Palestinians
Are Being Denied
The right To Non-Violent Resistance
By Jonathan Cook in Nazareth
01 December, 2006
Countercurrents.org
If
one thing offers a terrifying glimpse of where the experiment in human
despair that is Gaza under Israeli siege is leading, it is the news
that a Palestinian woman in her sixties -- a grandmother -- chose last
week to strap on a suicide belt and explode herself next to a group
of Israeli soldiers invading her refugee camp.
Despite the “Man bites dog” news value of the story, most
of the Israeli media played down the incident. Not surprisingly: it
is difficult to portray Fatma al-Najar as a crazed fanatic bent only
the destruction of Israel.
It is equally difficult not to pause and wonder at the reasons for her
suicide mission: according to her family, one of her grandsons was killed
by the Israeli army, another is in a wheelchair after his leg had to
be amputated, and her house had been demolished.
Or not to think of the years of trauma she and her family have suffered
living in a open-air prison under brutal occupation, and now, since
the “disengagement”, the agonising months of grinding poverty,
slow starvation, repeated aerial bombardments, and the loss of essentials
like water and electricity.
Or not to ponder at what it must have been like for her to spend every
day under a cloud of fear, to be powerless against a largely unseen
and malign force, and to never know when death and mutilation might
strike her or her loved ones.
Or not to imagine that she had been longing for the moment when the
soldiers who have been destroying her family’s lives might show
themselves briefly, coming close enough that she could see and touch
them, and wreak her revenge.
Yet Western observers, and the organisations that should represent the
very best of their Enlightenment values, seem incapable of understanding
what might drive a grandmother to become a suicide bomber. Their empathy
fails them, and so does their humanity.
Just at the moment Fatma was choosing death and resistance over powerlessness
and victimhood -- and at a time when Gaza is struggling through one
of the most oppressive and ugly periods of Israeli occupation in nearly
four decades -- Human Rights Watch published its lastest statement on
the conflict. It is document that shames the organisation, complacent
Western societies and Fatma’s memory.
In its press release “Civilians Must Not Be Used to Shield Homes
Against Military Attacks”, which was widely reported by the international
media, HRW lambasts armed Palestinian groups for calling on civilians
to surround homes that have been targeted for air strikes by the Israeli
military.
Noting almost as an afterthought that more than 1,500 Palestinians have
been made homeless from house demolitions in the past few months, and
that 105 houses have been destroyed from the air, the press release
denounces Palestinian attempts at non-violent and collective action
to halt the Israel attacks. HRW refers in particular to three incidents.
On November 3, Hamas appealed to women to surround a mosque in Beit
Hanoun where Palestinian men had sought shelter from the Israeli army.
Israeli soldiers opened fire on the women, killing two and injuring
at least 10.
And last week on two separate occasions, crowds of supporters gathered
around the houses of men accused of being militants by Israel who had
received phone messages from the Israeli security forces warning that
their families’ homes were about to be bombed.
In language that would have made George Orwell shudder, one of the world’s
leading organisations for the protection of human rights ignored the
continuing violation of the Palestinians’ right to security and
a roof over their heads and argued instead: “There is no excuse
for calling [Palestinian] civilians to the scene of a planned [Israeli]
attack. Whether or not the home is a legitimate military target, knowingly
asking civilians to stand in harm’s way is unlawful.”
There is good reason to believe that this reading of international law
is wrong, if not Kafkaesque. Popular and peaceful resistance to the
oppressive policies of occupying powers and autocratic rulers, in India
and South Africa for example, has always been, by its very nature, a
risky venture in which civilians are liable to be killed or injured.
Responsibility for those deaths must fall on those doing the oppressing,
not those resisting, particularly when they are employing non-violent
means. On HRW’s interpretation, Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela
would be war criminals.
HRW also applies a series of terrible double standards in this press
release.
It refuses Palestinians the right to protect homes from attack, labelling
these civilians “human shields”, even while admitting that
most of the homes are not legitimate military targets, and yet it has
not said a word about the common practice in Israel of building weapons
factories and army bases inside or next to communities, thereby forcing
Israeli civilians to become human shields for the army.
And HRW prefers to highlight a supposed violation of international law
by the Palestinians -- their choice to act as “human shields”
-- and to demand that the practice end immediately, while ignoring the
very real and continuing violation of international law committed by
Israel in undertaking punitive house demolitions against Palestinian
families.
