Is Human Rights Watch Losing its Moral Compass?
Franklin Lamb | 03.09.2007 23:58 | Palestine | Repression | World
Surely if Human Rights Watch did not exist most of us would want to see it quickly created and would want to join in that effort ourselves. Its work since its founding 29 years ago, as Helsinki Watch, has been generally exemplary given the conditions it sometimes finds in the 70 countries it operates in.
Yet its research, hypotheses, findings, interpretations, reports and recommendations are not infallible and, in fairness, HRW has never claimed that they are.
Its August 29, 2007 128-page Report entitled “Civilians Under Assault: Hezbollah’s Rocket Attacks on Israel in the 2006 War” is a case in point. This Report raises serious questions concerning HRW’s recent drift afield from its original mandate and whether it is becoming a captive of those who house and financially support the human rights organization.
For some perspective, HRW’s most recent Report is not the first it has issued on the subject of resistance to Israeli occupation and aggression over the past few years that has raised concerns within the academic and international legal community.
One need only consult the Mideast section of HRW’s website recently to learn that it is consistently critical of the Palestinian society in sundry ways ranging from domestic violence to various resistance activities against the illegal Israeli occupation which increasingly smoothers every aspect of Palestinian life.
Unfortunately, a deep imbalance, both in the number of reports being issued against the occupiers and the occupied, in terms of the failure to hold accountable the side committing the far greater abuses of human rights which is Israel has become the HRW’s modus operandi in Israel-Palestine as well as in Lebanon.
Last fall, in its press release “Civilians Must Not Be Used to Shield Homes against Military Attacks,” HRW lambasted Palestinian resistance groups for inviting their civilian neighbors to surround homes that have been targeted for air strikes by the Israeli military. HRW barely mentioned that 1,500 Palestinians had been made homeless from house demolitions in the preceding few months and that more than 105 houses had been destroyed from the air. Increasingly, HRW denounces Palestinian attempts at non-violent and collective action to halt Israeli attacks. HRW appears to mold principles, standards and rules of international law to achieve a political objective.
In its press release accompanying its “Findings of Fact and Conclusion of Law” HRW treats the recent appeal to Palestinians to exercise their right to protect their neighbors, and to act in solidarity with non-violent resistance to occupation, as no different from the dozens of known violations committed by the Israeli army of abducting Palestinian civilians as human shields to protect its troops.
Women volunteering to surround a mosque become the equivalent of the notorious incident in January 2003 when 21-year-old Samer Sharif was handcuffed to the hood of an army Jeep and driven towards stone-throwing youngsters in Nablus as Israeli soldiers fired their guns from behind his head.
HRW prefers to highlight a supposed violation of international law by the Palestinians — their choice to act as “human shields” — and to demand that the practice end immediately, while minimizing the very real and continuing violation of international law committed by Israel in undertaking punitive house demolitions against Palestinian families. They do the same with respect to Hezbollah.
In language that would have made George Orwell shudder, Human Rights Watch ignored the continuing violation of the Palestinians’ right to security and argued instead: “There is no excuse for calling [Palestinian] civilians to the scene of a planned [Israeli] attack… knowingly asking civilians to stand in harm’s way is unlawful.” With due respect, this approach is seriously flawed. There is no supporting morality or law for this position. Citizens, Palestinian, Lebanese and worldwide have every right, indeed duty, to project their property and livelihood by peaceful means. HRW knows better.
As Nazareth-based British journalist Jonathon Cook correctly notes , “This (HRW) reading of international law is wrong, if not Kafkaesque. Popular and peaceful resistance to the oppressive policies of occupying powers and autocratic rulers, in India and South Africa for example, has always been, by its very nature, a risky venture in which civilians are liable to be killed or injured. Responsibility for those deaths must fall on those doing the oppressing, not those resisting, particularly when they are employing non-violent means. On HRW’s interpretation, Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela would be war criminals.”
In fairness it must be noted that one HRW Report does urge the Israeli government to ensure that the army investigates the reasons for the shelling that killed the 19 Palestinian inhabitants of Beit Hanoun.
Yet, after four decades of reporting on Israel’s occupation of the Palestine, HRW has covered most of Israel’s many categories of human rights abuses and so now increasingly ignores them.
HRW appears to have Human Rights and international law monitoring fatigue when it comes to Israel. For example, despite thousands of violations of Palestinian rights at Israeli check points every day, they are ignored by HRW in favor of one report every few years.
HRW under Pressure from the Israel Lobby?
HRW has acted as an advocate with an Israeli brief against the Lebanese Resistance. As a Human rights organization it should base its judgment of whether the Resistance violated International Law by examining the facts and then applying the relevant legal principles. In failing to do this HRW violated its mandate in this case and instead argued Israel’s case while shedding its own neutrality.
–J. Benoit, PhD.
One explanation being offered in America, among human rights and pro-peace, pro-Arab and pro-Muslim groups as well as by Americans seeking to change US policy toward the Middle East is that Human Rights Watch has caved to intimidations by pro-Israeli members of Congress and the AIPAC led US Israeli Lobby. It is no secret that an increasing number of Zionist warnings and threats have targeted HRW and that some of its personnel and supporters have been advised that HRW would be destroyed if it did not balance its criticism of Israel with “equal criticism” of Hezbollah. There has also been an increase since 2002, of efforts by some Zionist organizations in the US, such as the Anti-Defamation League, and the American Jewish Committee have been instructing their members not to contribute to HRW until further notice.
In addition, some HRW researchers have long complained of pressure by Israeli officials and threats that HRW would be expelled from Israel if its reports were not “more balanced.”
Ever since the US based, but increasingly international, Israel lobby intensified its campaign to intimidate HRW in the late 1990s, which action increased following the IOF 2002 assault on the Palestinian camp at Jenin, Palestine, HRW appeared to increasingly follow a pattern of erroneously interpreting international law such as to refuse the Palestinians the right to resist the aggression and occupation and to protect homes from attack. HRW wrongly labels these civilians “human shields” even while admitting that most of the homes are not legitimate military targets. Along with this trend, HRW has remained mute about the common practice in Israel of building weapons factories and army bases inside or next to Arab communities, thereby forcing Israeli civilians to become human shields for the army. HRW has continued its disturbing trend during the 2006 July War when it again skewed legal standards to blame the victims rather than the aggressors.
As Cook has argued in recently, HRW goes soft on Israel because “constant press releases denouncing Israel would provoke accusations, as they do already, that Israel is being singled out — and with it, the implication that anti-Semitism lies behind the special treatment.”
HRW’s annual budget now exceeds $ 25 million. Its employee’s number more than 240 with 70% of its budget estimated to be provided by Jewish contributors. Its landlord at 350 Fifth Avenue in New York City are Zionists and it is increasingly apparent to some observers that HRW too often follows the expectations of the Israel lobby and sometimes rejects equity and justice to buy peace for itself.
Adding to the pressure on HRW are frequent warnings from Members of the US Congress including Tom Lantos, Elliot Cohen, Shelly Berkeley, Adriana Ros-Lehtinen, Gary Ackerman, among others, including AIPAC, who keep a close eye on HRW while more than once threatening to audit, investigate, and shut them down.
Observations on Human Rights Watch’s August 27, 2006 Report entitled ” Civilians Under Assault: Hezbollah’s Rocket Attacks on Israel in the 2006 War:
“The timing of the release of the Report led many observers to believe HRW “was spreading false publicity against Lebanon and weakening the national spirit.” One official Lebanese Judicial report on August 30, 2007 accused HRW of attempting to “prevent the resistance from protecting its country against Israeli assaults and violating Lebanon’s sovereignty.”
The following comment argues that HRW has taken the same skewed approach to Israeli actions in Lebanon during the 2006 July war, as it has increasingly done in Palestine.
