Quite a few bloggers have commented on Benjamin Birnbaum’s “Minority Report” – an account of Robert Bernstein’s break from HRW – in the New Republic.
There were some ironies. According to Birnbaum, Marc Garlasco was one of the HRW staffers who was more sympathetic to Israel. After his dishonest performance four years ago, I’m not sure how much credit I’d give him on that score. Unless, of course, that demonstrates how bad the anti-Israel animus really is there. The other character who comes off as less anti-Israel than one might have guessed is Richard Goldstone. The stories really seem to confirm that he wasn’t so anti-Israel before his investigation of the Gaza war. Was he seduced by a chance to make history?
Besides the observations about Garlasco and Goldstone, a couple of paragraphs though really stuck out for me:
Bernstein—now a gregarious octogenarian—had always considered himself a friend of Israel; but, for a long time, he didn’t follow events there particularly closely. Any Zionism on his part manifested itself mostly in regular contributions to the New Israel Fund—a left-wing NGO that finances Israeli human rights groups. But, as the Second Intifada erupted, following the failure of the Oslo process, Bernstein began paying closer attention to HRW’s work on Israel. And he didn’t like what he was seeing.
With Palestinian suicide bombings reaching a crescendo in early 2002, precipitating a full-scale Israeli counterterrorist campaign across the West Bank, HRW’s Middle East and North Africa division (MENA) issued two reports (and myriad press releases) on Israeli misconduct—including one on the Israel Defense Forces’ assault on terrorist safe havens in the Jenin refugee camp. That report—which, to HRW’s credit, debunked the widespread myth that Israel had carried out a massacre—nevertheless said there was “strong prima facie evidence†that Israel had “committed grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions,†irking the country’s supporters, who argued that the IDF had in fact gone to great lengths to spare Palestinian civilians. (The decision not to launch an aerial bombardment of the densely populated area, and to dispatch ground troops into labyrinthine warrens instead, cost 23 Israeli soldiers their lives—crucial context that HRW ignored.) It would take another five months for HRW to release a report on Palestinian suicide bombings—and another five years for it to publish a report addressing the firing of rockets and mortars from Gaza, despite the fact that, by 2003, hundreds had been launched from the territory into Israel. (HRW did issue earlier press releases on both subjects.)
This is one thing that still amazes. Many pundits – expert and otherwise – still refer to Binymamin Netanyahu as a right winger. He may be to the right of Labor or Kadima, but he is not as far to the right as he was in 1996, when he was first elected as Prime Minister. (And I don’t think he was as right wing then as he was portrayed.) Of course calling Netanyahu a right winger offers some comfort to those who wish to explain away recent failures of the peace process.
However, the “Aqsa intifada” or Arafat’s terror war, starting in 2000, demonstrated the real reason that there’s no peace. Arafat never changed. The whole premise of the peace process was that Israel could accept the PLO as a “peace partner” because the PLO had rejected terror. Of course, it had not, and when Arafat decided it benefited him, he ended the pretense. (Of course, even now, even though the Palestinian Authority appears less extreme, it could still change its mind.)
I’m surprised that the “Aqsa intifada” didn’t change more minds than just Bernstein.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad”.
