Natan Sharansky, a human rights activist and former political prisoner in the Soviet Union, is chairman of advisory boards of the Combat Antisemitism Movement and the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy.
Roth answered that his organization demanded more from democracies than from dictatorships and more from states than from non-state actors, even those that target innocents. Hearing this remark about Human Rights Watch, I felt as if my own child, one in whom I had invested all of my effort and hopes, had crossed enemy lines and started working for the other side.
Let me explain. I was one of the founding members of Helsinki Watch, which was established in 1976 in Moscow to document human rights violations by the Soviet Union. Within a year, all of the organizations’ members had been arrested or exiled. Nevertheless, we were confident that the documents we generated in that year, chronicling the regime’s brutality, haunted Soviet leaders until the fall of the U.S.S.R.
Just before our arrest, Robert Bernstein, the president and CEO of Random House at the time, visited us in Moscow; upon returning to New York, he created the American Helsinki Watch — later Human Rights Watch — which aimed to give voice to dissidents fighting for human rights under dictatorships. Yet Bernstein disassociated himself from his own creation many years later, for the same reason that I asked my question of Roth: because the organization had unwittingly become an aid to dictators and terrorists fighting against Israel.
Fast forward to the current moment. On Saturday morning, during holiday services in my synagogue in Jerusalem, our prayer was interrupted many times by sirens signaling incoming missiles. Such was the case all over Israel that day. At the same time, terrorists from Gaza were infiltrating communities in the south, slaughtering parents and children, abducting innocent people of all ages. Hundreds of Israelis who had been joyfully celebrating our national holiday, many of them young, were killed or kidnapped. As far as Hamas is concerned, the mere fact of being Jewish in the world’s only Jewish state is enough to make one a legitimate target.
To understand the scope of this tragedy for Israel, a country of 9.2 million people, imagine that more than 25,000 Americans were killed, more than 90,000 were injured and 3,600 were kidnapped by terrorists.
Sadly, Israel has no choice but to wage a war for its survival. Later, we will determine why our intelligence failed so abjectly. Maybe we will go further and ask whether we were right, with the Oslo accords in 1993, to grant Yasser Arafat dictatorial power over the Palestinians so that he could deal with terrorist organizations, rather than doing so ourselves. We might even probe our own responsibility, by unilaterally withdrawing from Gaza in 2005, for allowing Hamas to turn it into a terrorist launchpad.
But these questions are for the future. Right now, we have to destroy the organization that seeks to destroy us, and for that we must fight a war.
Today, the world seems to understand this. World leaders have denounced Hamas’s barbarism and affirmed the legitimacy of Israel’s right to self-defense. But what about tomorrow? What will happen as the Palestinian death toll rises? At that point, I fear, the same leaders will forget that Israel and Hamas are fighting on radically different terms and focus their efforts on restraining Israel instead of condemning Hamas.
The reason this will happen — as it always does — is that Hamas has a powerful unconventional weapon, one far more sophisticated and effective than missiles and drones: Palestinian civilians, used as human shields. The more Palestinians who die because Hamas terrorists cynically hide behind them, the more the free world will turn against Israel.
It is only a matter of weeks, or days, or even hours, until articles will appear in major publications depicting the Israeli government as indiscriminately targeting innocent Palestinians. Human Rights Watch will yet again vilify Israel as an international outlaw, and the United Nations will pass resolutions demanding that we cease our war of self-defense.
I was a member of Israel’s security cabinet when we made crucial decisions about how to fight terror during the second intifada in the early 2000s, at a time when hundreds of Israeli civilians were targeted and killed simply for living in the Jewish state. At that time, I also had regular conversations with my colleagues in the U.S. government about how they handled such asymmetric warfare.
In light of these experiences, I know with certainty that Israel expends more effort than any other country during wartime in trying to minimize harm to innocent civilians on the enemy side. These tools include special warning missiles and even text messages and phone calls, in addition to thorough pilot training and other measures, designed to warn Palestinian civilians of pending attacks and to give them time to get to safety.
Hamas terrorists, by contrast, position themselves and their weaponry in heavily populated areas, including in mosques, hospitals and schools, confident that every innocent person killed is another propaganda victory.
The only way to help neutralize this despicable unconventional weapon in the coming days would be for leaders of Western democracies and responsible Arab rulers to make this message absolutely clear: Every innocent Palestinian killed in this conflagration is the victim of Hamas.
The horrific events of this past Saturday can have no silver lining, but the world would benefit immeasurably if the attack were to prompt free nations, together with leading human rights organizations, to finally unite completely in the fight against terrorism — and in the belief that every state, Jewish or not, has the right to defend itself against the indiscriminate murder of its citizens.