HRW’s view of the law and the facts with respect to the Lebanese Resistance’s right of self defense during the July 2006 War
Most lawyers, if their case is quite weak on the facts, may, when preparing to argue their clients case in Court, stress to the Court and especially the Jurors, the heavy and solemn weight and technical aspects of applicable legal principles, standards and rules. They will sometimes tell the jurors that their own personal feelings and intuition do not count and must not interfere with what the law, in the opinion of the advocate, requires. It is an approach crafted to achieve the desired result and which is sometimes based on legal fictions and misleading technicalities.
If the law is against their client’s case the lawyer would likely zealously argue the facts in their clients favor.
It is submitted that HRW, in the Report under review, argues technical aspects and certain selected international legal principles it views in Israel’s favor. It chose this lawyerly approach because the facts of the July 2006 War overwhelmingly and incontrovertibly support Lebanon, the Lebanese Resistance and the civilian victims in Lebanon rather than Israel’s actions.
Some examples:
Throughout its Report, HRW explains and tries to excuse its lack of prohibitive evidence by blaming Israeli censorship:
“Citing national security concerns, Israeli military authorities limited the amount of information publicly available (to HRW) about various aspects of the war, including certain information on where Hezbollah rockets landed during the conflict. These restrictions limited our ability to fully investigate the pattern of Hezbollah attacks”
“We also encountered restrictions on information concerning certain industrial targets. For example, Kobi Bachar, chief of police for the Zvulon district north of Haifa, said, ‘Hezbollah was trying to hit the petrochemical plants in our area. We had hits within the factories, but because of censorship, I do not know if I am allowed to give you that information. In the end he did not provide it.’”
“July 19, Human Rights Watch researchers visiting Haifa’s Rambam Hospital met an IDF soldier being treated for an injury sustained when a rocket hit an air force base just outside the city. He said that the IDF had instructed him not to speak to the press, and in fact the news media never, to our knowledge, reported that rocket attack. A physician at Rambam who said he treated the soldier also told us that the IDF had prevented that particular rocket strike from being publicized.”
HRW complained in its Report that “Israeli censors did not allow HRW researchers permission to report missile hits at IDF bases and/or strategic facilities , or the location of those facilities”.
The fact that the Israeli military did not make it easy for Human Rights Watch to gather evidence they were seeking, or apparently hoping for, does not justify HRW filling in evidentiary gaps or imagine evidence based on intuition and then use that speculation to issue an international indictment against Lebanon and its resistance. HRW admitted that Hezbollah’s claims that its rockets had hit military targets inside Israel more often than the media was reporting were true based on its own findings.
HRW fails to sufficiently acknowledge or weigh the fact that in the north of Palestine, fixed military facilities, such as IDF bases, are located next to or in the midst of civilian settlements, i.e., the IDF’s frequent use of human shields. For example it is well known that the IDF northern command headquarters is located near the city center of Safed — also that the Israeli navy has a major training base on the Haifa waterfront, next to a major hospital and a neighborhood of low-rise apartment buildings.
Moreover, in many cases the IDF fired artillery into Lebanon from locations quite near to residential communities, such as the border villages of Zarit and Arab al-Aramshe. These artillery emplacements constitute military objects; in some of its wartime communiqués, Hezbollah announced that it had directed its rockets at such artillery positions inside Israel.
One of HRW’s most egregious conclusions and misstatements of international law is the following:
“Hezbollah’s attacks in violation of the laws of war, when combined with such statements indicating criminal intent, is strong evidence that some Hezbollah members and commanders were responsible for war crimes.”
HRW concludes there was a violation of international law and then finds criminal intent by joining certain use of puffing or verbal psychological warfare tactics by Hezbollah in press releases including threats to Israeli military authorities’ regarding possible attacks on certain areas if Israel did not stop its carpet bombing of Lebanon.
In concluding that these elements somehow “renders Hezbollah members and commanders responsible for war crimes” is not an accurate reading of international customary law or treaty law. Words in this context and on the facts HRW offer do not establish criminal intent
As Hezbollah leaders have stated, especially in its experience with Israel and in asymmetrical warfare theatres, psychological warfare is increasingly important in dealing with Israel military and political leaders. Israel certainly thought so when it dropped scores of thousands of threatening leaflets, sent threatening text messages to Lebanese phones, broke into TV and radio broadcasts and generally tried to gain military advantage by unnerving its opponents.
Moreover, Hezbollah threats had the effect of sending ten of thousands of civilians out of harms way. That was one of their objectives. By contrast, Israel warned civilians to leave and then bombed them as they fled. This occurred at Marwahin on July 15, at Aitaroun on July 16, on a minibus in the Bekaa Valley on August 10th and on more than one dozen other occasions.
Did not the Lebanese Resistance have a right to use psychological tactics and increase pressure on Israeli authorities to end their attacks by suggesting it had surprises and intended to match the level of response to Israeli attacks?
The psychological tactics used by Israel and Hezbollah during the July War were not illegal under international law.
That there are problems with the enforcement of International law is well known. Also there are some issues that need the attention of an International Conference on Revisions of The Laws of Armed Conflict. One subject that requires attention and discussion is the one raised during the July War by Hezbollah’s Secretary-General Sayed Hasan Nasrallah expressed thus:
“As long as the enemy undertakes its aggression without limits or red lines, we will respond without limits or red lines.”
This statement mirrors international practice. Should it be codified by convention? Does it accurately reflect international customary law?
Certainly the history of warfare reveals that virtually every army has used retaliation, sometimes massively. Dresden, Coventry, Berlin come to mind.
Were there errors in firing rockets by Hezbollah? Certainly. The Lebanese Resistance readily admits this.
Should HRW’s claim that Hezbollah purposely targeted civilian be credited? Not based on the evidence it tenders.
HRW ignored Israeli use of Human Shields
HRW also ignores a plethora of credible reports that Israel used Palestinian Arabs as human shields in the areas north of Haifa by placing arms depots, military vehicles, mobile launchers, and bases near and inside Arab neighborhoods while providing only the Jewish neighborhoods with adequate bomb shelters.
The record of military actions during the July War suggests that Hezbollah may well have known exactly where Israeli military installations were placed and monitored the movement and placement of Israeli mobile positions and launchers before it fired rockets. HRW admits this possibility but avoids the conclusion that Hezbollah had the right to target Lebanon-bound rockets from Israel as long as the military necessity outweighed risk to civilians.
HRW also condemns Hezbollah for firing on Kiryal Shmona but omits mention of the real possibility that Israel did have mobile military sites in that and more than 20 other locations where civilians were nearby.
HRW offers no proof that Hezbollah purposely targeted civilians. It leaves to one footnote the mention that Hezbollah urged civilians to leave the area of the Israeli bases and move south out of danger and that Sayed Nasrallah pleaded for residents to move south and away from Israel positions, declaring that “your blood is our blood.”
HRW seeks to excuse its lack of proof that Hezbollah targeted civilian areas and to avoid its duty to provide compelling evidence by stating that Israeli base locations are classified. This remarkably weak excuse for not meeting its burden of proof could be applied to any unsubstantiated assertion. Most war criminals classify their crimes.
If HRW is not able or willing to provide maps showing the position of Israeli bases in relation to targeting by Hezbollah it should withdraw its unsupported accusation.
The Donald Rumsfeld paradigm?
One of HRW’s main arguments is that “Hezbollah’s means of attack relied on unguided weapons that had no capacity to hit military targets with any precision. It repeatedly bombarded cities, towns, and villages without any apparent effort to distinguish between civilians and military objectives. In doing so, Hezbollah, as a party to an armed conflict governed by international humanitarian law, violated fundamental prohibitions against deliberate and indiscriminate attacks against civilians.”
