A group of Soviet dissidents gathered in a Moscow apartment nearly 35 years ago and courageously formed the Moscow Helsinki group, with the aim of monitoring how the Soviet Union was living up to the human rights component of the 1975 Helsinki Accords that dealt with ways to improve ties between the communist bloc and the West.

Smokes rises over Gaza City during an IAF operation.
Photo: AP

One of those involved was Natan Sharansky. Using this group as a model, Helsinki Watch, an NGO founded largely by Robert Bernstein, an American Jew concerned with human rights, was established soon after, also as a way to monitor Soviet compliance. In the intervening 31 years, Helsinki Watch has morphed into Human Rights Watch (HRW), a mammoth human rights NGO that went to Saudi Arabia in May and used its work castigating Israel as a way to solicit funds in one of the world's worst human rights violators.

That transformation, at least for Sharansky, is simply too much.

"Here is an organization created by the goodwill of the free world to fight violations of human rights, which has become a tool in the hands of dictatorial regimes to fight against democracies," he said this week. "It is time to call a spade a spade. The real activity of this organization today is a far cry from what it was set up 30 years ago to do: throw light in dark places where there is really no other way to find out what is happening regarding human rights."

Calling a spade a spade is what Bar-Ilan University political science professor Gerald Steinberg, executive director of NGO Monitor, has been trying to do for years, monitoring the work and methodology of HRW and other human rights organizations, issuing reports pointing out faulty methodology and conflicts of interest. But his has largely been a voice in the wilderness, one dismissed by the NGOs themselves - and some in the media - as nothing more than that of a propagandist with a right-wing Zionist agenda.

Now, however, the government is listening, and after years of choosing largely to ignore damming reports put out by HRW and similar organizations, it has decided to go on the offensive and attack the organizations for essentially using human rights and legal lingo to delegitimize Israel. The last month has seen a wave of reports from various NGOs, including HRW, blasting Israel for its conduct during Operation Cast Lead.

"We are going to dedicate time and manpower to combating these groups; we are not going to be sitting ducks in a pond for the human rights groups to shoot at us with impunity," said Ron Dermer, director of policy planning in the Prime Minister's Office. "We will insist that they defend their record and their values. When I see a human rights organization try to raise money in Saudi Arabia, it speaks to the collapse of the human rights community."

The reports of these organizations are an attempt to undermine Israel's legitimate right to self-defense, Dermer said, adding that those who are attacking Israel for defending itself against terrorists using civilians as human shields are playing Hamas's game.

"Every NGO that participates in this adds fuel to the fire and is serving the cause of Hamas," he said. "This is exactly what Hamas wants to do. They use innocent civilians to hide, Israel defends itself, there are unintentional casualties, and they turn that into a great political victory. What then happens is that these tactics of warfare will become more anchored and more likely to happen around the world."

The NGOs, he said, are "blaming the firefighter, not the arsonists. We have to devote more time and resources to getting this out there. We must focus more time and effort in pushing back, in unabashedly seizing the moral high ground."

One thing that these organizations must do to retain "their moral compass" is to distinguish between democratic and nondemocratic governments, he said. "During the Cold War the reason the human rights community was so effective was because it made the distinction between good and bad regimes and how good and bad regimes do in terms of human rights. I would hope that they would regain their moral compass by doing this again, by laying down a marker, and not looking only at this or that violation, but rather looking at the overall nature of the regimes. Once they make that distinction, every single human rights violation is put in the proper perspective."

But Sarah Leah Whitson, director of HRW's Middle East and North Africa division, said the organization will never make these types of distinctions.

"No regime deserves a pass, whether it is a democratic or totalitarian form of government," she said. "There is one human rights law, one standard. Democratic governments are no more exempt from abiding by international law than are totalitarian regimes."

Whitson said that the "unfortunate truth is that democratic regimes are also quite capable of human rights violations."

"It might be that what is disappointing Mr. Sharansky and others is that we don't rank a government as to who is worse and better because we think that each government has to stand by its own record according to the standard of international law," she said.

She said Steinberg, Sharansky and other HRW critics "overplay" the assertion that the organization is giving other countries in the Middle East a pass, while focusing almost obsessively on Israel. "They just don't like it when we also point the finger at their misconduct."

"If the democratically elected president of France is making policy statements as to what women should and shouldn't wear, it doesn't make it better that he is the democratically elected president," she said of recent comments made by Nicolas Sarkozy saying that Muslim women should not wear the full-length burka in France.

"That the Venezuelan president, who is democratically elected, should be barring free speech and press, it doesn't make it okay just because he was democratically elected. The matter in which one is elected is not relevant to the particular human rights violation we are looking at. And in the case of Israel, where our focus is primarily on the violations of international law and humanitarian law in the occupied Palestinian territories, the fact that government is a democracy is completely irrelevant because the rule in place in the occupied territories is military rule, it is not a democracy."