‘Roth’s False God’

A critic’s first duty is to get his facts right, but not Abraham Foxman. He, embarrassingly, didn’t do his homework before launching his broadside at Human Rights Watch [“No Accident,” Op-ed, August 2, 2006]. Rather than correct his mistakes, the Sun compounds them, offering a litany of unsupported claims that Israel is doing everything possible to spare Lebanese civilians, and thus that Human Rights Watch’s reporting on deaths due to Israeli misconduct must be biased [“Roth’s False God,” Editorial, August 8, 2006].

To prove that supposed bias, Mr. Foxman accuses Human Rights Watch of a “rush to judgment” in Jenin and Qana. He seems to have forgotten that it was the rest of the world that accused Israel of a “massacre” at Jenin. Human Rights Watch, however, refused to pronounce judgment until it had completed its own on-site investigation. It was only when Human Rights Watch then declared that there had been no massacre that this unfounded accusation was put to rest.

As for the 28 civilians killed by Israeli missiles in a house in Qana, Human Rights Watch’s finding that there was no Hezbollah presence in or near the house to justify Israel’s attack has now been conceded by even the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). After initially suggesting the opposite, the IDF finally admitted that on the day of the attack there was no evidence of Hezbollah activity or rocket fire from Qana, let alone from the house targeted. The only “rush to judgment” there was by the reflexive IDF defenders of the sort cited in your editorial.

Yet Mr. Foxman, while offering no evidence, blames the hundreds of civilian casualties in Lebanon on Hezbollah’s “embedding their missiles not only in civilian areas, but literally in civilian households.” Your editorial, with no greater attention to fact, suggests the same. Hezbollah does sometimes endanger civilians, and that’s clearly wrong. But in some two dozen cases examined by Human Rights Watch accounting for what was then a third of the civilian deaths in Lebanon, Hezbollah was nowhere around at the time of the attack.

That’s the conclusion of Human Rights Watch’s detailed investigation using war-tested interview methods for probing and cross-checking accounts from multiple eyewitnesses — the same techniques used at Jenin and Qana. Many of the witnesses talked openly of Hezbollah’s presence elsewhere but were adamant that Hezbollah wasn’t at the scene of the attack. Human Rights Watch also examined bombing sites for evidence of military activity such as trenches, destroyed rocket launchers or military equipment, or dead or wounded fighters. If investigators were unsure, they gave the IDF the benefit of the doubt. The bottom line: the excuse of a Hezbollah presence simply doesn’t explain these deaths.

Rather, having issued a warning to evacuate, the IDF seems to have assumed, in the words of Israel’s minister of justice, Haim Ramon, “all those now in south Lebanon are terrorists who are related in some way to Hezbollah” and thus are fair game for attack. But many Lebanese civilians cannot leave because of infirmity, inability to pay exorbitant taxi fares, or unwillingness to risk the many deadly Israeli attacks on southern Lebanese roads. Creating a free-fire zone in such circumstances is a war crime.

The issue is not, as your editorial falsely states, “Israel’s right to defend itself.” That is not in question. Rather, the issue is how Israel chooses to wage that defense. Casting cheap slurs of anti-Semitism or making false charges of “moral equivalence” may help change the subject but it does not change the fact that Israel, in the way it fights, is not taking all feasible precautions to protect civilians as required by international humanitarian law.

Mr. Foxman, for his part, accuses Human Rights Watch of being “immoral” for supposedly believing that the “continuous flow of rockets, launchers, and other weapons from Iran and Syria to an illegitimate group [Hezbollah] is not worthy of consideration.” Apparently Mr. Foxman neglected to examine the public letters sent by Human Rights Watch to Iran and Syria and posted prominently on the organization’s website seeking to stop that flow because it is being used to deliberately and indiscriminately rain death and injury on the people of northern Israel — a clear war crime.

Mr. Foxman does no better when he claims that “the overwhelming thrust of Human Rights Watch work regarding Israel and the Arab world falls on Israel.” A recent survey of Human Rights Watch’s work in the region since January 2000 showed that publications on Israel lagged behind those on each of Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, and Turkey.

At a meeting with Mr. Foxman three years ago at the headquarters of the Anti-Defamation League, I asked him how much of Human Rights Watch’s work he thought was devoted to Israel. He said about a third. When I explained that Human Rights Watch works regularly on some 70 countries, and that of Human Rights Watch’s entire staff (then 180 people, today 230), only one works full time on abuses by Israeli and Palestinian forces, splitting her time between the two, he conceded, “I’ve learned something.” Evidently, he has now forgotten. The Sun, for its part, didn’t bother to check.

KENNETH ROTH
Executive Director
Human Rights Watch
New York, N.Y.

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