Does this mean there were no legitimate targets? Did HRW later learn what the targets were?
HRW reports that, “In some of those cases, we could find no evidence there had been a legitimate military target in the vicinity at the time of the attack, suggesting it was a deliberate attack on civilians.”
Suggestions are insufficient when accusing someone of war crimes. Again, HRW’s suggestion is not proof of war crimes. Its suspicions do not meet its required burden of proof or the legal standard to accuse Lebanon’s resistance of war crimes.
Proof beyond a reasonable doubt is the lowest legal standard to be applied, for such a serious charge as war crimes. Under international law no one should be charged, as HRW does, with being a war crime unless there is overwhelming and irrefutable evidence. HRW fails to produce it and fails to meet its burden of proof.
Regarding not being able to find evidence, HRW adopts former US Defense Secretly Donald Rumsfelds edict that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” Rumsfeld was wrong and so is HRW. Absence of evidence is just that, absence of evidence. It is a neutral fact of independence significance and does not convict Hezbollah of War Crimes but rather it suggests the contrary.
That there was no apparent a legitimate military target on the date of HRW ‘research’ means just that. But that alone is not probative evidence that there was no legitimate military target at the time Hezbollah fired its weapon.
HRW concludes, “The justness of the cause does not affect the international humanitarian law analysis.” HRW’s New York lawyers are wrong if they truly believe this conclusion which defies basic common sense, morality and international customary law. Does HRW believe that there exists moral, political, or legal parity between someone who tries to kill another and the response of the victim attempting to stop the continuing life endangering attacks? The Lebanese Resistance had the international legal right and duty to protect Lebanon. By returning fire in an effort to encourage the aggressors to stop their carpet bombing of Lebanon their defensive action were not on the same moral level as the aggressors. Neither domestic laws virtually every neither country nor international customary law equates the acts of aggressors with the defensive acts of the victim. In doing so, HRW errs. International customary law incorporates international morality.
HRW charges that Hezbollah “repeatedly bombarded cities, towns, and villages without any apparent effort to distinguish between civilians and military objectives.” What probative, relevant, and material evidence does HRW have concerning the actual firings logs of Hezbollah, and what a particular target was at the time of firing and whether or not Hezbollah acted “without any apparent effort to distinguish between civilians and military objectives?”
HRW builds it case on language such as “In some of those cases, we could find no evidence there had been a legitimate military target in the vicinity at the time of the attack, suggesting it was a deliberate attack on civilians.”
Even Israeli military leaders have frequently expressed the surprise they experienced by Hezbollah’s prowess, tactics, and battlefield intelligence regarding Israeli positions. The fact that Hezbollah chooses for its own tactical reasons not to share all that it knew about Israeli targets during the July War with HRW (and Israel) does not prove war crimes. This is based damage that, according to examination by HRW, did not reveal a definite military target.
By way of Recommendations following its Findings of Facts and Conclusions of Law, HRW calls on the government of Lebanon to interdict the delivery of rockets to Hezbollah and implies it should disarm the Lebanese Resistance. This HRW demand constitutes interference in the internal affairs of Lebanon. It is for the Lebanese government, not Israel or HRW to decide how its country defends itself.
Finally, the timing of the HRW Report appears politically calculated to achieve maximum publicity for HRW given the great interest in Hezbollah. Within the next few days HRW will issue its report on Israel’s activity in the July war.
Given the sensitive, even tense atmosphere in Lebanon/Palestine of which HRW is well aware, it would have been preferable for HRW to issue one comprehensive Report containing all its findings and not single out just one side
The timing of the release of the Report led many observers to believe HRW “was spreading false publicity against Lebanon and weakening the national spirit.” One official Lebanese Judicial report charged accused HRW of attempting to “prevent the resistance from protecting its country against Israeli assaults and violating Lebanon’s sovereignty.”
HRW’s recent use of harsh, narrow, legalistic judgments on the Palestinian and Lebanese resistance suggests that it has been willing to trim its sails under pressure from the Israeli lobby and as a consequence it may have lost its moral compass and betrayed its mandate.
The international community needs the work of human rights organizations on behalf of victims of human rights abuses. Hopefully Human Rights watch will reexamine its recent work and draw the correct conclusions.
Its August 29, 2007 128-page Report entitled “Civilians Under Assault: Hezbollah’s Rocket Attacks on Israel in the 2006 War” is a case in point. This Report raises serious questions concerning HRW’s recent drift afield from its original mandate and whether it is becoming a captive of those who house and financially support the human rights organization.
For some perspective, HRW’s most recent Report is not the first it has issued on the subject of resistance to Israeli occupation and aggression over the past few years that has raised concerns within the academic and international legal community.
One need only consult the Mideast section of HRW’s website recently to learn that it is consistently critical of the Palestinian society in sundry ways ranging from domestic violence to various resistance activities against the illegal Israeli occupation which increasingly smoothers every aspect of Palestinian life.
Unfortunately, a deep imbalance, both in the number of reports being issued against the occupiers and the occupied, in terms of the failure to hold accountable the side committing the far greater abuses of human rights which is Israel has become the HRW’s modus operandi in Israel-Palestine as well as in Lebanon.
Last fall, in its press release “Civilians Must Not Be Used to Shield Homes against Military Attacks,” HRW lambasted Palestinian resistance groups for inviting their civilian neighbors to surround homes that have been targeted for air strikes by the Israeli military. HRW barely mentioned that 1,500 Palestinians had been made homeless from house demolitions in the preceding few months and that more than 105 houses had been destroyed from the air. Increasingly, HRW denounces Palestinian attempts at non-violent and collective action to halt Israeli attacks. HRW appears to mold principles, standards and rules of international law to achieve a political objective.
In its press release accompanying its “Findings of Fact and Conclusion of Law” HRW treats the recent appeal to Palestinians to exercise their right to protect their neighbors, and to act in solidarity with non-violent resistance to occupation, as no different from the dozens of known violations committed by the Israeli army of abducting Palestinian civilians as human shields to protect its troops.
Women volunteering to surround a mosque become the equivalent of the notorious incident in January 2003 when 21-year-old Samer Sharif was handcuffed to the hood of an army Jeep and driven towards stone-throwing youngsters in Nablus as Israeli soldiers fired their guns from behind his head.
HRW prefers to highlight a supposed violation of international law by the Palestinians — their choice to act as “human shields” — and to demand that the practice end immediately, while minimizing the very real and continuing violation of international law committed by Israel in undertaking punitive house demolitions against Palestinian families. They do the same with respect to Hezbollah.
In language that would have made George Orwell shudder, Human Rights Watch ignored the continuing violation of the Palestinians’ right to security and argued instead: “There is no excuse for calling [Palestinian] civilians to the scene of a planned [Israeli] attack… knowingly asking civilians to stand in harm’s way is unlawful.” With due respect, this approach is seriously flawed. There is no supporting morality or law for this position. Citizens, Palestinian, Lebanese and worldwide have every right, indeed duty, to project their property and livelihood by peaceful means. HRW knows better.
As Nazareth-based British journalist Jonathon Cook correctly notes , “This (HRW) reading of international law is wrong, if not Kafkaesque. Popular and peaceful resistance to the oppressive policies of occupying powers and autocratic rulers, in India and South Africa for example, has always been, by its very nature, a risky venture in which civilians are liable to be killed or injured. Responsibility for those deaths must fall on those doing the oppressing, not those resisting, particularly when they are employing non-violent means. On HRW’s interpretation, Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela would be war criminals.”
In fairness it must be noted that one HRW Report does urge the Israeli government to ensure that the army investigates the reasons for the shelling that killed the 19 Palestinian inhabitants of Beit Hanoun.
