Please write to Kenneth Roth & Sarah Leah Whitson of HRW.
NEW: Reader
letters; updated Dec. 01, 2006 01:00 AM.
Even by the grim standards of Gaza,
the past five months have been cruel ones.
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Some four hundred Palestinians, mostly unarmed civilians,
have been killed during Israeli attacks. (Four Israeli soldiers and two
civilians have been killed.) Israel
has sealed off Gaza from the outside world while
the international community has imposed brutal sanctions, ravaging Gaza’s already
impoverished economy.
“Gaza is dying,” Patrick
Cockburn reported in The Independent, “its people are on the edge of
starvation….A whole society is being destroyed….The sound that Palestinians
most dread is an unknown voice on their cell phone saying they have half an
hour to leave their home before it is hit by bombs or missiles. There is no
appeal.”
“Gaza
is in its worst condition ever,” Gideon
Levy wrote in Haaretz. “The Israel Defense Forces has been rampaging
through Gaza—
there’s no other word to describe it—killing and demolishing, bombing and
shelling, indiscriminately....This is disgraceful and shocking collective
punishment.”
Predictably Gaza
teetered on the precipice of civil war. “The experiment was a success: The
Palestinians are killing each other,” Amira Hass
wryly observed in Haaretz, “They are behaving as expected at the end
of the extended experiment called ‘what happens when you imprison 1.3 million
human beings in an enclosed space like battery hens.’”
It is at times like this that we expect human rights organizations to speak
out.
How has Human Rights Watch responded to the 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 favor
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?
Was HRW seeking to appease pro-Israel critics after taking the heat for its
report documenting Israeli war crimes in Lebanon?
After Martin Luther King delivered his famous speech in 1967 denouncing the war
in Vietnam,
mainstream Black leaders rebuked him for jeopardizing the financial support of
liberal whites. “You might get yourself a foundation grant,” King retorted, “but
you won’t get yourself into the Kingdom
of Truth.”
HRW now also stands poised at a crossroads: foundation grants or the Kingdom of Truth?
A first step in the right direction would be for it to issue a retraction of
its press release and an apology.
HRW executive director Kenneth Roth “commended” Israel during its last invasion
for warning people in south Lebanon to flee—before turning it into a moonscape,
slaughtering the old, infirm and poor left behind. It would seem that
Palestinian leaders and people, too, merit some recognition for embracing the
tactics of Gandhi and King in a last desperate bid to save themselves from
annihilation.
(Many HRW staffers have reportedly been appalled by the
press release. Your letter of protest can make a difference. Email HRW Middle East director Sarah Leah Whitson:
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
—and HRW executive director
Kenneth Roth—
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
.) Please
cc letters to this website for posting.
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