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When the United Nations released the so-called Goldstone Report in September 2009, Israelis and their supporters around the world were astonished by the blunt words near its conclusion: “There is evidence indicating serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law were committed by Israel during the Gaza conflict, and that Israel committed actions amounting to war crimes, and possibly crimes against humanity.” The report declared that virtually everything Israel had done during Operation Cast Lead—Israel’s attempt in late 2008 and early 2009 to stop Hamas’s rocket war on Israeli civilians—had been a crime. No single written attack on the Jewish state has been as damning, as prominent, or as influential. And yet the South African jurist Richard Goldstone and his team had only a few months to compile a report that runs to nearly 600 pages and makes hundreds of detailed accusations about the Israel Defense Force’s conduct of the war, and Goldstone himself made only a single four-day visit to Gaza. Where did they secure the evidentiary rope with which to hang Israel?
The report was largely compiled from material provided by what is often referred to as Israel’s “human rights community.” This vague euphemism refers to a coterie of groups and individuals that has evolved over the past decade into a highly politicized movement of dozens of nongovernmental organizations that operate in Israel and subject its government, military, laws, and people to relentless scrutiny and accusation. And, as first pointed out by NGO Monitor, the Goldstone Report relied most heavily on the largest and most prominent among them: the group known as B’Tselem. More footnotes in the report, 56 in all, cite B’Tselem as a source than any other. Indeed, as Jessica Montell, B’Tselem’s executive director, has said, B’Tselem “provided extensive assistance to the UN fact-finding mission headed by Justice Goldstone—escorting them to meet victims in Gaza, providing all of our documentation and correspondence, and meeting the mission in Jordan.”
In making such a profound contribution to the Goldstone Report, B’Tselem was performing the task to which it has truly dedicated itself: not the defense of human rights in the West Bank and Gaza, but the delegitimization of Israel and its existence as a Jewish state.
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B’Tselem—“The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories”—was founded in 1989 by what the organization refers to as “a group of prominent academics, attorneys, journalists, and Knesset members” whose politics were overwhelmingly on the far left of the political spectrum. Its purpose was to “document and educate the Israeli public and policymakers about human-rights violations in the Occupied Territories,” and during the 1990s it largely focused on that internal mission. Yet with the onset of the Palestinian terror war in 2000 and Israel’s increasingly tough responses to it over the succeeding four years, B’Tselem’s mission shifted from trying to inform and influence the Israeli debate to becoming the primary resource for those journalists, officials, and activists who saw in Israel’s self-defense the full flowering of a new age of Israeli oppression and criminality.
B’Tselem employs Israelis, and there is no doubt that the major reason for its appeal—especially internationally—is due to the perception that it is an Israeli group exposing Israeli crimes in order to achieve a more just Israeli society. Yet almost its entire annual budget is provided by European governments and American foundations, such as the New Israel Fund and the Ford Foundation.
That money pays for 41 staffers who work primarily in two divisions, data and communications. Most of the 19 members of the data division are Palestinians who live in the West Bank and Gaza and supply a constant stream of anecdotes and testimony to the group’s Jerusalem headquarters, where a few researchers compile the information and the 10-person communications department packages and disseminates it to journalists, other NGOs, policymakers, and activists. B’Tselem mounts campaigns on certain issues, such as the supposed illegality of Israeli communities over the armistice lines of 1949 and the supposed illegality of West Bank checkpoints erected to interdict suicide bombers. “B’Tselem,” according to its own materials, “ensures the reliability of information it publishes by conducting its own fieldwork and research, the results of which are thoroughly cross-checked with relevant documents, official government sources, and information from other sources.” These reports have made B’Tselem the most famous and successful Israeli NGO. It is also one of the most ambitious. A list of “advocacy efforts” from its 2009 year-end report, for example, includes
a month-long, high-profile campaign using B’Tselem’s 20-year anniversary to draw attention to the urgency of the human-rights situation in the Occupied Territories; four Internet campaigns on Operation Cast Lead, security force violence, the siege on Gaza, and Road 443, which is barred to Palestinian use; four full-length publications, including Guidelines for Israel’s Investigation of Operation Cast Leadand Without Trial: Administrative Detention of Palestinians by Israel; 22 visual articles and films made available online; and 80 study tours and 176 briefings for policymakers, journalists, diplomats, and international organizations.
Today, B’Tselem conducts itself as though its true purpose is not trying to convince Israelis to change their policies from within, but rather aiding international efforts to pressure Israel to adopt the kind of policies Israelis themselves have repeatedly rejected in elections. To that end, in 2008 B’Tselem opened an office in Washington, which, according to a press release, it “expects to become the central clearinghouse for information about human-rights conditions in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip for Member [sic] of Congress, the State Department, and other policymakers.” Or, as Anat Biletzky told a small campus audience in 2007 just after she stepped down as the group’s chairman of the board, “B’Tselem is now opening an office in D.C. because we think that there are two main targets here. One is American policymakers. The other is the Jewish community. And the two are not unrelated, as we have seen in Walt and Mearsheimer’s book.”