Yet, after four decades of reporting on Israel’s occupation of the Palestine, HRW has covered most of Israel’s many categories of human rights abuses and so now increasingly ignores them.
HRW appears to have Human Rights and international law monitoring fatigue when it comes to Israel. For example, despite thousands of violations of Palestinian rights at Israeli check points every day, they are ignored by HRW in favor of one report every few years.
HRW under Pressure from the Israel Lobby?
HRW has acted as an advocate with an Israeli brief against the Lebanese Resistance. As a Human rights organization it should base its judgment of whether the Resistance violated International Law by examining the facts and then applying the relevant legal principles. In failing to do this HRW violated its mandate in this case and instead argued Israel’s case while shedding its own neutrality.
–J. Benoit, PhD.
One explanation being offered in America, among human rights and pro-peace, pro-Arab and pro-Muslim groups as well as by Americans seeking to change US policy toward the Middle East is that Human Rights Watch has caved to intimidations by pro-Israeli members of Congress and the AIPAC led US Israeli Lobby. It is no secret that an increasing number of Zionist warnings and threats have targeted HRW and that some of its personnel and supporters have been advised that HRW would be destroyed if it did not balance its criticism of Israel with “equal criticism” of Hezbollah. There has also been an increase since 2002, of efforts by some Zionist organizations in the US, such as the Anti-Defamation League, and the American Jewish Committee have been instructing their members not to contribute to HRW until further notice.
In addition, some HRW researchers have long complained of pressure by Israeli officials and threats that HRW would be expelled from Israel if its reports were not “more balanced.”
Ever since the US based, but increasingly international, Israel lobby intensified its campaign to intimidate HRW in the late 1990s, which action increased following the IOF 2002 assault on the Palestinian camp at Jenin, Palestine, HRW appeared to increasingly follow a pattern of erroneously interpreting international law such as to refuse the Palestinians the right to resist the aggression and occupation and to protect homes from attack. HRW wrongly labels these civilians “human shields” even while admitting that most of the homes are not legitimate military targets. Along with this trend, HRW has remained mute about the common practice in Israel of building weapons factories and army bases inside or next to Arab communities, thereby forcing Israeli civilians to become human shields for the army. HRW has continued its disturbing trend during the 2006 July War when it again skewed legal standards to blame the victims rather than the aggressors.
As Cook has argued in recently, HRW goes soft on Israel because “constant press releases denouncing Israel would provoke accusations, as they do already, that Israel is being singled out — and with it, the implication that anti-Semitism lies behind the special treatment.”
HRW’s annual budget now exceeds $ 25 million. Its employee’s number more than 240 with 70% of its budget estimated to be provided by Jewish contributors. Its landlord at 350 Fifth Avenue in New York City are Zionists and it is increasingly apparent to some observers that HRW too often follows the expectations of the Israel lobby and sometimes rejects equity and justice to buy peace for itself.
Adding to the pressure on HRW are frequent warnings from Members of the US Congress including Tom Lantos, Elliot Cohen, Shelly Berkeley, Adriana Ros-Lehtinen, Gary Ackerman, among others, including AIPAC, who keep a close eye on HRW while more than once threatening to audit, investigate, and shut them down.
Observations on Human Rights Watch’s August 27, 2006 Report entitled ” Civilians Under Assault: Hezbollah’s Rocket Attacks on Israel in the 2006 War:
“The timing of the release of the Report led many observers to believe HRW “was spreading false publicity against Lebanon and weakening the national spirit.” One official Lebanese Judicial report on August 30, 2007 accused HRW of attempting to “prevent the resistance from protecting its country against Israeli assaults and violating Lebanon’s sovereignty.”
The following comment argues that HRW has taken the same skewed approach to Israeli actions in Lebanon during the 2006 July war, as it has increasingly done in Palestine.
HRW’s view of the law and the facts with respect to the Lebanese Resistance’s right of self defense during the July 2006 War
Most lawyers, if their case is quite weak on the facts, may, when preparing to argue their clients case in Court, stress to the Court and especially the Jurors, the heavy and solemn weight and technical aspects of applicable legal principles, standards and rules. They will sometimes tell the jurors that their own personal feelings and intuition do not count and must not interfere with what the law, in the opinion of the advocate, requires. It is an approach crafted to achieve the desired result and which is sometimes based on legal fictions and misleading technicalities.
If the law is against their client’s case the lawyer would likely zealously argue the facts in their clients favor.
It is submitted that HRW, in the Report under review, argues technical aspects and certain selected international legal principles it views in Israel’s favor. It chose this lawyerly approach because the facts of the July 2006 War overwhelmingly and incontrovertibly support Lebanon, the Lebanese Resistance and the civilian victims in Lebanon rather than Israel’s actions.
Some examples:
Throughout its Report, HRW explains and tries to excuse its lack of prohibitive evidence by blaming Israeli censorship:
“Citing national security concerns, Israeli military authorities limited the amount of information publicly available (to HRW) about various aspects of the war, including certain information on where Hezbollah rockets landed during the conflict. These restrictions limited our ability to fully investigate the pattern of Hezbollah attacks”
“We also encountered restrictions on information concerning certain industrial targets. For example, Kobi Bachar, chief of police for the Zvulon district north of Haifa, said, ‘Hezbollah was trying to hit the petrochemical plants in our area. We had hits within the factories, but because of censorship, I do not know if I am allowed to give you that information. In the end he did not provide it.’”
“July 19, Human Rights Watch researchers visiting Haifa’s Rambam Hospital met an IDF soldier being treated for an injury sustained when a rocket hit an air force base just outside the city. He said that the IDF had instructed him not to speak to the press, and in fact the news media never, to our knowledge, reported that rocket attack. A physician at Rambam who said he treated the soldier also told us that the IDF had prevented that particular rocket strike from being publicized.”
HRW complained in its Report that “Israeli censors did not allow HRW researchers permission to report missile hits at IDF bases and/or strategic facilities , or the location of those facilities”.
The fact that the Israeli military did not make it easy for Human Rights Watch to gather evidence they were seeking, or apparently hoping for, does not justify HRW filling in evidentiary gaps or imagine evidence based on intuition and then use that speculation to issue an international indictment against Lebanon and its resistance. HRW admitted that Hezbollah’s claims that its rockets had hit military targets inside Israel more often than the media was reporting were true based on its own findings.
HRW fails to sufficiently acknowledge or weigh the fact that in the north of Palestine, fixed military facilities, such as IDF bases, are located next to or in the midst of civilian settlements, i.e., the IDF’s frequent use of human shields. For example it is well known that the IDF northern command headquarters is located near the city center of Safed — also that the Israeli navy has a major training base on the Haifa waterfront, next to a major hospital and a neighborhood of low-rise apartment buildings.
Moreover, in many cases the IDF fired artillery into Lebanon from locations quite near to residential communities, such as the border villages of Zarit and Arab al-Aramshe. These artillery emplacements constitute military objects; in some of its wartime communiqués, Hezbollah announced that it had directed its rockets at such artillery positions inside Israel.
One of HRW’s most egregious conclusions and misstatements of international law is the following:
“Hezbollah’s attacks in violation of the laws of war, when combined with such statements indicating criminal intent, is strong evidence that some Hezbollah members and commanders were responsible for war crimes.”
HRW concludes there was a violation of international law and then finds criminal intent by joining certain use of puffing or verbal psychological warfare tactics by Hezbollah in press releases including threats to Israeli military authorities’ regarding possible attacks on certain areas if Israel did not stop its carpet bombing of Lebanon.
