Abu Rahmah’s crime was organizing illegal demonstrations in a West Bank village where all demonstrations are by definition illegal. Abu Rahmah, 39, had long been involved in peaceful, multiethnic protests in the village of Bil’in, where Israel’s separation wall has cut Palestinians off from hundreds of acres of their land. Though barely covered in the American press, his conviction was protested by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Catherine Ashton, the foreign policy chief of the European Union, among others. “Israel’s attempt to crack down on this effective resistance movement by criminalizing peaceful protest is unacceptable and unjust,” said Desmond Tutu, one of Abu Rahmah’s supporters.

American Jews often ask where the Palestinian Gandhi is. What few realize is that if such a man exists, he’s probably sitting in an Israeli military prison.

Right now, there’s a small but significant nonviolent resistance movement in the West Bank. The important recent documentary Budrus tells the story of its beginning in 2003. That’s when Budrus community activist Ayed Morrar, with the help of his astonishingly intrepid 15-year-old daughter Iltezam, succeeded, through peaceful but resolute protest, in thwarting plans to build the wall on their village’s land. Their model—community-based, grassroots efforts to protect their property—spread through neighboring villages, including Bil’in.

Over five years in Bil’in, demonstrators—a mix of Palestinians, Israelis, and foreigners—held weekly demonstrations against the building of the wall, which annexed much of the village’s land into a nearby Israeli settlement. Israel’s Supreme Court ruled the wall’s route illegal, saying, “We were not convinced that it is necessary for security-military reasons to retain the current route that passes on Bil’in’s lands.” But construction continued. For most of the world, this village of 1,700 clearly has justice on its side. And though there has been some rock throwing, Abu Rahmah and other activists have done their best to prevent it and to maintain the moral high ground.

As Ethan Bronner wrote in the New York Times last year, the Bil’in movement “is one of the longest-running and best organized protest operations in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and it has turned this once anonymous farming village into a symbol of Palestinian civil disobedience, a model that many supporters of the Palestinian cause would like to see spread and prosper.”

Much rides on the fate of the Bil’in model. With peace talks going nowhere, there’s a lot of talk among Palestinians about a new uprising, a third intifada. There are Palestinian leaders who, for both tactical and moral reasons, are desperate to make it nonviolent. Everyone concerned about the future of the Middle East has good reason to hope that they succeed.

“I believe our future depends totally on the rise of the nonviolent movement,” the liberal Palestinian activist Mustafa Barghouti said over lunch recently. Nonviolent resistance, he said, is “why I live.”

Barghouti, who finished second to Mahmoud Abbas in the 2005 Palestinian National Authority elections, believes that continued settlements are making the death of the two-state solution imminent. As a last gasp, he wants Palestinians to unilaterally declare a state within 1967 borders and challenge the world to recognize it. “If the world community does not accept our approach of recognizing a Palestinian state immediately in ’67 borders, and forcing Israel to accept that, you will be witnessing the death of the two-state option,” he said. “And then we will have a very long struggle against apartheid. Nonviolent.”

This, as Barghouti knows, would be profoundly threatening to Israel. “For them, I am more dangerous than those who do military action, because I expose their system,” he said. Israel’s actions suggest that at least some in the military agree, because the Palestinian nonviolent movement is being systematically crushed.

In 2005, as Human Rights Watch reports, Abdallah Abu Rahmah’s brother Rateb Abu Rahmah was shot in the foot and arrested for stone throwing and assaulting a border policeman. During the trial, video evidence proved that the policeman had given false testimony. Eventually, the policeman confessed to fabricating his story, and Rateb was acquitted.

Mohammed Khatib, another leader of the Bil’in protests, was arrested in 2008 and charged with stone throwing. He later proved that he was on the Pacific island of New Caledonia at the time of the alleged incident. Nevertheless, he was held for nine months and only released on the condition that he report to the police station weekly during the time of the protests. Since May 2008, according to Popular Struggle Coordination Committee, an umbrella group for the nonviolent village-based movements, there have been 119 arrests in Bil’in. The Israeli army has started using live ammunition against the demonstrators, and four unarmed anti-wall protesters have been killed.

