Rights group not the enemy

1. "The most vociferous countries criticizing Israel are terrible human rights violators. Their hypocritical behaviour is shameful!" This claim is undoubtedly true, but is also utterly irrelevant to the matter at hand. Countries such as Libya, Sudan and North Korea have terrible human rights records; moreover, they have no grassroots organizations to monitor, expose and pursue human rights violations on an ongoing basis. This explains why such countries and others are widely considered to be chronic human rights violators. Israel is utterly different. It maintains a robust network of organizations that meticulously track and report on such violations. Some organizations see to it that cases are dealt with at the highest judicial levels. Measuring Israel according to the same yardstick as well-known human rights violators, be they state actors or terror organizations such as Hamas, is an affront to Israel. The sole criteria that should be used to measure Israeli conduct are international humanitarian law and Israel's own legislation on human rights matters.

2. "Exposing Israel's faults in the media is wrong because it will harm its image abroad and even cause Anti-Semitism." Proponents of this attitude often brand Israeli human rights activists as "tattletales," likening Israel to a naughty child in the kindergarten of world opinion. Unlike the metaphor, however, in the real world human rights violations tend to go noticed one way or another: be it by Israeli, Palestinian or international organizations. The advantage of Israeli organizations dealing with incriminating information is that their treatment of it is done with the utmost care and accuracy in well-documented facts and data. Unfortunately, the same cannot always be said for certain international organizations. On the moral level, facts should not be concealed just because they are embarrassing or costly, be it financially or from a PR point of view. What is at stake here is Israel's moral character, not only its moral image.

3. "Israeli human rights organizations receive funds from foreign countries intent on harming Israel". Ad-hominem attacks always seem to be an easy resort when the facts are hard to debate. Delegitimizing Israeli human rights organizations by accusing them of representing foreign interests is not only wrong, it's intellectually dishonest. After all, many Israeli organizations would be forced to close shop if deprived of precious American funds, emanating from various interest groups. Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights organization, was the target of an anonymous editorial published in the Jerusalem Post on March 11 accusing it of "working against the interests of Israel's mainstream by chipping away at any Jewish claims beyond the 1949 Armistice Lines." Beyond the peculiarity of defining alleged illegal quarries in the West Bank as "Jewish claims," it should be noted that Yesh Din only accepts Israeli volunteers to its ranks and shuns political involvement, stringently keeping its mission local, professional, and focused on the letter of the law. "Israel's security concerns…do not interest Yesh Din," the editorial asserts, "nor does the threat of terrorist infiltration." True, yet these issues do interest the IDF which does its job quite well. As a human rights organization, Yesh Din is concerned with human rights. This too, in addition to security concerns, has a place in democratic countries such as our own.