Gerald M. Steinberg is the Director of the Program for Conflict Management at Bar Ilan University and editor of www.ngo-monitor.org and a member of the SPME Board of Directors. He is publishing this as a draft exclusive for SPME Faculty Voices.

In September 2001, the leaders of the international human rights community including diplomats from the United Nations and the heads of non-governmental organizations, gathered in Durban South Africa for a conference on racism. The main result was a highly publicized denunciation of Israeli “war crimes” and comparison of Zionism with Apartheid.

In examining last week’s „advisory decision” on the Israeli separation barrier issued by the International Court of Justice, the Durban pattern re-emerges. In The Hague, where the ICJ is located, and in Durban, the processes were led by the powerful Arab and Islamic groups in the United Nations, with the active cooperation or silent acquiescence of Europe, Canada and others. In both instances, the texts condemning Israel were prepared well in advance „ in the case of Durban, in the UN Human Rights Coommission, under the leadership of Mary Robinson, and in The Hague, by the Palestinian Negotiating Support Unit (NSU) „ funded by European governments long after any negotiations ended. And in both examples, private non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Christian Aid, Oxfam, as well as their Palestinian adjuncts, provided much of the leg work that propelled the political campaigns.

The Palestinian strategy of using the ICJ for the attack against Israel was a logical follow-up to their success at Durban, and, in particular, the NGO caucus in which the anti-Israel rhetoric was most virulent. The actors and script in The Hague followed the Durban model very closely.

The campaign to demonize the „Apartheid wall” began in the Fall of 2003 with a massive public relations blitz by Human Rights Watch, joined by Adallah, Al Mezan, (both funded in part by the Ford Foundation, New Israel Fund, the European Union), and others. This was followed by a special session of the UN General Assembly in December, which approved a resolution asking the politicized judges on the ICJ to rule on „the legal consequences arising from the construction of the wall being built by Israel, the occupying power, in the occupied Palestinian territory.” There was no mention of Palestinian terrorism, and as in Durban, the outcome was cooked long before any discussion began. Less than half of the 191 countries supported the motion, but it was approved by a vote of 90 against eight, with 74 members abstaining.

However, the Europeans, Canada and others suddenly woke up to the consequences of giving the pseudo-legal ICJ (headed by judge from China) the power to determine critical norms of international behavior. These countries joined Israel and the U.S. in submitting briefs against the involvement of the ICJ in this political dispute, but by then, the damage had been done. Nothing was learned from Durban, where Canada and Europe gave the conference legitimacy after the Americans and Israelis walked out, and then issued polite position papers that were ignored.

In The Hague, the bland and carefully balanced diplomatic and legal briefs were again lost in the barrage of NGO press releases repeating the allegations against Israel. HRW used part of its $22 million annual budget to issue another media blast against Israel’s separation policy. One day earlier, a Palestinian terror in Jerusalem killed and wounded many civilians, but this gross violation of human rights went unmentioned by Human Rights Watch. Instead, this organization again condemned Israel and the construction of a security barrier, for „indiscriminate punishment”â⁄š“arbitrary and excessive restrictions on the freedom of movement”

None of this should have been surprising. Indeed, the evidence examined by the NGO Monitor project shows that much of the force in the ritual demonization of Israel comes from the self-proclaimed „human rights” NGO superpowers. The same is true for their systematic attacks against American policy in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the simplistic attempt to apply the polite norms of post war Europe to a world threatened by mass terror.

A great deal of the success of the NGOs (in addition to the huge funds at their disposal) comes from the fact that no one is watching the watchers, allowing the human rights agenda to be exploited to promote private political and ideological agendas. In the past four years, HRW has made well over 100 pronouncements on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but only 13 focus on Palestinian terror. The rest consist of attacks on Israel based on unverifiable “eyewitness reports”, pseudo-legal terminology such as “war crimes” and “excessive force”, and a studied removal of background information on terror and hatred. (Joe Stork, who runs HRW’s Middle East section, was a well-known anti-Israel extremist before taking this position, and had no experience in human rights.)

The result, in addition to the demonization of Israel, is that the entire human rights community has lost credibility. NGOs such as Human Rights Watch, which were founded on the ashes of the Holocaust and the struggle for basic rights under the Soviet empire, have debased the meaning of universal human rights in pursuit of a highly particular political agenda. And the victims of real human rights abuses in the Sudan, Central Africa, and elsewhere, are paying the price.