Last December, Abu Rahmah, the coordinator of the Bil’in Popular Committee Against the Wall and Settlements, was arrested in a 2 a.m. raid on his home. In a particularly absurd twist, he was charged with weapons possession, because he’d once collected used tear gas projectiles and bullet casings to demonstrate the types of ammunition that the IDF was using. Eventually, he was acquitted of that charge, but he was convicted of organizing illegal demonstrations and of incitement, which, under Israeli military law, means an “attempt, verbally or otherwise, to influence public opinion in the Area in a way that may disturb the public peace or public order.”

Abu Rahmah’s wife Majida has been denied permits to visit him in the Israeli military prison where he’s been held. He hasn’t seen his 1-and-a-half-year-old son since the baby was 6 months old. He’s not even allowed to make a phone call.

“We are concerned that his continued detention on charges of incitement and organizing and attending demonstrations is intended to prevent him and other Palestinians from exercising their legitimate right to nonviolent protest against the annexation of Palestinian land to Israel,” said a statement by the British Foreign Office. It’s hard to come to any other conclusion.

Of course, the challenge to nonviolence isn’t only coming from Israel. There’s hardly a consensus about the need for nonviolence among the Palestinian population: A 2008 poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that an overwhelming 84 percent of Palestinians supported a deadly attack on a West Jerusalem religious school that took place that year. But it’s at least conceivable that such support for violence could diminish if Palestinians believed there were other routes to freedom. One of the jobs of any social movement, after all, is to build ideological support for positions that might at first seem naïve or absurd.

“This is the Palestinian alternative to despair,” Jonathan Pollack, one of the leading Israeli activists working with the Palestinian protesters, said of nonviolent civil disobedience. “Both to the despair of futile negotiation, and to the despair of armed struggle. If Israel manages to kill this movement, to put this movement down, the consequences are going to be grave, both for Palestinians and for Israelis.”

The flotilla episode is fraught with complexities and ironies on both sides. While the Turkish-led mission focused on a grave human rights crisis—Israel’s oppressive treatment of Gaza’s Palestinians—Turkey’s righteous indignation toward Israel both oversimplifies Israel’s distress about Hamas and seems glaringly hypocritical in view of its own human-rights problems. Those problems, which include Turkey’s repressive and violent treatment of its large Kurdish population, some 15 million or more, and its record of legal detention, imprisonment, and torture of Turkish intellectuals, journalists, and political activists, constitutes one of the world’s worst human rights records, as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch reports repeatedly show, over the past 20 years. Add to that Turkey’s occupation of Northern Cyprus in violation of international law and its international campaign to falsify the history of its genocide of the Armenians in 1915, and the ironies multiply.

While there remains a narrative among opinion-makers like New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman that frames Turkey as an exemplary friend and a real democracy, Jews should wrestle with some truths about past and present realities. Jews, like Christians, lived as designated infidels under the Ottomans, often under harsh and repressive laws; Zionists were jailed and killed outright by the Turkish government through the end of World War I (Palestine was under Ottoman rule then). The U.S. ambassador to Turkey from 1913 to 1916, an American Jew, Henry Morgenthau, said more than once that he feared that the fate of the Armenians at the hands of the Turks awaited the Jews next. It remains uncomfortable for Jews to recall that Turkey supplied the Nazis with large amounts of chromium during World War II, a mineral that was used, among other things, for killing in concentration camps. And today a virulent anti-Semitism has spread throughout Turkey so that recently a banner of the Islamic Saadet Party read: “Legendary leader Hitler, our patience is running out, we need your spirit.”

It’s a strange irony that in recent decades Israeli and Jewish diasporan groups have colluded with Turkey’s aggressive policy of denying and rewriting the history of the Armenian Genocide. In this equation the Armenian past has become a bargaining chip between Turkey and Israel, which have a regional partnership based on reciprocal needs. Turkey is an important source of Israel’s water supply and at least until recently, had been a friendly Muslim ally in a hostile region. Israel supplies Turkey with high-powered weapons, and the lucrative military manufacturing deals are important to Israel’s economy.

