Saudi Arabia's Human Rights Watch Is Hard At Work

Daled Amos
21 December '10

From now on, every HRW report on Israel is going to be greeted with "you mean the Saudi-funded HRW," or "you mean the report written by the woman [HRW Middle East director Sarah Leah Whitson] who is a great admirer of Norman Finkelstein and lobbied Kofi Annan against Israel in the middle of the Second Intifada" or "you mean the report written by the guy [Stork] who supports the anti-Israel boycott movement and has been venting his hostility to Israel for almost forty years" or "you mean HRW, the organization that fails to take down from its website anti-Israel reports even when it has admitted they are inaccurate," and so on.
David Bernstein, Volokh Conspiracy

And yes, Human Rights Watch is at it again.

Saudi Arabia's favorite NGO has come out with its 166-page report Separate and Unequal accusing Israel of discriminating against West Bank Arabs on the “basis of race, ethnicity, and national origin.”


So for instance, according to the HRW report:

In most cases where Israel has acknowledged differential treatment of Palestinians—such as barring them from accessing “settler-only” roads and subjecting them to 505 roadblocks and checkpoints within the West Bank (as of June 2010)—it has asserted that the measures are necessary to protect Jewish settlers and other Israelis who are subject to periodic attacks by Palestinian armed groups, particularly during the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising, from 2000 to around 2006.[4]

When we check out the documentation for this in footnote 4, we read:

Violent attacks by Palestinian armed groups killed 202 Israeli civilians in the West Bank between 2000 and August 31, 2010. During the same period, Israeli settlers killed 43 Palestinian civilians in the West Bank and Israeli security forces killed 1823 Palestinian civilians there, according to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem.

While it is nice that Human Rights Watch acknowledges that there were "violent attacks by Palestinian armed groups" that does not stop it from fudging the B'Tselem numbers--as NGO Monitor points out in its report HRW´s Destructive Criticism: Analysis Of False Claims Against Israel. HRW leaves out the part where B'Tselem notes the 479 "Palestinians who took part in the hostilities and were killed by Israeli security forces" and 411 "Palestinians who were killed by Israeli security forces and it is not known if they were taking part in the hostilities".

That is sloppy on Human Rights Watch's part.

(Read full "Saudi Arabia's Human Rights Watch Is Hard At Work")

If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
.