HRW denying Palestinians the right to non-violent resistance

Jonathan Cook takes on Human Rights Watch again. His arguments are very much valid.

Comments (2)

Yes, it was a terrible press release. But come on. I thought Cook was smarter than this. He’s done a lot of good reporting. But wow, he must have some really good editors.

With friends like this, the Palestinians don’t need enemies. The entire first half of the article, explaining what drove Fatma to blow herself up, is off point.

If his point is that denouncing an illegal tactic to prevent an illegal attack is a poor choice of battles to fight, I take it.

Personally, I was moved when I heard that crowds of Palestinians had converged to protect those houses, and I inwardly cheered their success. But, as Cook urges HRW to remember, a war crime is a war crime is a war crime. It would have been one thing if people spontaneously gathered to protect the homes of innocents. It’s another for armed groups to call unarmed civilians around them for protection.

And Cook admits that the use of human shields is a war crime (after first throwing up the red-herring comparison to Gandhi and Mandela, neither of whom asked anyone to sit under a falling bomb to protect a combatant—at least as far as I know). So he needs to resort to scattershot descriptions of how tough life is in Gaza to excuse the practice.

HRW has certainly never disputed that the Israelis have made life really tough in Gaza. So this, in particular, really ticked me off:

And HRW prefers to highlight a supposed violation of international law by the Palestinians — their choice to act as “human shields” — and to demand that the practice end immediately, while ignoring the very real and continuing violation of international law committed by Israel in undertaking punitive house demolitions against Palestinian families.

“Ignoring…punitive house demolitions against Palestinian families”? Try scrupulously documenting.

After criticizing HRW for (putatively) seeking to appear balanced by issuing an equal number of press releases about Israeli and Palestinian abuses rather than reporting on the facts as they happen, Cook takes a page from Gerald Steinberg’s bean-counting playbook. Which is it, Cook? Should human rights organizations report events as they happen, or should they count how many press releases they’ve done criticizing one side or another in a conflict and worry about whether this confirms to one lobby or another’s conception of the problem?

If the point is that “Taking a broad view of things, Palestinians are the victims,” I take the point. But while Palestinians may be the victims of Israeli human rights abuses, being underdogs doesn’t make them beyond reproach.

Off on a tangent, Cook writes, “HRW’s position ignores the context in which the lynching takes place.” It’s one of those embarrassing lines that you wish some editor would have cut to save the writer’s credibility. Rather than bending over backwards to justify a lynching, Cook should hold his own thinking to the same standard he holds HRW’s.

Denounce
The
Lynching.

And get off that tangent, anyway.

And consider the advantages of admitting, at least to yourself, that oppressed people (sometimes) suck.

ISM’s statement was much better: http://www.palsolidarity.org/main/2006/12/01/hrw-response/

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