In 1982—by threatening the lives and livelihoods of Jews in Turkey—Turkey pressured the Israeli government to stop a genocide studies conference in Tel Aviv, at which a group of scholars were giving papers on the Armenian Genocide. As a result the Israeli government pulled out its support, Elie Wiesel decided he could not participate, and the conference was moved to an out-of-the-way location and was greatly diminished. In the 1990s, two Armenian documentaries that were to be aired on Israeli TV—one of them about the Armenian community of Jerusalem—were canceled at the last minute because of Turkish pressure. From 1989 on, Jewish-American organizations have worked at Ankara’s request to help stop a simple, non-binding Armenian Genocide resolution from passing in the U.S. Congress. When former Israeli Education Minister Yossi Sarid declared 10 years ago that he wanted to institute a new history curriculum with a chapter on genocide that would have “a broad reference to the Armenian genocide,” he was rebuked by his government and shortly thereafter left office.

In recent years, the Israeli government has mimicked at times the Turkish government’s propaganda about 1915. Shimon Peres, then Israel’s foreign minister, went as far as to say: “We reject attempts to create a similarity between the Holocaust and the Armenian allegations. Nothing similar to the Holocaust occurred. What the Armenians went through is a tragedy, but not genocide.” Peres’ crude denial elicited angry responses from Israeli scholars, and Israel Charny, the director of the Institute on Genocide in Jerusalem, crystallized the anger of many when he replied: “As a Jew and an Israeli I am ashamed of the extent to which you have now entered into the range of actual denial of the Armenian Genocide, comparable to denials of the Holocaust.”

The question remains: Is aiding Turkey’s denial of a genocidal past something Israel can continue to do? And at what cost? Amos Elon, writing in Haaretz about the “hypocrisy, opportunism, and moral trepidation” of Israeli collusion with Turkey, put it well when he asked: “But where is the boundary between the natural chauvinism of exploitation and the cheap opportunism of hypocrisy? What happens when the survivors of one Holocaust make political deals over the bitter memory of the survivors of another Holocaust?”

***

While political events provide opportunities for moments of reform, change, or introspection, it is not crass opportunism, I believe, that should dictate a change in Israeli policy on the Armenian Genocide. Rather, might this be a time—when the ironies of history have surfaced in the wake of the flotilla episode—for Israel and some Jewish diasporan organizations to rethink the moral concession Israel has made in this ethical arena—not as revenge against Turkey, but as thoughtful reflection on painful truths?

Given Turkey’s relentless campaign to deny the Armenian Genocide and insinuate its own extreme national narrative into democratic societies around the world, Israel’s call for the genocide’s proper and long overdue recognition would have important ethical meaning. It would, among other things, be a redress to genocide denial in general. As scholars have noted, denial is the final stage of genocide. The distinguished Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt has written that “denial of genocide, whether that of the Turks against the Armenians or the Nazis against the Jews … strives to reshape history in order to demonize the victims and rehabilitate the perpetrators.”

Recognizing the Armenian Genocide would allow Israel to embrace the deeply rooted relationship between Jews and Armenians in the modern age. When Hitler exhorted his military advisers eight days before invading Poland in 1939, “Who today, after all, speaks of the annihilation of the Armenians?” he made it clear that he was both inspired by what the Young Turk government had done to the Armenians in 1915 and also noted that because the memory of what had been the most well-reported human rights catastrophe of the first quarter of the 20th century had been washed away, it was easier to commit genocide again.

Hitler learned a good deal from the genocide of the Armenians because Germany was Turkey’s wartime ally, and there was a great deal of documentation from German foreign officers and other German personnel in Turkey at the time. There are, of course, parallels—in bureaucratic organization, killing squad implementation, race ideology, and more—between the two events. Yet what ties Jews to Armenians even more deeply is the powerful role Jews have played in bearing witness to and later defining Turkey’s genocide.

Ambassador Henry Morgenthau’s life remains a crucial part of the history of rescue and resistance during the Armenian Genocide. As U.S. ambassador to Turkey, he had the courage to step outside his prescribed role as ambassador and confront Pashas Talaat and Enver—the two major architects of the plan; he implored both the U.S. and German governments to intercede and stop the mass killing of the Armenian population; and he was a primary force in helping to organize the first major relief campaign for the Armenians in the United States.