In concluding that these elements somehow “renders Hezbollah members and commanders responsible for war crimes” is not an accurate reading of international customary law or treaty law. Words in this context and on the facts HRW offer do not establish criminal intent
As Hezbollah leaders have stated, especially in its experience with Israel and in asymmetrical warfare theatres, psychological warfare is increasingly important in dealing with Israel military and political leaders. Israel certainly thought so when it dropped scores of thousands of threatening leaflets, sent threatening text messages to Lebanese phones, broke into TV and radio broadcasts and generally tried to gain military advantage by unnerving its opponents.
Moreover, Hezbollah threats had the effect of sending ten of thousands of civilians out of harms way. That was one of their objectives. By contrast, Israel warned civilians to leave and then bombed them as they fled. This occurred at Marwahin on July 15, at Aitaroun on July 16, on a minibus in the Bekaa Valley on August 10th and on more than one dozen other occasions.
Did not the Lebanese Resistance have a right to use psychological tactics and increase pressure on Israeli authorities to end their attacks by suggesting it had surprises and intended to match the level of response to Israeli attacks?
The psychological tactics used by Israel and Hezbollah during the July War were not illegal under international law.
That there are problems with the enforcement of International law is well known. Also there are some issues that need the attention of an International Conference on Revisions of The Laws of Armed Conflict. One subject that requires attention and discussion is the one raised during the July War by Hezbollah’s Secretary-General Sayed Hasan Nasrallah expressed thus:
“As long as the enemy undertakes its aggression without limits or red lines, we will respond without limits or red lines.”
This statement mirrors international practice. Should it be codified by convention? Does it accurately reflect international customary law?
Certainly the history of warfare reveals that virtually every army has used retaliation, sometimes massively. Dresden, Coventry, Berlin come to mind.
Were there errors in firing rockets by Hezbollah? Certainly. The Lebanese Resistance readily admits this.
Should HRW’s claim that Hezbollah purposely targeted civilian be credited? Not based on the evidence it tenders.
HRW ignored Israeli use of Human Shields
HRW also ignores a plethora of credible reports that Israel used Palestinian Arabs as human shields in the areas north of Haifa by placing arms depots, military vehicles, mobile launchers, and bases near and inside Arab neighborhoods while providing only the Jewish neighborhoods with adequate bomb shelters.
The record of military actions during the July War suggests that Hezbollah may well have known exactly where Israeli military installations were placed and monitored the movement and placement of Israeli mobile positions and launchers before it fired rockets. HRW admits this possibility but avoids the conclusion that Hezbollah had the right to target Lebanon-bound rockets from Israel as long as the military necessity outweighed risk to civilians.
HRW also condemns Hezbollah for firing on Kiryal Shmona but omits mention of the real possibility that Israel did have mobile military sites in that and more than 20 other locations where civilians were nearby.
HRW offers no proof that Hezbollah purposely targeted civilians. It leaves to one footnote the mention that Hezbollah urged civilians to leave the area of the Israeli bases and move south out of danger and that Sayed Nasrallah pleaded for residents to move south and away from Israel positions, declaring that “your blood is our blood.”
HRW seeks to excuse its lack of proof that Hezbollah targeted civilian areas and to avoid its duty to provide compelling evidence by stating that Israeli base locations are classified. This remarkably weak excuse for not meeting its burden of proof could be applied to any unsubstantiated assertion. Most war criminals classify their crimes.
If HRW is not able or willing to provide maps showing the position of Israeli bases in relation to targeting by Hezbollah it should withdraw its unsupported accusation.
The Donald Rumsfeld paradigm?
One of HRW’s main arguments is that “Hezbollah’s means of attack relied on unguided weapons that had no capacity to hit military targets with any precision. It repeatedly bombarded cities, towns, and villages without any apparent effort to distinguish between civilians and military objectives. In doing so, Hezbollah, as a party to an armed conflict governed by international humanitarian law, violated fundamental prohibitions against deliberate and indiscriminate attacks against civilians.”
Does this mean there were no legitimate targets? Did HRW later learn what the targets were?
HRW reports that, “In some of those cases, we could find no evidence there had been a legitimate military target in the vicinity at the time of the attack, suggesting it was a deliberate attack on civilians.”
Suggestions are insufficient when accusing someone of war crimes. Again, HRW’s suggestion is not proof of war crimes. Its suspicions do not meet its required burden of proof or the legal standard to accuse Lebanon’s resistance of war crimes.
Proof beyond a reasonable doubt is the lowest legal standard to be applied, for such a serious charge as war crimes. Under international law no one should be charged, as HRW does, with being a war crime unless there is overwhelming and irrefutable evidence. HRW fails to produce it and fails to meet its burden of proof.
Regarding not being able to find evidence, HRW adopts former US Defense Secretly Donald Rumsfelds edict that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” Rumsfeld was wrong and so is HRW. Absence of evidence is just that, absence of evidence. It is a neutral fact of independence significance and does not convict Hezbollah of War Crimes but rather it suggests the contrary.
That there was no apparent a legitimate military target on the date of HRW ‘research’ means just that. But that alone is not probative evidence that there was no legitimate military target at the time Hezbollah fired its weapon.
HRW concludes, “The justness of the cause does not affect the international humanitarian law analysis.” HRW’s New York lawyers are wrong if they truly believe this conclusion which defies basic common sense, morality and international customary law. Does HRW believe that there exists moral, political, or legal parity between someone who tries to kill another and the response of the victim attempting to stop the continuing life endangering attacks? The Lebanese Resistance had the international legal right and duty to protect Lebanon. By returning fire in an effort to encourage the aggressors to stop their carpet bombing of Lebanon their defensive action were not on the same moral level as the aggressors. Neither domestic laws virtually every neither country nor international customary law equates the acts of aggressors with the defensive acts of the victim. In doing so, HRW errs. International customary law incorporates international morality.
HRW charges that Hezbollah “repeatedly bombarded cities, towns, and villages without any apparent effort to distinguish between civilians and military objectives.” What probative, relevant, and material evidence does HRW have concerning the actual firings logs of Hezbollah, and what a particular target was at the time of firing and whether or not Hezbollah acted “without any apparent effort to distinguish between civilians and military objectives?”
HRW builds it case on language such as “In some of those cases, we could find no evidence there had been a legitimate military target in the vicinity at the time of the attack, suggesting it was a deliberate attack on civilians.”
Even Israeli military leaders have frequently expressed the surprise they experienced by Hezbollah’s prowess, tactics, and battlefield intelligence regarding Israeli positions. The fact that Hezbollah chooses for its own tactical reasons not to share all that it knew about Israeli targets during the July War with HRW (and Israel) does not prove war crimes. This is based damage that, according to examination by HRW, did not reveal a definite military target.
By way of Recommendations following its Findings of Facts and Conclusions of Law, HRW calls on the government of Lebanon to interdict the delivery of rockets to Hezbollah and implies it should disarm the Lebanese Resistance. This HRW demand constitutes interference in the internal affairs of Lebanon. It is for the Lebanese government, not Israel or HRW to decide how its country defends itself.
Finally, the timing of the HRW Report appears politically calculated to achieve maximum publicity for HRW given the great interest in Hezbollah. Within the next few days HRW will issue its report on Israel’s activity in the July war.
Given the sensitive, even tense atmosphere in Lebanon/Palestine of which HRW is well aware, it would have been preferable for HRW to issue one comprehensive Report containing all its findings and not single out just one side
The timing of the release of the Report led many observers to believe HRW “was spreading false publicity against Lebanon and weakening the national spirit.” One official Lebanese Judicial report charged accused HRW of attempting to “prevent the resistance from protecting its country against Israeli assaults and violating Lebanon’s sovereignty.”
HRW’s recent use of harsh, narrow, legalistic judgments on the Palestinian and Lebanese resistance suggests that it has been willing to trim its sails under pressure from the Israeli lobby and as a consequence it may have lost its moral compass and betrayed its mandate.
