foreigners. They would be barred from working as engineers, lawyers and doctors, occupations that are regulated by professional syndicates limited to Lebanese citizens.

The NYT, of course, mostly avoids the main issue of full rights - which would include citizenship for those born in Lebanon. It also refers to them as “refugees,” even though they are nothing of the sort. This section is telling:

“I am 51 years old, born and raised here, and this is the first time I feel like I am a human being,” said Abu Luay Issawi, who owns a grocery store in Mar Elias, a refugee camp in Beirut.

Electricity was out in the camp on Tuesday. No water was running, as is the case almost every day in Mar Elias, which is overcrowded and lacks basic infrastructure.

Mr. Issawi said he had graduated among the top of his class from Beirut Arab University more than two decades ago with a degree in engineering, but was never able to find a job here. “I don’t remember anything about engineering,” he said. “But it is nice to know that my son will have a better future.”

His neighbor interrupted him. “If I am going to live and die here, then I want all my rights,” Youssef Ahmad, 52, said.

The Times gratingly quotes a Human Rights Watch spokesman, who righteously claims that “This should be the start and not the finish line in the march toward achieving human rights for Palestinians.”

In fact, Human Rights Watch does not want Lebanese Palestinians to have their full rights. For them to have full rights would involve the right to become full citizens of Lebanon if they so choose, and HRW is against that right.

HRW twists international law to make the “right of return” apply to descendants. In a remarkably convoluted argument, HRW says:

The right [to return] is held not only by those who fled a territory initially but also by their descendants, so long as they have maintained appropriate links with the relevant territory. The right persists even when sovereignty over the territory is contested or has changed hands. If a former home no longer exists or is occupied by an innocent third party, return should be permitted to the vicinity of the former home.

They link to their definition of “appropriate links“. They first quote a UN committee comment on Article 12 of the International Covenant on civil and Political Rights:

Thus, the persons entitled to exercise this right can be identified only by interpreting the meaning of the phrase “his own country”. The scope of “his own country” is broader than the concept “country of his nationality”. It is not limited to nationality in a formal sense, that is, nationality acquired at birth or by conferral; it embraces, at the very least, an individual who, because of his or her special ties to or claims in relation to a given country, cannot be considered to be a mere alien. This would be the case, for example, for nationals of a country who have been stripped of their nationality in violation of international law, and of individuals whose country of nationality has been incorporated in or transferred to another national entity, whose nationality is being denied them.

Note that this in no way includes descendants.

HRW goes way beyond this:

In the view of Human Rights Watch, the clearest guidance in international law for defining the basis on which an individual can exercise a claim to return to his or her “own country” is provided by the convergence of the wording of the General Comments of the Human Rights Committee — “an individual who, because of his or her special ties to or claims in relation to a given country, cannot be considered to be a mere alien”– and the concept of a “genuine and effective link,” which arose out of the International Court of Justice’s Nottebohm case (2). While the Nottebohm case addressed the issue of nationality, the criteria that it sets forth are the most comprehensive, Human Rights Watch considers, for determining the existence of the right to return., it says :

“Different factors are taken into consideration, and their importance will vary from one case to the next: there is the habitual residence of the individual concerned but also the centre of his interests, his family ties, his participation in public life, attachment shown by him for a given country and inculcated in his children, etc.”

The Nottebohm case did not in any way deal with the children of the person contesting his nationality.

Here is another case where HRW substitutes lex ferenda for lex lata - the law as they want it to be with the law as it is.

In their zeal to “protect” a non-existent “right of return” for Lebanese Palestinians who were born in Lebanon, Human Rights Watch is denying Palestinians in Lebanon their human rights to citizenship in the country of one’s birth! Human rights are individual, not collective, but HRW is de facto adopting the Arab lie that “Palestinian unity” is more important than individual rights.

Yes, there are political issues involved in allowing hundreds of thousands of Sunnis to become citizens of Lebanon. Yes, there are political issues in the Arab world against the concept of naturalization of millions of people. But since when should HRW twist international law in order to justify these ultimately political decisions?

The entire issue is one of individual choice. If Palestinian Arabs in Lebanon are afraid that by becoming citizens, they would compromise on the miniscule chance that they would eventually be allowed to move to Israel and rebuild a village destroyed in 1948, they can choose not to become naturalized. History shows that most Lebanese Palestinians would become citizens in a minute if they could, and when HRW parrots Arab lies about how the “right of return” is more important than their rights to citizenship, then HRW shows itself to be a mere parody of a human rights organization.

Another issue is simple realism. The fact is that the majority of Lebanese Palestinians will never immigrate to “Palestine” or to Israel even with a peace agreement. The Lebanese will still insist on restricting the PalArabs’ rights even afterwards. HRW, evidently, prefers the Arab cop-out of an unrestricted “right of return” and its concomitant sentencing of an entire population to misery rather than working to help them attain truly equal rights.

