Human Rights Watch doesn’t like Israel. No surprise there. But since the advocacy group still does important work on human rights issues in other countries, it continues to get taken seriously by the media and government officials. This legitimacy should end immediately in light of HRW’s latest report, which tacitly endorses the beyond-fringe Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. From the text of the study:
The report is based on case studies comparing Israel’s starkly different treatment of settlements and next-door Palestinian communities in these areas. It calls on the US and EU member states and on businesses with operations in settlement areas to avoid supporting Israeli settlement policies that are inherently discriminatory and that violate international law.
The report also asks the U.S. to avoid “offsetting the costs of Israeli expenditures on settlements by withholding U.S. funding from the Israeli government in an amount equivalent to its expenditures on settlements and related infrastructure in the West Bank.”
That’s bad enough. But there was one recommendation that really caught my eye:
Congress should request a report from the General Accounting Office on the subject of tax-exempt organizations that support settlements and settlement-related activities. Such a study should include specific assessments of the amounts and types of donations involved and the actual end-uses of such donations in the settlements. The report should also address whether current laws and regulations regarding charitable organizations ensure that tax-exempt status is not granted to organizations that facilitate human rights violations or violations of international humanitarian law, are adequately enforced, and whether they are adequate or require revision.
Hmm. As we know from the Z Street case, the IRS has already been giving some pro-Israel groups a hard time on their tax-exemption applications — ostensibly because Israel has a “higher risk of terrorism.” But could the IRS also be concerned about tax-exempt groups giving support to Israeli settlements? And if not, will this be the next rallying cry picked up by the BDS movement?
In addition to those suggestions, HRW also recommended the following quasi-BDS tactics:
• The international community should tack on extra tariffs to products imported from Israeli settlements: “Ensure that policies do not promote settlement activity, such as the discriminatory violations of Palestinian human rights documented in this report, by enforcing tariff agreements in accordance with international law, such that Israeli settlement goods are not given preferential treatment, including by requiring and enforcing clear origin labeling.”
• Businesses operating from the settlements should cease involvement in any activity that HRW deems to be a violation of international law, “including where necessary ending such [business] operations altogether.”
The NGO Monitor has also denounced the report. In an e-mail, it called it evidence that HRW “endorses boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS), disguised as opposition to settlements, but in reality seeking the destruction of Israel.”
“This is further proof of HRW founder Robert Bernstein’s conclusion that the organization has turned Israel into a pariah state,” NGO Monitor president Gerald Steinberg added, in a statement on Sunday.
Blinders are required for fanaticism. The narrow field of focus this leaves allows no room for a broader vision. It would be nice if the shock and disappointment of Obama moving in a moderate direction so infuriated the left that cynicism and apathy resulted. At least they’d be out of the country’s hair. Or, even better, they might return to the Days of Rage mode — window breaking, Off the Pigs, and the rest of the Yippee street theater. It released a lot of pent up fury and provided amusement for the rest of us. It might presage a return to the spotlight of the likes of old faves like Jane Fonda, artificial hip and all.
It’s reassuring to see that Obama may actually have common sense about foreign affairs. How do we get him to do the same with economics ?
“Arabs, particularly Palestinians, are nervous that Obama seems prepared to give the job of top diplomat to a senator from New York who has spent eight years cultivating her pro-Israel constituency and would continue, they think, a lack of U.S. evenhandedness in refereeing the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.”
Personally, I don’t think we should show any “evenhandedness” when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. We should show unabashed support for the liberal democracy at the expense of the terror tainted Palestinians.
It might seem a minor point, but it’s actually very important: General James Jones makes a serious strategic mistake in wanting to put NATO troops “between” Israel and the Palestinian Arabs.
The urge to involve NATO in the Levant is not invalid. But Jones, and the busy bureaucrats up in Brussels, need to move their sights up the coast. Lebanon is where NATO’s interests lie. Hizballah is gradually consolidating Lebanon as an Iranian outpost on the Mediterranean — and Russia is busy reestablishing her Cold War-era fraternal ties with Syria. NATO should be very concerned about these developments, a key truth about which is that they are developing independently of the Arab Palestinian guerrilla war with Israel. What NATO’s interests are in the Levant, Israel is not “the cause” of threats to.
No concession Israel could make, including relinquishing her existence, would reduce the interest of Iran and Russia in achieving strategic position in the Levant. This latter is NATO’s legitimate security concern. But putting NATO troops in Israel and/or the Palestinian Territories, to act as security intermediaries, would put NATO OUT of position to affect developments in Lebanon — at least without mounting a whole separate effort, eliminating any potential for agility and efficiency in policy, and closing off all neutral-state exit strategies.