In the end Morgenthau would lose his job because of his stance on the Armenians. After leaving Turkey in 1916 and noting that it would remain “a place of unutterable horror” for him, he included in his acclaimed World War I memoir of 1918, Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story, the first full narrative about the Armenian Genocide in English.

Franz Werfel, the Austrian Jewish novelist who escaped Hitler’s death list by a hair in 1934, wrote the first major novel about the Armenian Genocide, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, which depicted Armenian resistance to massacre in a small mountain village; it was also a novel that was a specific warning to the Jews of Europe about what might happen to them. The Nazis banned and burned the book in 1934, but the novel would inspire Jewish resistance during the Holocaust and became an important text in the educational curriculum for Jews in Palestine and then Israel.

Raphael Lemkin, the Polish Jewish legal scholar who coined the word genocide, was the first to use the term Armenian Genocide in the early 1940s—noting that it was the precise term for intended group destruction of the Armenians in 1915. He underscored that the concept “genocide” derived from his understanding of the acts committed against the Armenians in 1915 and against the Jews in the 1940s: “Examples of genocide,” he wrote in 1949, “are the destruction of the Armenians in the first World War, the destruction of the Jews in the second World War.” He also noted in his autobiography that his study of the Armenian massacres was a turning point in his life’s work.

In the modern era, the contributions to the Armenian Genocide discourse made by Jewish scholars both in Israel and worldwide has been extraordinary, and a list would be long and include Elie Wiesel, Robert Jay Lifton, Deborah Lipstadt, Robert Melson, Jay Winter, the documentary filmmaker Andrew Goldberg, Israeli scholars Yehuda Bauer, Israel Charny, and Yair Auron, who wrote The Banality of Denial: Israel and the Armenian Genocide. Recently, the Center For Jewish History and the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York put on brilliant exhibitions on the lives of both Raphael Lemkin and Henry Morgenthau—in which the Armenian genocide figured significantly.

Given this long-standing record of Jewish engagement and intellectual achievement concerning the Armenian Genocide, and the deep ties between the two cultures—it would seem an organic thing for Israel to finally say: The game is over. The truth of history, the meaning of genocide, the importance of ethical memory is a defining part of Jewish intellectual tradition and identity. And, in the Armenian case, the two genocidal histories commingle in deep and historical ways. As for fear of Turkey? The other 20 countries (including France, Italy, Sweden, Poland, Greece, and Canada) that have passed Armenian Genocide resolutions have witnessed Turkey’s initial diplomatic anger, an ambassador recalled for a short time, and then it’s been back to business as usual—proving that the hysteria passes and life goes on.

The Israeli government could recognize the Armenian Genocide by honoring the words of the great founding genocide scholar Lemkin—a Holocaust survivor who lost 49 members of his own family to the Nazis. In August 1950, Lemkin wrote to a colleague: “Let us not forget that the heat of this month is less unbearable to us than the heat of the ovens of Auschwitz and Dachau and more lenient than the murderous heat in the desert of Aleppo which burned to death the bodies of hundreds of thousands of Christian Armenian victims of genocide in 1915.”

As for Armenians, in the midst of this, they look on with bewilderment, anger, bitterness. For the sizable meaning and historical significance of the genocide committed against them, they feel endlessly embattled in the effort to preserve the truthful memory of what happened to them. It seems to most Armenians that the accurate memory of their history is an ethical necessity, a minimal thing to ask others to affirm in the face of the continued assault on historical truth by Turkey. Israel’s affirmation would be of distinct ethical importance given the common experience the two peoples have shared. For Israel, colluding with a denialism is too painfully ironic.

Peter Balakian, the Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor of the Humanities at Colgate University, is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response, among other books.

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The letter also directly addressed the question of whether the military wing of Hamas targets civilians with its Qassam rockets. “Human Rights Watch would also like to ask for clarification of recent statements by Hamas spokespersons that Hamas rocket attacks into southern Israel were intended to target Israeli military bases, but not Israeli civilians,” the letter said. “Previous statements by Hamas leaders, as well as our own research, indicate that rocket attacks by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups deliberately targeted Israeli civilians or were launched towards Israeli population centers indiscriminately. The Goldstone report concluded that Hamas was responsible for serious violations of the laws of war, including war crimes and possible crimes against humanity, in connection with these rocket attacks directed against Israeli civilians.”

