Human Rights Watch: Still Missing the Point
Should We Deny Lebanon the Right to Defend Itself?
By Jonathan Cook
CounterPunch, September 25, 2006
In a CounterPunch article article criticising Human Rights Watch
for singling out Hizbullah rather than Israel for harsher
condemnation of its military actions during the Lebanon war, I made
sure to quote the organisation fairly and accurately before seeking
to refute its arguments. Unfortunately, in her recent response HRW's
Middle East policy director, Sarah Leah Whitson, did not return the
favour. Possibly realising that her case was weak, she decided to
paraphrase my argument instead, misrepresenting it, and only then
try to rebut it.
According to Whitson, I claim to know that Hizbullah was trying to
hit military rather than civilian targets in Israel during this
summer's war because on several occasions its rockets actually did
strike military targets. If only, for her sake, that were my
argument. As she points out, it is easy to discredit such reasoning:
if Hizbullah's rockets were entirely random, they might still have
hit an Israeli military site or two by chance.
By misrepresenting my position, Whitson benefits in two ways. First,
she is able to suggest that I am an apologist, naïve or
mischievious, for Hizbullah's war crimes. I am either a dupe or a
dissembler. And second, she enjoys the satisfaction of asserting
that she and her organisation are facing down the extremists on both
sides: apologists for Hizbullah's war crimes like me on the one
hand, and the supporters of pre-emptive wars and torture like Alan
Dershowitz on the other. Whitson can then smugly claim to be
occupying the sensible centre.
If this is how one of the directors of HRW distorts my arguments and
evidence when I carefully set out my case in black and white on the
page, one has to wonder how faithfully she and her organisation sift
the evidence in the far trickier cases relating to human rights,
where things are rarely so black and white.
Which brings me back to my original argument. My point was not, as
Whitson asserts, to claim that I knew whether Hizbullah -- or Israel
-- was trying to distinguish between military and civilian targets
during the war.
Quite the reverse, in fact. I made it clear that I could not know
what either side intended because I was not sitting alongside the
Katyusha rocket teams or Israel's military intelligence officers.
I took issue with HRW precisely because it appears to believe it
does know what the two sides intended, even though it was no nearer
to the rocket teams or Israeli command bunkers than I was. In fact,
not only does it claim to know what Hizbullah and Israel hoped to
achieve in the war, HRW also feels able to conclude that Hizbullah's
intentions were far more malign than Israel's and therefore produced
the greater war crimes.
I am not challenging HRW's research, which appears to show
unequivocally that Israel did commit major war crimes; I am
contesting its distorted presentation of the facts it unearthed to
suit what looks suspiciously like a political agenda. The impression
is that HRW is trying to present a more damning picture of
Hizbullah's actions than Israel's, despite the evidence, to avoid
attracting yet more allegations of anti-Semitism from Israel's
influential defenders.
It is for that very reason, of course, that Israel's apologists use
the slur: to intimidate organisations like HRW. The inevitable
conclusion, at least based on HRW's presentation of its findings
about the Lebanon war, is that the Israel lobby is succeeding.
Let's recap on the quote from HRW's senior researcher, Peter
Bouckaert, published in the New York Times, that provoked my
original article:
"I mean, it's perfectly clear that Hezbollah is directly targeting
civilians, and that their aim is to kill Israeli civilians. We don't
accuse the Israeli army of deliberately trying to kill civilians.
Our accusation, clearly stated in the report, is that the Israeli
army is not taking the necessary precautions to distinguish between
civilian and military targets. So, there is a difference in intent
between the two sides. At the same time, they are both violating the
Geneva Convention."
I hope I am not the only person discomforted by the idea that a
major human rights organisation thinks it has a legitimate role
divining what two sides in a war wanted to achieve rather than what
they did in fact achieve, and then seeks to make judgments about war
crimes based on its interpretations of such intentions.
Whitson could have distanced herself from Bouckaert's comments,
saying they were unjustified, but instead she chose to defend them.
Which serves only to increase my suspicions about HRW's agenda.
A responsible human rights organisation ought to be concerned with
the events of the Lebanese conflict only, and then try to judge the
degree to which the acts committed by both sides fell within the
parameters of legitimate warfare, defined as self-defence and the
protection of important national interests. War is never a moral
event, but it can be conducted within certain constraints that
should be the primary concern of human rights monitors.
According to the findings of Human Rights Watch, and reports in the
media, we know much about what Israel actually did during the war.
Its airforce massively attacked Lebanon's infrastructure, such as
roads and power stations, collectively punishing the populaton; its
aerial bombardments resulted in the deaths of more than 1,000
Lebanese, the overwhelming majority of them civilians; its air
strikes forced hundreds of thousands of Lebanese civilians to flee
their homes as villages were destroyed in the south; convoys of
refugees and medical personnel, as well as a United Nations
peacekeeping base, were attacked; and finally, in the last few hours
of war, as the deadline for a ceasefire rapidly approached, Israel
dropped hundreds of thousands of cluster bombs, tiny land mines that
are maiming and killing returning refugees and will continue to do
so for years to come.
On all these grounds, Israel grossly violated international law --
it committed war crimes. We need know nothing about its intentions
to make this judgment. None of these forms of attack was necessary
in terms of Israel's right to self-defence or its right to protect
its interests: the return of the two soldiers captured by Hizbullah,
the pretext for the war, and the reassertion of its sovereignty.
Given that Hizbullah immediately offered a prisoner exchange for the
soldiers, in return for Lebanese prisoners of war being held in
Israeli jails, it is clear that options other than the ones above
were available to Israel.
So what about the facts in relation to Hizbullah? Let's examine its
behaviour in the war's two main phases: Hizbullah's provocation of
hostilities, and its conduct during the war.