The international community needs the work of human rights organizations on behalf of victims of human rights abuses. Hopefully Human Rights watch will reexamine its recent work and draw the correct conclusions.
Franklin Lamb
Homepage:
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2007/09/is-human-rights-watch-losing-its-moral-compass-and-caving-in-to-the-israeli-lobby/
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Lebanese Resistance against what occupation?
04.09.2007 02:20
Lebanon still hasn't rescinded its original declaration of war against Israel's existence, which is also Hizbollah's declared view of Israel. Now Robert Fisk is reporting that Hizbollah is building a whole new network of fort and communications north of the Litani river in preparation "for the next war", all because Lebanon's in no hurry to sue for peace with Israel for the return of Shebaa farms? "We know whats' good for you m'boys, we'll fight for that land for you from your territory whether you like it or not."
Aha, now I get it Franklin, Hizbollah is by definition the legitimate resistance against the LEBANESE government because the Lebanese government is unlawfully failing to attack Israel to destroy it or at least get Shebaa farms back and the Hizbollah hostages. Rather than, of course, sue for peace in some way for the latter more like Egypt, the ANC or even the IRA.
A dissident voice
All organisations are prone to corruption of the original pure thought
04.09.2007 07:26
I think all organisations are prone to corruption of the original thought - Human Rights Watch is no exception. Lets look at Liberty and Amnesty International. All one can do is challenge people with views which are really ill-disguised prejudice. You have to recognise humanitarian sociey to find it - something these organisations with their merchant bank direct debit card schemes have forgotten. It will take people or another organisation to challenge this but then will have to have the strength to keep on challenging themselves.
End illegal wars now
Didn't Jonathan Cook answer this question already?
04.09.2007 08:46
Human Rights Watch has lost its moral bearings
Scanner
What's the source
04.09.2007 12:02
Estimated by who?
Interested to know
HRW Acknowledges Israeli War Crimes
07.09.2007 00:03
By The Associated Press
In its harshest condemnation of Israel since the Second Lebanon War, Human Rights Watch charged that most of the Lebanese civilian casualties came from indiscriminate Israeli air strikes, according to a report to released Thursday.
Presenting the group's findings at a news conference, Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth said there were only rare cases of Hezbollah operating in civilian villages.
"To the contrary, once the war started, most Hezbollah military officials and even many political officials left the villages," he said. And indeed what we found is that most Hezbollah military activity was conducted from prepared positions outside Lebanese villages in the hills and valleys around."
Israel has said that it attacked civilian areas because Hezbollah set up rocket launchers in villages and towns.
(But this was quickly exposed as a bald-faced, proven LIE)
More than 1,000 Lebanese were killed in the 34-day conflict last summer, which began after Hezbollah staged a cross-border raid, killing three Israel Defense Forces soldiers and capturing two others, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev. They are still being held.
Israel Air Force warplanes targeted Lebanese infrastructure, including bridges and Beirut Airport, and heavily damaged a neighborhood in Beirut known as a Hezbollah stronghold, as well as attacking Hezbollah centers in villages near the border. Hezbollah fired nearly 4,000 rockets at northern Israel, killing 44 civilians. In the fighting, 119 Israeli soldiers were killed.
Roth said a in the statement issued before the report's release that, "Israel wrongfully acted as if all civilians had heeded its warnings to evacuate southern Lebanon when it knew they had not, disregarding its continuing legal duty to distinguish between military targets and civilians."
He added, "Issuing warnings doesn't make indiscriminate attacks lawful."
Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev rejected the report's findings. "Hezbollah adopted a deliberate strategy of shielding itself behind the civilian population and turning the civilians in Lebanon into a human shield," he said, charging that Hezbollah broke the first fundamental rule of war in that they deliberately exploited the civilian population of Lebanon as a human shield.
The full report was released at a news conference in Jerusalem on Thursday. Human Rights Watch had to cancel a similar news conference in Beirut last month because of threats of Hezbollah protests. That report accused Hezbollah of firing rockets indiscriminately at civilian areas in Israel.
Human Rights Watch said it investigated 94 cases of Israeli air, artillery and ground attacks to discern the circumstances surrounding the deaths of 510 civilians and 51 combatants, about half the death toll in Lebanon in the conflict.
The group said simple movement of vehicles or people, such as attempting to buy bread or moving around private homes, could trigger a deadly Israeli attack. The group charged that Israeli aircraft targeted vehicles carrying fleeing civilians.
Roth said that Hezbollah guerrillas did not wear uniforms, making it hard to pick them out from civilians, but that did not justify the Israeli military's failure to distinguish between them. He said the laws of war dictate if in doubt to treat the person as a civilian.
The report said the investigation refutes the argument made by Israeli officials that most of the Lebanese civilian casualties were due to Hezbollah routinely hiding among civilians. It said Hezbollah did at times fire rockets from, and store weapons in, populated areas and deploy its forces among the civilian population.
However, the human rights group said it found no evidence in these cases of separate legal violation of shielding, which is the deliberate use of civilians to render combatants immune from attack. Also, it said, Hezbollah conducted most of its activities and stored most of its weapons away from civilians.
Regev said there were countless documented examples of civilian facilities being used for military purposes - missiles in houses, mosques and schools used for storing weapons.
The report found that Hezbollah used hilltop UN positions for shelling Israel, which it said might be shielding, but said that required further investigation.
Nearly All the War Crimes Were Israel's
The Second Lebanon War, A Year Later
By JONATHAN COOK
This week marks a year since the end of hostilities now officially called the Second Lebanon war by Israelis. A month of fighting -- mostly Israeli aerial bombardment of Lebanon, and rocket attacks from the Shia militia Hizbullah on northern Israel in response -- ended with more than 1,000 Lebanese civilians and a small but unknown number of Hizbullah fighters dead, as well as 119 Israeli soldiers and 43 civilians.
When Israel and the United States realised that Hizbullah could not be bombed into submission, they pushed a resolution, 1701, through the United Nations. It placed an expanded international peacekeeping force, UNIFIL, in south Lebanon to keep Hizbullah in check and try to disarm its few thousand fighters.
But many significant developments since the war have gone unnoticed, including several that seriously put in question Israel's account of what happened last summer. This is old ground worth revisiting for that reason alone.
The war began on 12 July, when Israel launched waves of air strikes on Lebanon after Hizbullah killed three soldiers and captured two more on the northern border. (A further five troops were killed by a land mine when their tank crossed into Lebanon in hot pursuit.) Hizbullah had long been warning that it would seize soldiers if it had the chance, in an effort to push Israel into a prisoner exchange. Israel has been holding a handful of Lebanese prisoners since it withdrew from its two-decade occupation of south Lebanon in 2000.
The Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, who has been widely blamed for the army's failure to subdue Hizbullah, appointed the Winograd Committee to investigate what went wrong. So far Winograd has been long on pointing out the country's military and political failures and short on explaining how the mistakes were made or who made them. Olmert is still in power, even if hugely unpopular.
In the meantime, there is every indication that Israel is planning another round of fighting against Hizbullah after it has "learnt the lessons" from the last war. The new defence minister, Ehud Barak, who was responsible for the 2000 withdrawal, has made it a priority to develop anti-missile systems such as "Iron Dome" to neutralise the rocket threat from Hizbullah, using some of the recently announced $30 billion of American military aid.
It has been left to the Israeli media to begin rewriting the history of last summer. Last weekend, an editorial in the liberal Haaretz newspaper went so far as to admit that this was "a war initiated by Israel against a relatively small guerrilla group". Israel's supporters, including high-profile defenders like Alan Dershowitz in the US who claimed that Israel had no choice but to bomb Lebanon, must have been squirming in their seats.
There are several reasons why Ha'aretz may have reached this new assessment.