“Hamas, just like Israel, needs to make clear to its forces that unlawful attacks on civilians will not be ignored,” the letter said.

Hamas: Investigate Attacks on Israeli Civilians [HRW.org]
Letter to Prime Minister Haniya [HRW.org]

But several things particularly spooked Israel (and the United States) about the report, Falk writes. First, Goldstone is “an eminent international personality who cannot credibly be accused of anti-Israel bias, making it harder to deflect attention from the findings no matter how loud the screaming of ‘foul play.’” Plus, “the unsurprising findings are coupled with strong recommendations” for the Security Council to send Israel (and Hamas) to the International Criminal Court in the Hague if they don’t conduct adequate internal investigations—and could also put Israeli officials at risk for being detained for prosecution or extradition when traveling abroad. What all this leads to, Falk concludes, is a loss for Israel in the “Legitimacy War.” He explains: “Such a war fought on a global political battlefield is what eventually and unexpectedly undermined the apartheid regime in South Africa, and has become much more threatening to the Israeli sense of security than has armed Palestinian resistance.”

Why the Goldstone Report Matters [Mondoweiss]

Garlasco was outed as “Flak 88,” a frequent visitor to websites devoted to discussing combat paraphernalia of the Third Reich. In one forum, he was quoted as saying, “That is so cool! The leather SS jacket makes my blood go cold it is so COOL!”—a sign of obsessiveness about a macabre subject that led various bloggers, as well as Benjamin Netanyahu’s office, to question his motive for reporting on alleged human rights abuses committed by Israel in wartime. As NGO Monitor, a group that investigates supposed anti-Israel biases and inaccuracies in human rights reporting on the Arab-Israeli conflict, wrote at the time, “It is bizarre enough for a ‘human rights’ activist to choose the name of a gun as an internet screen name and for his car license plate. Coupled with the neo-Nazi iconography, however, the adoption of “Flak88” as Garlasco’s alter ego is evidence at the very least of highly questionable moral judgment.”

At first, HRW issued a press release vigorously defending Garlasco and his work. It claimed his extracurricular interests were purely scholarly and not at all driven by a covert or latent sympathy for fascism. Garlasco also wrote a self-defense for the Huffington Post, saying that he regretted “causing pain and offense with a handful of juvenile and tasteless postings I made on two websites that study Second World War artifacts.”

Rights Group Assailed for Analyst’s Nazi Collection [NYT]
Responding to accusations [HuffPost]
Earlier: HRW Official Collects Nazi Memorabilia
Related: Broken Watch [Tablet]

“A war crimes investigator who is an avid collector and trader in Nazi memorabilia is perhaps a new low,” Netanyahu’s policy director, Ron Dermer, told the Jerusalem Post. NGO Monitor, another HRW critic, said that the revelations, “when combined with his central role in the condemnations of Israel under false banners of ‘human rights’ violations and ‘war crimes,’ show that he is entirely inappropriate as a human rights reporter.” Human Rights Watch, meanwhile, issued a strong rebuttal, stating, “Gerlasco has never held or expressed Nazi or anti-Semitic views.” Gerlasco, it says, had a grandfather who was conscripted into the German military, though he never joined the Nazi Party. Gerlasco’s great-uncle, meanwhile, worked on B-17s for Uncle Sam; Gerlasco also collects U.S. Air Force paraphernalia.

Collecting Nazi memorabilia, of course, is not proof of being a Nazi sympathizer. And let’s concede that Gerlasco is no anti-Semite, and that his hobby is, well, just that. Still, we would gently advise HRW that endorsing Gerlasco’s views on Israel’s actions is not the best way to be taken seriously on an issue where, fairly or not, it is already walking on controversial ground. The point is not only to prevent bias from creeping into ostensibly neutral reports; it’s to avoid even the appearance of and potential for impropriety. This week, people who talk about Human Rights Watch’s reports on Israel are not talking about their substance, but about the process behind them, and that process’s alleged flaws. Is that really what Human Rights Watch wants?

