HRW critique that doesn’t hold water

Netanyahu: "We must expose the hypocrisy of human rights organizations that turn a blind eye to the most repressive regimes in the world."

JPost Editorial
21 December '10

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Sunday night attacked the ostensible anti-Israel bias of some human rights watchdog groups. “We must expose the hypocrisy of human rights organizations that turn a blind eye to the most repressive regimes in the world... and instead target the only liberal democracy in the Middle East,” Netanyahu said.

Netanyahu’s comments appeared to be a reaction to a 166-page report entitled “Separate and Unequal,” issued by Human Rights Watch earlier Sunday. In addition to descriptions of alleged Israeli violations of human rights, the report, the longest and most comprehensive issued on any Middle East country this year, called on the US to punish Israel by deducting aid in accordance with its spending on settlements.

There is a tendency among politicians, including the prime minister, to make sweeping charges against HRW and other human rights NGOs, generalizing that they are riddled with malicious intent without providing specific examples. It is worth focusing on one of the many tendentious claims in HRW’s report to illustrate the unfortunately frequent validity of official Israel’s sense of grievance.

THE REPORT takes Israel to task for a purportedly discriminatory water allocation policy. HRW stated that, “Average Israeli per capita consumption of water, including water consumption, by settlers is 4.3 times that of Palestinians in the occupied territories (including Gaza).”

This is true, as far as it goes: Per capita water consumption among Palestinians is 70 liters a day, compared to Israel’s average per person of 300 liters a day. What HRW failed to mention, however, is that access to piped water has dramatically improved in recent decades and is significantly better than in Syria or Jordan, which would have been in control of the West Bank had it not attacked Israeli in 1967.

In fact, as Alon Tal of the Blaustein Institute for Desert Research at Ben-Gurion University noted in a recent article in the Israel Journal for Foreign Affairs, Israel has significantly exceeded its requirement as set down in the 1995 Oslo II Peace Accords, increasing supply by 60 million cubic meters (mcm) a year, instead of 28.6 mcm as required.

The 10 percent of the Palestinian population on the West Bank who do not have reasonable access to running water might usefully be contrasted with, say, Romania, where one-third of the population has no running water, or closer to home, the Jordanian city of Irbid, where 400,000 residents lack access.

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