Recent reports have revealed that one of the main justifications for Hizbullah's continuing resistance -- that Israel failed to withdraw fully from Lebanese territory in 2000 -- is now supported by the UN. Last month its cartographers quietly admitted that Lebanon is right in claiming sovereignty over a small fertile area known as the Shebaa Farms, still occupied by Israel. Israel argues that the territory is Syrian and will be returned in future peace talks with Damascus, even though Syria backs Lebanon's position. The UN's admission has been mostly ignored by the international media.
One of Israel's main claims during the war was that it made every effort to protect Lebanese civilians from its aerial bombardments. The casualty figures suggested otherwise, but increasingly so too does other evidence.
A shocking aspect of the war was Israel's firing of at least a million cluster bombs, old munitions supplied by the US with a failure rate as high as 50 per cent, in the last days of fighting. The tiny bomblets, effectively small land mines, were left littering south Lebanon after the UN-brokered ceasefire, and are reported so far to have killed 30 civilians and wounded at least another 180. Israeli commanders have admitted firing 1.2 million such bomblets, while the UN puts the figure closer to 3 million.
At the time, it looked suspiciously as if Israel had taken the brief opportunity before the war's end to make south Lebanon -- the heartland of both the country's Shia population and its militia, Hizbullah -- uninhabitable, and to prevent the return of hundreds of thousands of Shia who had fled Israel's earlier bombing campaigns.
Israel's use of cluster bombs has been described as a war crime by human rights organisations. According to the rules set by Israel's then chief of staff, Dan Halutz, the bombs should have been used only in open and unpopulated areas -- although with such a high failure rate, this would have done little to prevent later civilian casualties.
After the war, the army ordered an investigation, mainly to placate Washington, which was concerned at the widely reported fact that it had supplied the munitions. The findings, which should have been published months ago, have yet to be made public.
The delay is not surprising. An initial report by the army, leaked to the Israeli media, discovered that the cluster bombs had been fired into Lebanese population centres in gross violation of international law. The order was apparently given by the head of the Northern Command at the time, Udi Adam. A US State Department investigation reached a similar conclusion.
Another claim, one that Israel hoped might justify the large number of Lebanese civilians it killed during the war, was that Hizbullah fighters had been regularly hiding and firing rockets from among south Lebanon's civilian population. Human rights groups found scant evidence of this, but a senior UN official, Jan Egeland, offered succour by accusing Hizbullah of "cowardly blending".
There were always strong reasons for suspecting the Israeli claim to be untrue. Hizbullah had invested much effort in developing an elaborate system of tunnels and underground bunkers in the countryside, which Israel knew little about, in which it hid its rockets and from which fighters attacked Israeli soldiers as they tried to launch a ground invasion. Also, common sense suggests that Hizbullah fighters would have been unwilling to put their families, who live in south Lebanon's villages, in danger by launching rockets from among them.
Now Israeli front pages are carrying reports from Israeli military sources that put in serious doubt Israel's claims.
Since the war's end Hizbullah has apparently relocated most of its rockets to conceal them from the UN peacekeepers, who have been carrying out extensive searches of south Lebanon to disarm Hizbullah under the terms of Resolution 1701. According to the UNIFIL, some 33 of these underground bunkers or more than 90 per cent -- have been located and Hizbullah weapons discovered there, including rockets and launchers, destroyed.
The Israeli media has noted that the Israeli army calls these sites "nature reserves"; similarly, the UN has made no mention of finding urban-based Hizbullah bunkers. Relying on military sources, Haaretz reported last month: "Most of the rockets fired against Israel during the war last year were launched from the 'nature reserves'." In short, even Israel is no longer claiming that Hizbullah was firing its rockets from among civilians.
According to the UN report, Hizbullah has moved the rockets out of the underground bunkers and abandoned its rural launch pads. Most rockets, it is believed, have gone north of the Litani River, beyond the range of the UN monitors. But some, according to the Israeli army, may have been moved into nearby Shia villages to hide them from the UN.
As a result, Haaretz noted that Israeli commanders had issued a warning to Lebanon that in future hostilities the army "will not hesitate to bomb -- and even totally destroy -- urban areas after it gives Lebanese civilians the chance to flee". How this would diverge from Israel's policy during the war, when Hizbullah was based in its "nature reserves" but Lebanese civilians were still bombed in their towns and villages, was not made clear.
If the Israeli army's new claims are true (unlike the old ones), Hizbullah's movement of some of its rockets into villages should be condemned. But not by Israel, whose army is breaking international law by concealing its weapons in civilian areas on a far grander scale.
As a first-hand observer of the fighting from Israel's side of the border last year, I noted on several occasions that Israel had built many of its permanent military installations, including weapons factories and army camps, and set up temporary artillery positions next to -- and in some cases inside -- civilian communities in the north of Israel.
Many of those communities are Arab: Arab citizens constitute about half of the Galilee's population. Locating military bases next to these communities was a particularly reckless act by the army as Arab towns and villages lack the public shelters and air raid warning systems available in Jewish communities. Eighteen of the 43 Israeli civilians killed were Arab -- a proportion that surprised many Israeli Jews, who assumed that Hizbullah would not want to target Arab communities.
In many cases it is still not possible to specify where Hizbullah rockets landed because Israel's military censor prevents any discussion that might identify the location of a military site. During the war Israel used this to advantageous effect: for example, it was widely reported that a Hizbullah rocket fell close to a hospital but reporters failed to mention that a large army camp was next to it. An actual strike against the camp could have been described in the very same terms.
It seems likely that Hizbullah, which had flown pilotless spy drones over Israel earlier in the year, similar to Israel's own aerial spying missions, knew where many of these military bases were. The question is, was Hizbullah trying to hit them or -- as most observers claimed, following Israel's lead -- was it actually more interested in killing civilians.
A full answer may never be possible, as we cannot know Hizbullah's intentions -- as opposed to the consequences of its actions -- any more than we can discern Israel's during the war.
Human Rights Watch, however, has argued that, because Hizbullah's basic rockets were not precise, every time they were fired into Israel they were effectively targeted at civilians. Hizbullah was therefore guilty of war crimes in using its rockets, whatever the intention of the launch teams. In other words, according to this reading of international law, only Israel had the right to fire missiles and drop bombs because its military hardware is more sophisticated -- and, of course, more deadly.
Nonetheless, new evidence suggests strongly that, whether or not Hizbullah had the right to use its rockets, it may often have been trying to hit military targets, even if it rarely succeeded. The Arab Association for Human Rights, based in Nazareth, has been compiling a report on the Hizbullah rocket strikes against Arab communities in the north since last summer. It is not sure whether it will ever be able to publish its findings because of the military censorship laws.
But the information currently available makes for interesting reading. The Association has looked at northern Arab communities hit by Hizbullah rockets, often repeatedly, and found that in every case there was at least one military base or artillery battery placed next to, or in a few cases inside, the community. In some communities there were several such sites.
This does not prove that Hizbullah wanted only to hit military bases, of course. But it does indicate that in some cases it was clearly trying to, even if it lacked the technical resources to be sure of doing so. It also suggests that, in terms of international law, Hizbullah behaved no worse, and probably far better, than Israel during the war.
The evidence so far indicates that Israel:
* established legitimate grounds for Hizbullah's attack on the border post by refusing to withdraw from the Lebanese territory of the Shebaa Farms in 2000;
* initiated a war of aggression be refusing to engage in talks about a prisoner swap offered by Hizbullah;
* committed a grave war crime by intentionally using cluster bombs against south Lebanon's civilians;
* repeatedly hit Lebanese communities, killing many civilians, even though the evidence is that no Hizbullah fighters were to be found there;
* and put its own civilians, especially Arab civilians, in great danger by making their communities targets for Hizbullah attacks and failing to protect them.