Human Rights Watch Investigator Accused of Collecting Nazi Memorabilia [Guardian]
‘HRW Expert Collects Nazi Memorabilia’ [JPost]
HRW Responds, and So Do I [Elder of Ziyon]
Related: Broken Watch [Tablet]

The next day, The Jerusalem Post reported that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had declared political war on HRW and other non-government organizations that were continuing to investigate Israel’s conduct during last winter’s war in Gaza. “We will dedicate time and manpower to combating these groups,” Netanyahu’s chief policy adviser, Ron Dermer, told the paper. “We will insist that they defend their record and their values.” Last week, after HRW released a 63-page report accusing Israeli troops of killing Palestinian civilians who were waving white flags in Gaza, Ben-Dror Yemini, a columnist for the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv, accused HRW’s deputy Middle East director, Joe Stork, of attending a 1976 anti-Israel conference organized by Saddam Hussein and of writing bitterly anti-Zionist screeds at roughly the same time. The story, which was translated into English and was reprinted on Commentary’s blog, provoked a heated letter from Stork, who said he had written exposes against Hussein in the 1970s and did not espouse the anti-Zionist views attributed to him. (Stork did not respond to e-mail or phone messages from Tablet.)

At a time when Jews are anxious about how Israel will fare in negotiations with the Obama administration over a peace deal with the Palestinians, the Stork and Whitson affairs present an unfamiliar problem to HRW: how to reassure liberal Jews, including HRW’s founder and one of its current board members, worried that the organization is playing into the hands of anti-Israel activists from New York to Riyadh. Whether or not its staff actively seek out ways to target Israel, as Netanyahu’s office claims, by appearing to focus so many of its resources on Israel—five reports have been issued already since the Gaza War, three of them criticizing the IDF’s conduct, and another report about Israel’s “wanton destruction” is forthcoming—and by hiring people like Stork and Whitson, HRW, under executive director Ken Roth, leaves those doubts unanswered. “Ken feels their facts are right, and the critics are wrong, next case,” said Sid Sheinberg, the former Hollywood mogul and vice-chair of HRW’s board. “I don’t believe that’s the way the Israelis should be treated.”

Founded in 1978 as Helsinki Watch—mainly to help insure that dissident intellectuals were treated fairly by the Soviet Union in accordance with the Helsinki Accords—HRW has, over the past 20 years, come to occupy a diplomatic position of heft and responsibility, “somewhere between a permanent and a rotating member of the Security Council,” jokes one longtime U.N. watcher. Even harsh critics like Gerald Steinberg, a professor of political science at Bar Ilan University who also runs NGO Monitor, which tracks HRW and other NGOs in Israel, concede that HRW is unmatched as a voice for exposing grave human rights abuses, from Sudan to China. According to Roth, its work in Israel is no different from its work anywhere else. “We look at the worst abuse on both sides,” he said, pointing out recent reports on Hamas rocket fire and executions. “It’s not that we’re exclusively focusing on Israel. But if the question is, ‘Why are we more concerned about the [Gaza] war rather than on other rights abuses [in Israel]?’ Well, we’ve got to pick and choose—we’ve got finite resources.”

HRW has been dogged for years by Israeli claims that it is unfairly biased, or, more specifically, that it has failed to hold others—namely, Hamas and Hezbollah, along with anti-Semitic groups worldwide—sufficiently accountable for human rights violations. But relations between Israel and HRW are now at their worst since 2001, when Israel, under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, blamed the organization for failing to stand up against expressions of anti-Semitism during the United Nations’ 2001 conference on racism in Durban, South Africa. “This is the first time it’s really resonated,” said Steinberg. “It’s only in the past couple of years that Jewish board members, especially, began to be concerned and think there’s a problem.”

