Human Rights Watch has seen a civil war waged in its ranks over the organization’s treatment of Israel, culminating in the publication by HRW’s founder of an Op-Ed in The New York Times calling HRW’s work on Israel shoddy and biased. In the last few years, many key figures who have dissented against the organization’s targeting of Israel have left HRW or been purged fom its ranks.
The New Republic’s Benjamin Birnbaum has the story.
On October 19 of last year, the op-ed page of The New York Times contained a bombshell: a piece by Robert Bernstein, the founder and former chairman of Human Rights Watch (HRW), attacking his own organization. HRW, Bernstein wrote, was “helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state.”…
It isn’t every day that the founder of a group turns so publicly on his own creation. What few people outside HRW knew, however, was that Bernstein’s op-ed was the culmination of a long struggle inside the organization that had turned increasingly acrimonious over the years. The debate revolved around a single question: Was the world’s most respected human rights group being fair to Israel? Bob Bernstein wasn’t the only person at Human Rights Watch who thought the answer was no.
Even Richard Goldstone, the South African jurist who has become persona non grata in pro-Israel circles for his U.N. report on the Gaza war, pushed HRW to focus more on attacks against Israel (Goldstone was an HRW board member).
Full story here.
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