It’s not just a bad idea from Israel’s perspective (you know which side would be prevented from defending itself by NATO troops). It’s a bad idea from NATO’s perspective. And of course, until the NATO West gets over the erroneous idea that “Israel” is the source of all strategic motivations relating to the Middle East, it will have no hope of adopting effective policy on the region anyway.
Hardly a minor point, JE. If Jones seriously thinks anything like that – putting NATO or US troops anywhere in between Israel and her adversaries is even conceivable – I once again am put in the impossible position of having to consider an experienced senior Marine officer ….. well, nuts. (Zinni being the first time)
Whatever NATO’s strategic interests in the Levant, I don’t see any scenario in which a NATO presence makes sense. Israel is not a proxy, but if Russia or Iran somehow attain an intolerable position in the Levant (I’m not sure what that would mean in practice), Israel becomes a de facto proxy WRT those issues. It’s very hard for me to imagine any arrangement being better than supporting Israel (and the Arabs likely to also weigh in against Iranian or Russian meddling, such as Egypt and Jordan).
To over-simplify for discussion but not to distort the substantive bottom line, NATO members lack the military capacity or political will to play any role in the Levant (or elsewhere, apart from perhaps the irrelevant Balkans). I suppose NATO can help with ships for Gulf of Aden piracy suppression, and of course play a supporting role in Afghanistan. But I can’t see NATO countries playing any constructive role in the Levant, where their military weakness and long-term tendencies towards appeasement of Arab rejectionism, on top of general lack of political will, courage, or self-respect on such matters, render NATO a non-factor at best.
IceCold — on the fecklessness of European NATO since 1991, I certainly agree with you. If NATO were to involve itself USEFULLY in the Levant, it would have to be a NATO of a different color.
NATO should have seen, before the Doha Accords, that it has a significant interest in the disposition of Lebanon. As recently at the Taif Accords, NATO did understand that (although it still chose, when it came to monitoring or enforcing the Accords, the path of fecklessness). Coasting on the old patterns of colonialism, NATO understood the importance of Lebanon all the way back to its inception in 1949.
But West European NATO has drfited, since the Taif Accords, into a weirdly inward-looking and unready state, as if it thinks the brittle stasis of the Mediterranean in 2008 will persist without any real policy effort. Iran prepares to supply Hizballah with C802 coastal missiles, and Russia, already selling arms to Iran, sends her aircraft carrier to visit Tartus, and looks to sell Damascus a new arsenal of much more modern ballistic and coastal cruise missiles, helos and fighter aircraft. A number of developments further afield (e.g., down the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa, and up through the Aegean into the Black Sea) should tip NATO that both Russia and Iran are seeking to wield military influence over the great juncture of chokepoints that is the Middle East.
There isn’t much NATO could do, directly, about Russia selling modern arms to Syria, paying naval visits there, and reimproving the port facilities at Tartus — a key naval base for the USSR — to accommodate the Russian navy. There’s not a whole lot NATO could do directly about Russian private firms reimproving the former Yugoslav port of Tivat, also a one-time major naval base for the USSR (now in Montenegro), to, coincidentally, the standards of naval-level support.
But NATO could have taken a real prior interest in the outcome of the Doha negotiations, and the internal arrangements of Lebanon. Lebanon has characteristics that Syria doesn’t: chronic instability, and a substantial Western-oriented population that would respond well to being stabilized. Lebanon is also the place to block Iran, by denying Lebanon’s territory to Iran’s client Hizballah.
NATO’s smartest moves in the Levant would be, as you say, to support Israel; to focus on imposing stability in Lebanon and denying Lebanon to Iran; and to Be There: patrol the living snot out of Syria’s coastline and airspace, and demonstrate resolve to keep the water- and airways of the Eastern Mediterranean NATO-owned and NATO-operated. Russia and Iran should both push and probe there in vain.
But no, Jim Jones wants to go park NATO troops so that they’ll foul the range of Israel’s security forces — a position in which the only thing they can possibly do is become the exploitable dupes of the Palestinians. Instead of benefiting from the addition a strong Israel makes to NATO security, he wants to send troops to WEAKEN Israel, which will only hasten the crumbling of security in the Eastern Med. Brilliant.
The Arabs fail to notice that, as Secretary of State, Clinton will not need her NY Jewish constituency any more. And what do the Clintons do when they no longer have a use for someone….?
attaboy, oakwheel.
i am surprised that rosner is oblivious to that, but i guess most of the right is wishfully thinking these days.
There will be either NATO or the US or a combination of US and others between Israel and Palestine before anything is settled.
Take it to the bank.
And it will not resemble the Beruit operation. These will be ‘enforcers’ not peacekeepers.