Bashing of Human Rights Watch unfair

Bernstein shouts alarm over the fact that Hamas and Hezbollah receive support from the Tehran regime, which he asserts has “openly declared its intention not just to destroy Israel but to murder Jews everywhere.” Not to sidestep the appalling behavior of any of the three, but the reality is more complicated. Hamas and Hezbollah are not Iranian puppets. Each has genuine and substantial popular support within their constituencies and throughout the Middle East — popularity, incidentally, that is the result of fighting Israeli occupation.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's infamous assertion in 2005 that the “occupying regime” in Israel should be “wiped off the map” did not call for the annihilation of Jews in Israel or anywhere else. Iran itself is home to about 25,000 Jews who are determined to remain there. Ahmadinejad's threat can reasonably be ascribed to rhetorical bombast more than to plans for another Holocaust.

Israel's politicians are not strangers to coarse discourse. The current foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, reportedly once advocated the bombing of the Aswan Dam in the event of war with Egypt, a catastrophic event that could kill millions of people.

Something that will help bring peace, stability and normalcy to the Middle East is a determined, good-faith effort by the United States to play an effective diplomatic role. President Barack Obama has pledged an effort to resolve the region's disputes through diplomacy rather than by force. Addressing such huge challenges as ending the 61-year-old Arab-Israeli conflict and preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons urgently requires an honest and open discussion about the Middle East — within the Obama administration and Congress and among America's influential intellectual elite.

In that discussion, Israel's policies and actions cannot be shielded from scrutiny by an organization such as Human Rights Watch, nor should those of any other party. The debate should include the question of Israel's military operations, such as in Lebanon in 2006 and more recently in Gaza (and, theoretically, against Iran in the future).

But, more important, the discussion pertaining to Israel must also deal with the basic issues that are the most painful ones for Israelis. Those include the establishment of a viable Palestinian state, ending Israel's occupation of Arab territories, negotiating the status of Jerusalem and a fair measure of justice for Palestinian refugees.

As a human rights activist and as head of Random House, Bernstein has spent a lifetime working to promote liberty. Unfortunately, his attack on Human Rights Watch helps those who seek to stifle a more open debate on the Middle East.

MacLeod has covered the Middle East for Time magazine since 1995.

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