Summary
The human rights NGO whose December 2010 report Separate and Unequal: Israel’s Discriminatory Treatment of Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories Falk welcomes as exhaustively documenting discrimination in the West Bank, while faulting its language as too moderate (Palestine: The Legitimacy of Hope, PDF p.166-170).
Details
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Falk gives the report “the credibility of an NGO that has an impeccable global reputation for getting the facts and applicable law right and for exercising restraint with respect to political implications”, and urges supporters of the Palestinian struggle to make it as widely known as possible in the setting of the global solidarity movement and the BDS campaign (PDF p.166).
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Its central contention as Falk states it: Israeli settlers unlawfully present and their settlements unlawfully established are given the fullest protection of the law and the maximum security possible, while Palestinians, “protected persons” under international humanitarian law, are abused constantly and live without rights or the barest minimum of security, their land and prospects diminished by settlement expansion (PDF p.169).
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One figure Falk takes from it: “As many as 31 percent of those interviewed in the Human Rights Watch report said they were seeking to escape somehow from life under occupation.” (PDF p.170)
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Falk’s three criticisms are its silence on the intrinsic unlawfulness of a prolonged occupation, its holding back from the criminal character of the discrimination structures (a prima facie basis for apartheid allegations), and its language of violations rather than crimes (PDF p.169-170).
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Responses Falk records: a spokesperson for Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said Human Rights Watch had allowed “a blatant anti-Israeli agenda to pollute its reporting”, and NGO Monitor’s Gerald Steinberg called its allegations “manufactured” on CNN and criticised its reliance on Al-Haq, BADIL, B’Tselem, Yesh Din and a UN office (PDF p.167-168).
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Elsewhere in Falk, Human Rights Watch is named among the bodies whose detailed reports documented the criminality of the IDF’s tactics in the 2008-2009 Gaza attacks, with the Goldstone Report and an Arab League mission (PDF p.76, p.141).
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In Falk’s “Israel’s Politics of Deflection” (September 30, 2013), Human Rights Watch appears on the receiving side of deflection pressure: Falk writes that even “the liberal, mainstream human rights powerhouse Human Rights Watch buckled under pressure from UN Watch, invoking a long-neglected technical rule to obtain my immediate removal from a committee, and then lacked the decency to explain that my removal was not a “dismissal” when UN Watch claimed “victory,””, concluding “Human Rights Watch has feet of clay when it comes to standing on principle” (Palestine: The Legitimacy of Hope, PDF p.225).
Related pages
Palestine: The Legitimacy of Hope, Apartheid, B’Tselem, Gaza, Goldstone report