We know that the Shiite group provoked the confrontation with Israel
by launching a military operation on July 12 designed to capture
Israeli soldiers under cover of a small and harmless volley of
mortars and rockets fired at border posts and at the northern
community of Shilo in what the Israeli army characterised at the
time as "diversionary tactics". In a gunfight, three Israeli troops
were killed as the two soldiers were captured.
This was presented as an act of unprovoked aggression by the Western
media, which stripped the attack of its context. In truth, the
military operation was the latest flare-up in long-running, if
small-scale, hostilities between Israel and Hizbullah since Israel
ended its two-decade occupation of south Lebanon in 2000. Those
tensions have focused on a disputed corridor of land, known as the
Shebaa Farms, claimed by Lebanon but held by Israel.
In addition, after withdrawing, Israel maintained and exacerbated
the state of hostilities by refusing to release a handful of
Lebanese PoWs, by failing to hand over maps of the hundreds of
thousands of land mines it laid during the occupation, by repeatedly
shooting at, and killing, Lebanese shepherds who strayed into the
Shebaa Farms area, and, most significantly, by violating almost
daily Lebanese sovereignty by sending warplanes and spy drones as
far as Beirut.
Hizbullah's operation was not the first it had launched to capture
Israeli soldiers since 2000, and its motives for wanting to do so
were well known to Israel. Hizbullah immediately offered to return
the soldiers in a prisoner swap.
Thus, although Hizbullah's operation may have been foolhardy, it was
most certainly not a war crime under any interpretation of
international law.
What about the second phase of the war, when Hizbullah began firing
rockets into Israel? Again, these attacks have been stripped of
their context, after much misinformation from Israel and its
supporters. Hizbullah did not initiate the rocket fire, as is
sometimes suggested; it retaliated after Israel began its massive
bombardment of Lebanon. There was clear cause and effect, which HRW
knows.
In his speeches, Hizbullah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, repeatedly
stated that its rocket fire was a response to Israel's far greater
attacks and would end when Israel stopped firing missiles and
dropping bombs on Lebanon. When Israeli guns briefly fell silent
after a US-imposed "period of calm", Hizbullah studiously observed
the 48-hour lull whereas Israel quickly broke it. Each expansion of
Hizbullah's range of rocket fire was preceded by a warning from
Nasrallah of what was in store if Israel continued or intensified
its assault.
The rocket fire, therefore, adequately fits any reasonable
definition of self-defence, not just of Hizbullah's military assets
but of Lebanon as a whole. Given the weakness of the Lebanese army
-- the reason, after all, why Israel was able to occupy the country
for so long -- Hizbullah can justifiably claim that the duty to
defend Lebanon from Israeli attack fell to it by default.
So again, it is difficult to see in what way Hizbullah's conduct
during the second phase of the war can be categorised as a war crime
-- and even harder to understand how HRW believes it can be
described as a greater war crime than Israel's assault.
But HRW believes it has one trump card up its sleeve. It says
Hizbullah should never have fired any of its rockets, even in
self-defence, because they were too primitive to be accurately aimed
at Israeli military targets. Even if Hizbullah intended to hit
military sites (and again we cannot be sure), and even if the
victims of its attacks were mainly soldiers, HRW regards Hizbullah
as having "deliberately targeted" civilians because whatever rockets
were sent over the border would in all probability strike civilian
areas.
I have previously pointed out the paradox of HRW criticising
Hizbullah for killing mostly soldiers, even with its "imprecise"
arsenal, more harshly than Israel, which killed mostly civilians
with its smart bombs and precision missiles. I will not labour the
point again.
Instead I will repeat the questions I asked last time, and which
Whitson failed to answer -- presumably because, given HRW's public
position, she could find no moral high ground from which to respond.
According to HRW's understanding of international law, what was
Hizbullah supposed to do, given its inferior arsenal, when Israel
started to wreck Lebanon, destroying its infrastructure, killing its
civilian population and driving hundreds of thousands from their
homes? If by firing just one of its rudimentary rockets, it was
immediately committing a war crime, what military options were
available to it as a response to what we have already seen was
unwarranted Israeli aggression against the whole of Lebanon?
If for weeks on end Israel used its superior armoury from the air --
relying on an air force against which Hizbullah, lacking
anti-aircraft guns, had no defence -- in what ways could Hizbullah
engage with such warfare? Under international law, was Hizbullah
required to sit tight and let the people of Lebanon die in their
hundreds while it waited to see whether Israel would begin a ground
invasion? Would a ground invasion have happened had Hizbullah not
continued firing its rockets? And was Israel's belated attack by
land the first moment Hizbullah was entitled to fight back?
The nearest to an answer Whitson supplied in her response to my
original article was the following: "[T]hese constraints [provided
by international law] hardly preclude a military strategy for either
side should it decide to pursue one. Hezbollah has a long history of
cross-border attacks on Israeli military facilities and soldiers,
including the one that launched the most recent round of fighting."
What a wonderfully complete circle her argument is. Hizbullah has
the right under international law to launch a cross-border attack to
capture soldiers, as it did, but then what? What rights under
international law does Hizbullah have if Israel chooses to destroy
Lebanon in response? Whitson offers no answers.
Let me finally suggest a further two questions for her. Does HRW
characterise Hizbullah's return of fire as a war crime even though
its undiminished ability to launch rockets was what finally brought
Israel's war machine to a standstill and led to a ceasefire? And
exactly how much of a war crime would the firing of those
rudimentary rockets be if it turned out that not only did they halt
the war but they also prevented its expansion to include Syria and
Iran?
If on this occasion Whitson can address my point, I would be
interested to hear her response.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth,
Israel. He is the author of the forthcoming "Blood
and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State"
published by Pluto Press, and available in the United States from
the University of Michigan Press. His website is
www.jkcook.net