It is clear that during the Second Lebanon war Israel committed the most serious war crimes.
The Salvador Option in Beirut
By TRISH SCHUH
"The only prospect that holds hope for us is the carving up of Syria... It is our task to prepare for that prospect. All else is a purposeless waste of time."
Zionist militant Zeév Jabotinsky, From "We and Turkey" in Di Tribune, November 30, 1915
"We should prepare to go over to the offensive. Our aim is to smash Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, and Syria. The weak point is Lebanon, for the Muslim regime is artificial and easy for us to undermine. We shall establish a Christian state there, and then we will smash the Arab Legion, eliminate Trans-Jordan, and Syria will fall to us."
David Ben-Gurion, From "Ben-Gurion, A Biography" by Michael Ben-Zohar, May 1948
"It is obvious that the above military assumptions, and the whole plan too, depend also on the Arabs continuing to be even more divided than they are now, and on the lack of any truly mass movement among them... Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us in the short run and will shorten the way to the more important aim of breaking Iraq up into denominations as in Syria and Lebanon... Syria will fall apart."
Oded Yinon, 1982. From "The Zionist Plan for the Middle East"
"Regime change is, of course, our goal both in Lebanon and Syria. We wrote long ago that there are three ways to achieve it- the dictator chooses to change; he falls before his own unhappy people; or if he poses a threat to the outside, the outside takes him out..."
-Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), From strategy paper #474 "Priorities in Lebanon & Syria", March 2, 2005
'Limited Hangout'
A Response to Franklin P. Lamb's Critique of Human Rights Watch
09.10.2007 18:14
Franklin P. Lamb’s article “Is Human Rights Watch Caving to the Israeli Lobby?”, published on September 4, 2007, is full of broad allegations of bias that are unsubstantiated and unworthy of response. However, his challenge to the methodology and evidence in our report “Civilians under Assault: Hezbollah’s Rocket Attacks on Israel in the 2006 War,” (
The main conclusion of “Civilians under Assault” is that Hezbollah “repeatedly bombarded cities, towns, and villages without any apparent effort to distinguish between civilians and military objectives. In doing so, Hezbollah, as a party to an armed conflict governed by international humanitarian law, violated fundamental prohibitions against deliberate and indiscriminate attacks against civilians….In some of those cases, we could find no evidence there had been a legitimate military target in the vicinity at the time of the attack, suggesting it was a deliberate attack on civilians.”
As an initial matter, contrary to what Lamb writes, Human Rights Watch does not oppose (or endorse) “the right to resist” of Hezbollah or the Palestinian people – or of any armed group anywhere in the world. We simply hold Hezbollah, as we hold any party to an armed conflict, whether a state or an armed group, to its obligations under international humanitarian law to spare, to the greatest extent possible, civilians from harm during armed conflict.
Lamb’s main criticism seems to be that Human Rights Watch discounted the presence of Israeli military objectives placed in civilian areas, which would undermine our finding that Hezbollah’s attacks amounted to a pattern of indiscriminate and sometimes deliberate attacks on civilians. Lamb either missed or ignored the several instances where we indeed documented the presence of Israel Defense Force (IDF) troops or weapons in the vicinity of a Hezbollah rocket attack. I know of no other public document that identifies so many Israeli military objects situated near some of the civilian areas that Hezbollah rockets hit, such as the naval base adjacent to Rambam Hospital in Haifa, the IDF northern command in Safed, the Raphael defense industry campus north of Kiryat Yam, and artillery pieces near Arab al-Aramshe and Kiryat Shmona. And we accordingly criticized Israel for failing in its duty to avoid endangering civilians by placing military assets in populated areas.
Yet the presence of IDF military assets in populated areas does not absolve Hezbollah of culpability for indiscriminately firing into them: that is, even if Hezbollah had a military target in mind, it failed to take precautions, in its targeting and its use of weapons, to distinguish between military and civilian objects in order to minimize civilian loss. Human Rights Watch similarly criticized Israel for failing to discriminate between legitimate Hezbollah military targets and civilians in its bombing of southern Lebanon. Furthermore, Lamb does not account for the numerous instances where we found no evidence of any IDF military target in civilian areas that Hezbollah nevertheless repeatedly targeted.
Lamb complains that we acknowledge Israeli censorship of news about successful Hezbollah strikes on Israeli military targets but then ignore the extent to which it calls our findings into doubt. As a human rights organization, we focus on attacks that kill and injure civilians and determine whether they violated international humanitarian law. So whether Hezbollah hit military objects more than is known is neither relevant to our analysis nor would excuse the scores of Hezbollah’s indiscriminate and deliberate attacks on civilian areas.
The attacks on Nahariya and Karmiel are illustrative. Hezbollah struck these two cities with hundreds of rockets throughout the course of the war, hitting residential neighborhoods in various parts of each city. Based on site visits and interviews, we concluded that there were no significant military objectives in either city, although there are defense industries located near, but outside, both. Our conclusion was that Hezbollah set out deliberately to hit these cities, in violation of the laws of war. Even if it turned out that we had overlooked a military target in either town, its presence would not justify Hezbollah’s firing of hundreds of rockets that landed all over Nahariya and Karmiel not on one or two days, but over an entire month.
Lamb also assails Human Rights Watch for accusing Hezbollah commanders of war crimes without having the requisite evidence to back up such serious charges. We stand by our findings. Firing deliberately or indiscriminately at civilians with criminal intent is a war crime. Our report quotes many statements by Hezbollah leaders indicating their intent to fire indiscriminately if not deliberately at civilian areas. For example, Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah stated on July 29, 2006:
When, throughout the Arab-Israeli conflict [have] 2 million Israelis [been] forced [before] to leave their areas or stay in shelters for 18 days or more? This number will increase when we expand the “beyond-Haifa” stage. The shelling of the city of Afula and its military base represented the beginning of this stage. Many cities in the centre will be a target in the beyond-Haifa stage if the barbaric aggression against our homeland, people, and villages continues.
This indication of intent, when coupled with the evidence we collected on the ground of deliberate and indiscriminate attacks on civilians, is evidence of war crimes, regardless of the justifications Hezbollah may have offered for pursuing this policy.
Lamb’s critique of Human Rights Watch’s methodology is familiar because it resembles the arguments used by many of those who seek to discredit our finding that Israel’s indiscriminate fire was the main cause of Lebanese civilian deaths during the 2006 war. (See our report “Why They Died: Civilian Casualties in Lebanon during the 2006 War” (
Some Lebanese and Israeli witnesses may have been uninformed or untruthful when answering our questions about the proximity of military objects at the time of enemy attacks. But in both our reports on Israel and Lebanon, we explain the additional evidence that supports our conclusions as to the nature of the attacks in their midst. In Israel, we interviewed whenever possible both Jewish and Arab eyewitnesses, favoring those whose testimony could be corroborated by other independent testimonies or physical evidence; we conducted on-site visits; and we monitored Hezbollah’s declarations to the media about specific attacks it carried out.
I invite readers to consult the reports and judge for themselves.
In closing, writing in a strictly personal capacity, I am repelled by Lamb’s assertion that “70 percent of [Human Rights Watch’s] budget [is] estimated to be provided by Jewish contributors.” Make no mistake: this unsourced and factually untrue statement is anti-Semitic and not anti-Zionist. It perpetuates the time-worn canard that all Jews share a political agenda – Israel right or wrong – and that with their lucre they pull the strings behind the scenes.
Eric Goldstein is the research director of the Middle East and North Africa Division of Human Rights Watch and principal author of “Civilians under Assault: Hezbollah’s Rocket Attacks on Israel in the 2006 War.”
Eric Goldstein
e-mail:
goldstr@hrw.org
Homepage:
http://www.hrw.org
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