October 20, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor

Rights Watchdog, Lost in the Mideast
By ROBERT L. BERNSTEIN

AS the founder of Human Rights Watch, its active chairman for 20 years
and now founding chairman emeritus, I must do something that I never
anticipated: I must publicly join the group’s critics. Human Rights
Watch had as its original mission to pry open closed societies,
advocate basic freedoms and support dissenters. But recently it has
been issuing reports on the Israeli-Arab conflict that are helping
those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state.

At Human Rights Watch, we always recognized that open, democratic
societies have faults and commit abuses. But we saw that they have the
ability to correct them — through vigorous public debate, an
adversarial press and many other mechanisms that encourage reform.

That is why we sought to draw a sharp line between the democratic and
nondemocratic worlds, in an effort to create clarity in human rights.
We wanted to prevent the Soviet Union and its followers from playing a
moral equivalence game with the West and to encourage liberalization
by drawing attention to dissidents like Andrei Sakharov, Natan
Sharansky and those in the Soviet gulag — and the millions in China’s
laogai, or labor camps.

When I stepped aside in 1998, Human Rights Watch was active in 70
countries, most of them closed societies. Now the organization, with
increasing frequency, casts aside its important distinction between
open and closed societies.

Nowhere is this more evident than in its work in the Middle East. The
region is populated by authoritarian regimes with appalling human
rights records. Yet in recent years Human Rights Watch has written far
more condemnations of Israel for violations of international law than
of any other country in the region.

Israel, with a population of 7.4 million, is home to at least 80 human
rights organizations, a vibrant free press, a democratically elected
government, a judiciary that frequently rules against the government,
a politically active academia, multiple political parties and, judging
by the amount of news coverage, probably more journalists per capita
than any other country in the world — many of whom are there expressly
to cover the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Meanwhile, the Arab and Iranian regimes rule over some 350 million
people, and most remain brutal, closed and autocratic, permitting
little or no internal dissent. The plight of their citizens who would
most benefit from the kind of attention a large and well-financed
international human rights organization can provide is being ignored
as Human Rights Watch’s Middle East division prepares report after
report on Israel.

Human Rights Watch has lost critical perspective on a conflict in
which Israel has been repeatedly attacked by Hamas and Hezbollah,
organizations that go after Israeli citizens and use their own people
as human shields. These groups are supported by the government of
Iran, which has openly declared its intention not just to destroy
Israel but to murder Jews everywhere. This incitement to genocide is a
violation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the
Crime of Genocide.

Leaders of Human Rights Watch know that Hamas and Hezbollah chose to
wage war from densely populated areas, deliberately transforming
neighborhoods into battlefields. They know that more and better arms
are flowing into both Gaza and Lebanon and are poised to strike again.
And they know that this militancy continues to deprive Palestinians of
any chance for the peaceful and productive life they deserve. Yet
Israel, the repeated victim of aggression, faces the brunt of Human
Rights Watch’s criticism.

The organization is expressly concerned mainly with how wars are
fought, not with motivations. To be sure, even victims of aggression
are bound by the laws of war and must do their utmost to minimize
civilian casualties. Nevertheless, there is a difference between
wrongs committed in self-defense and those perpetrated intentionally.

But how does Human Rights Watch know that these laws have been
violated? In Gaza and elsewhere where there is no access to the
battlefield or to the military and political leaders who make
strategic decisions, it is extremely difficult to make definitive
judgments about war crimes. Reporting often relies on witnesses whose
stories cannot be verified and who may testify for political advantage
or because they fear retaliation from their own rulers. Significantly,
Col. Richard Kemp, the former commander of British forces in
Afghanistan and an expert on warfare, has said that the Israel Defense
Forces in Gaza “did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a
combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare.”

Only by returning to its founding mission and the spirit of humility
that animated it can Human Rights Watch resurrect itself as a moral
force in the Middle East and throughout the world. If it fails to do
that, its credibility will be seriously undermined and its important
role in the world significantly diminished.

Robert L. Bernstein, the former president and chief executive of
Random House, was the chairman of Human Rights Watch from 1978 to
1998.