If Human Rights Watch really wanted to protect the human rights of these people, it would call on Lebanon to allow people born in that country to become citizens of that country should they so choose. Their choice to misinterpret international law instead says volumes about how HRW is, effectively, a political pawn of the Arabs.

(h/t BC)

As documented by NGO Monitor, Plitnick was previously employed as the director of education and policy at Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). JVP is active in anti-Israel activities, including divestment, promoting the BDS (boycotts, divestment, and sanctions) movement, and campaigning to pressure US President Barack Obama to suspend “military aid to Israel” in the wake of the “Free Gaza Flotilla.”

In his role as a top JVP official, Plitnick defended the application of “apartheid” rhetoric to Israel, while referring to this as not “very useful.” Similarly, he promoted “selective and targeted divestment that is aimed exclusively at the occupation, not at Israel itself,” although this includes “campaigns against companies that do business with the Israeli military, such as Caterpillar.”

During Plitnick’s time at JVP, the organization launched the MuzzleWatch blog, using crude attacks on organizations and individuals with different views, including NGO Monitor.

Plitnick and B’Tselem’s Washington Lobbying Office

B’Tselem’s claimed mission is “to document and educate the Israeli public and policymakers about human rights violations in the Occupied Territories…. and help create a human rights culture in Israel.” But, in contrast to this statement, many of the NGO’s activities, whose funders include European governments, are focused on lobbying foreign governments and media in order to pressure Israel. In September 2008, B’tselem opened a Washington, D.C. lobby office.

At the time, NGO Monitor’s analysis noted the problematic nature of an Israeli organization using European funding to lobby in the U.S., as well as the choice of a JVP activist – and the selection of Plitnick – to head this activity.

As B’Tselem’s U.S. representative, Plitnick “briefed Congressmen and State Department staff; spoken at conferences, synagogues and universities, provided briefings for the press and at think-tanks, facilitated visits by Israeli human rights experts and established B’Tselem as the central human rights clearinghouse in Washington” (B’Tselem email, December 11, 2009)

Under his leadership, B’Tselem took a leading role in pressing the Obama administration to endorse the Goldstone report. A joint NGO letter to Congress criticized U.S. House Resolution 867, which condemned Goldstone’s report as “biased and unworthy of further consideration or legitimacy.” B’Tselem’s U.S. office circulated this letter and encouraged supporters to lobby Representatives to vote against the resolution (B’Tselem email, November 2, 2009).

At B’Tselem, Plitnick also launched primitive attacks against NGO Monitor, writing (falsely) that the Israeli government was “[p]artnering with the extremist right-wing group [sic], NGO Monitor,” in an attempt “to undermine its own human rights community…”

He targeted NGO Monitor on his Twitter account, including the use of expletives directed at Gerald Steinberg (Poor Gerald Steinberg, forced now into outright lies as even the IDF knows he’s full of shit. – February 12, 2010 – post subsequently removed. ) Plitnick also referred to NGO Monitor’s “rampant hypocrisy” (July 6, 2010) and “anti-democracy campaign” (June 30, 2010), and labeled NGO Monitor’s staff “radical loons” (June 18, 2010).

After the violent “Free Gaza Flotilla” incident, he wrote on Twitter, “Pure crime, [Israel] has gone totally nuts” (May 31, 2010). And after experiencing a rocket attack in Sderot, Plitnick described how “After feeling the impact of the Qassam, I could only imagine how much greater the impact of the Israeli shelling was in Gaza” (B’Tselem email, February 10, 2009).

The replacement of Plitnick by Uri Zaki suggests that B’Tselem officials have responded in part to the ethical and professional issues noted in NGO Monitor’s publications.  The broader questions related to the contrast between B’Tselem’s mission statement and its political lobbying activities outside of Israel remain to be addressed.

As an academic, Prof. David Newman’s attack on NGO Monitor was both wrong and irrelevant to the debate on politics in the university (”Left and right at the lectern,” Haaretz, July 30, 2010). NGO Monitor is a research organization focusing on NGOs (not universities), and  if Newman does not like the research and analysis, he should present his data and make the case.

Just as he disagrees with the sweeping characterization of the Ben Gurion University faculty as “traitors, criminals, and leftists,” Newman’s attempts to discredit individuals and groups who do not share his ideology are unethical. Political witch hunts from all parts of the spectrum have no place in the academic search for knowledge.

A May 19, 2010 news item on the website of Hamas’ Central Commission for Documentation and Pursuit of Israeli War Criminals summarized a visit between Hamas “Injustice” Minister Faraj Alghoul, and Whitson and HRW Researcher Bill Van Esveld.  According to the account, Alghoul expressed “his hope” that HRW “will commit to neutrality and objectivity,” while remarking that HRW’s reports equate “between the executioner and the victim.” In response, Whitson stressed that “the reason behind coming to Gaza despite the difficulties they faced is to listen to all parties directly so she will prepare more objective and impartial reports.”  Whitson closed the meeting by thanking “Alghoul for his clarifications and emphasized that she will take these clarifications seriously and their next report will be about the Israeli violations as the Israeli illegal settlement which is against the international law.”