“They frequently say, ‘We’re trying to be evenhanded,’” said Robert Bernstein, the founder of Helsinki Watch and now a board member emeritus at HRW. “I don’t understand trying to be evenhanded, because to me Israel is interested and a believer in human rights and it stands out in the Middle East as practicing it in their country.” At its inception, he said, Helsinki Watch planned only to operate in closed societies—undemocratic, illiberal countries without freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and other basic rights. Operating in open, democratic societies like Israel is complicated because, as Bernstein noted, there are domestic organizations, like B’tselem in Israel, that do “a beautiful job” of holding their own governments accountable. “If you could cover every human rights act, it would be fine,” Bernstein said. “But you can’t, so you have to make choices about what you cover, and once you make choices, you’re political, whether you want to be or not.” The overall result of HRW’s current work, he added, “is to say we’re being evenhanded in a way that makes it come out that both sides are equal abusers of human rights—I don’t agree with that.”

But the organization also takes great pride in criticism, as evidence that it’s doing its job well. “I’m not going to do something to appease people who have no interest in the truth, or who are only screaming about Israel,” said Whitson, the Middle East division head. A former high-ranking staffer recalled being told by Carroll Bogert, Roth’s deputy, that “Human Rights Watch doesn’t pull its punches when it comes to Israel” after asking whether it made sense to release a document critical of Israel on the same day the organization was holding a fundraiser with Jewish donors. “There are human rights groups that deliberately choose not to cover Israel, and we’re not one of them,” said Gary Sick, a Columbia professor who is on HRW’s Middle East board. “If we backed away because it causes some discomfort, because of all the radical attacks that are directed at us, what we’d be doing is emasculating ourselves.”

After the Journal piece was published, Atlantic correspondent Jeffrey Goldberg published a lengthy email exchange in which Roth acknowledged that the standard pitch in the organization’s fundraising efforts in the Middle East includes a reference to the “lies and obfuscation inevitably thrown our way” by Israel and its supporters. Roth, who said the organization hasn’t lost any significant donors over its latest round of Israel reports, told Tablet he interpreted the attacks as a sign of credibility. “If we were irrelevant, if people didn’t take us seriously, we would be left alone,” he said. Roth, whose father fled Germany in 1938, said he felt particularly strongly that Israel should not get a free pass—either from his staff or from his donors. “I identify with the persecution of the Jews—it’s why I do this work, and I don’t believe we should make exceptions for Israel,” Roth said. “The people who don’t believe in that principle, who want to apply them to the other guy”—Hamas—“and not to their favorite country, don’t support us already, and I don’t want them.”

But critics like Sheinberg, the legendary Lew Wasserman’s longtime No. 2 at MCA, respond that even being right isn’t the same as succeeding as a rights organization. Recently a donor called Sheinberg asking whether it was too late to have his donation to HRW refunded in light of an an op-ed Whitson wrote in the Los Angeles Times, in which she bluntly compared Israeli settlers to thieves. For Sheinberg, the message was clear: “Don’t we know when it’s time to talk and when it’s time to shut up?”

Correction, August 27: Ken Roth’s quote, “But if the question is, ‘Why are we more concerned about the [Gaza] war rather than on other rights abuses?’ Well, we’ve got to pick and choose—we’ve got finite resources” referred specifically to HRW’s work in Israel. It has been edited to clarify that.

According to the HRW report, titled “White Flag Deaths,” IDF soldiers fired on a convoy of unarmed civilians waving white flags. “All available evidence,” the report’s introduction reads, “indicates that Israeli forces had control of the areas in question, no fighting was taking place there at the time, and Palestinian fighters were not hiding among the civilians who were shot.” HRW has called upon the Israeli government to investigate these allegations; in response, the IDF has said that its soldiers are ordered not to fire on anyone waving white flags, but that Hamas militants often used civilians draped in them as subterfuge. While HRW does seem to have a penchant for hiring people with feverish ideological backgrounds, the charges are serious enough to warrant investigation.

Who Is Human Rights Watch’s Joe Stork? [Commentary translation of Ma’ariv article]
Previously: Human Rights Watch Goes to Saudi Arabia
White Flag Deaths [Human Rights Watch]

UPDATE: Tablet contributing editor Jeffrey Goldberg, on his Atlantic blog reports his email exchange with HRW chief Ken Roth whether it’s true that his organization fund-raises in Saudi Arabia by touting its “battles” with pro-Israel groups. Remarkably, and after lots of evasion, Roth basically says yes.

Human Rights Watch Goes to Saudi Arabia [WSJ.com]