Whitson’s tète à tète with Hamas officials to emphasize HRW’s “objectivity” and “impartiality” as well as its future anti-Israel campaigning is yet a further indication of HRW’s loss of “critical perspective” as well as “helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state,” as noted by founder Robert Bernstein Her visit also begs the question:  When was the last time Whitson made a special trip to Israel to reassure its leaders about the fairness of HRW’s reporting.

A major HRW complaint is directed at legislation to prevent support for anti-Israel boycotts. In the press release, HRW Mid-East and North Africa Director Sarah Leah Whitson asserts that “peacefully advocating for or against boycotts should not be punished.” Given her ongoing support for the Caterpillar boycott campaign (2004 – 2010), Whitson is reflecting her own agenda. In this framework, the “collective punishment” of Gaza residents is “unlawful,” but the collective punishment of Israelis and Israeli corporations via boycotts is a legitimate position. (Whitson also neglects to mention that the goal of the boycott movement is the elimination of the State of Israel.)

HRW’s opposition to the “NGO Funding Bill” concern proposed Knesset legislation that would demand complete transparency on foreign government funding to Israeli non-governmental organizations. While HRW acknowledges that the original version bill has been amended, rendering most criticism moot, HRW still finds fault with transparency.

HRW ignores the distinct problem of governments funding non-governmental organizations that are involved in political activities, and the potential for manipulation of Israel’s democratic processes. Here, too, HRW repeats Israeli NGO talking points, deriding the law because “Many right-wing and settlers groups… would be unaffected [by the law] as their money derives exclusively from private donors.” Indeed, the European Union and European governments exclusively fund a narrow segment of the Israeli political spectrum.

Perhaps part of the problem is HRW’s own lack of transparency about the foreign government funds it receives: If HRW were an Israeli NGO, the  “NGO Funding Bill” would require the organization to disclose the support it receives from the Dutch government via Oxfam NOVIB ($987,818 in 2007-8, continued funding in 2009). HRW claims that “It accepts no government funds, directly or indirectly,” but the vast majority of Oxfam NOVIB’s funding is from the Netherlands.

In summary, both HRW and NIF claim to promote “progressive” policies and democracy – except when it comes to the public’s right to know about their own agendas and interests.

In the article “IDF Recognizes Help From Israeli Human Rights Group,” (Nathan Jeffay, The Forward, July 14, 2010) my detailed assessment of B’Tselem was greatly simplified and highly distorted. As I told Nathan Jeffay in our lengthy discussion of this issue, the IDF Advocate General relied on B’Tselem for the limited task of identifying and interviewing Palestinians involved in the relevant incidents.

This does not constitute an endorsement of B’tselem’s main activities, the publications, promotion of the Goldstone report (including the lobbying office in Washington) or its dominant political agenda, and the bias that results. In this interview, I also noted the need to examine the testimony at the forthcoming trials in these cases, in comparison with the reports published by B’Tselem. In the past, B’Tselem has included members of terror groups under the category of civilians, erased evidence that is inconsistent with the political bias, and has repeated unverifiable claims by Palestinians. Unfortunately, all of these points were not included in this article.

Prof. Gerald M. Steinberg

President, NGO Monitor

Reporters Without Borders
Secrétariat International
Middle East Bureau
47 rue Vivienne
75002 Paris – France

Re: “Reporters Without Limits” (Hezbollah’s version of RSF)

According to media reports, a Lebanese NGO named “Reporters Without Limits” is organizing another flotilla to Gaza, seeking a clash with Israel. It appears that this group and its name was chosen to appear legitimate, and to conceal Hezbollah’s role.

We are writing to ask whether you are aware of this situation, and whether you are concerned about the use of the name “Reporters Without Limits” by a Hezbollah front organization? We note that a number of bloggers initially accused Reporters Without Borders of collusion with Hezbollah. (See here, for an example of translating “Reporters Without Borders” as “Reporters Without Limits.”)

We are also asking whether Reporters Without Borders has or will make a public statement on this issue?

Sincerely,

Naftali Balanson
Managing Editor
NGO Monitor

NGO Monitor (www.ngo-monitor.org) was founded to promote critical debate and accountability regarding the political activities of non-governmental organizations. We have over 11,000 subscribers, who receive our internet research reports, as well as in-depth monographs examining the funding, agendas and credibility of NGOs claiming human rights and humanitarian agendas that are active in the Arab-Israel conflict zone. NGO Monitor’s reports are quoted frequently in the press, academic publications, by NGO officials and donors, and in governmental and parliamentary discussions.