But let us ignore even these important issues and assume that HRW is
technically correct that such Palestinian actions do violate international
law. Nonetheless, HRW is still failing us and mocking its mandate, because
it has lost sight of the three principles that must guide the vision
of a human rights organisation: a sense of priorities, proper context
and common sense.
Priorities: Every day HRW has to choose which of the many abuses of
international law taking place around the world it highlights. It manages
to record only a tiny fraction of them. The assumption of many outsiders
may be that it focuses on only the most egregious examples. That would
be wrong.
The simple truth is that the worse a state’s track record on human
rights, the easier ride it gets, relatively speaking, from human rights
organisations. That is both because, if abuses are repeated often enough,
they become so commonplace as to go unremarked, and because, if the
abuses are wide-ranging and systematic, only a small number of the offences
will be noted.
Israel, unlike the Palestinians, benefits in both these respects. After
four decades of reporting on Israel’s occupation of the Palestinians,
HRW has covered all of Israel’s many human rights-abusing practices
at least once before. The result is that after a while most violations
get ignored. Why issue another report on house demolitions or “targeted
assassinations”, even though they are occurring all the time?
And, how to record the individual violations of tens of thousands of
Palestinians’ rights every day at checkpoints? One report on the
checkpoints once every few years has to suffice instead.
In Israel’s case, there is an added reluctance on the part of
organisations like HRW to tackle the extent and nature of Israel’s
trampling of Palestinian rights. Constant press releases denouncing
Israel would provoke accusations, as they do already, that Israel is
being singled out -- and with it, the implication that anti-Semitism
lies behind the special treatment.
So HRW chooses instead to equivocate. It ignores most Israeli violations
and highlights every Palestinian infraction, however minor. This way
it makes a pact with the devil: it achieves the balance that protects
it from criticism but only by sacrificing the principles of equity and
justice.
In its press release, for example, HRW treats the recent appeal to Palestinians
to exercise their right to protect their neighbours, and to act in soldarity
with non-violent resistance to occupation, as no different from the
dozens of known violations committed by the Israeli army of abducting
Palestinian civilians as human shields to protect its troops.
Women vounteering to surround a mosque become the equivalent of the
notorious incident in January 2003 when 21-year-old Samer Sharif was
handcuffed to the hood of an army Jeep and driven towards stone-throwing
youngsters in Nablus as Israeli soldiers fired their guns from behind
his head.
According to HRW’s approach to international law, the two incidents
are comparable.
Context: The actions of Palestinians occur in a context in which all
of their rights are already under the control of their occupier, Israel,
and can be violated at its whim. This means that it is problematic,
from a human rights perspective, to place the weight of culpability
on the Palestinians without laying far greater weight at the same time
on the situation to which the Palestinians are reacting.
Here is an example. HRW and other human rights organisations have taken
the Palestinians to task for the extra-judicial killings of those suspected
of collaborating with the Israeli security forces.
Although it is blindingly obvious that the lynching of an alleged collaborator
is a violation of that person’s fundamental right to life, HRW’s
position of simply blaming the Palestinians for this practice raises
two critical problems.
First, it fudges the issue of accountability.
In the case of a “targeted assassination”, Israel’s
version of extra-judicial killing, we have an address to hold accountable:
the apparatus of a state in the forms of the Israeli army which carried
out the murder and the Israeli politicians who approved it. (These officials
are also responsible for the bystanders who are invariably killed along
with the target.)
But unless it can be shown that the lynchings are planned and coordinated
at a high level, a human rights organisation cannot apply the same standards
by which it judges a state to a crowd of Palestinians, people gripped
by anger and the thirst for revenge. The two are not equivalent and
cannot be held to account in the same way. Palestinians carrying out
a lynching are commiting a crime punishable under ordinary domestic
law; while the Israeli army carrying out a “targeted assassination”
is commiting state terrorism, which must be tried in the court of world
opinion.
Second, HRW’s position ignores the context in which the lynching
takes place.
The Palestinian resistance to occupation has failed to realise its goals
mainly because of Israel’s extensive network of collaborators,
individuals who have usually been terrorised by threats to themselves
or their family and/or by torture into “co-operating” with
Israel’s occupation forces.
The great majority of planned attacks are foiled because one member
of the team is collaborating with Israel. He or she not only sabotages
the attack but often also gives Israel the information it needs to kill
the leaders of the resistance (as well as bystanders). Collaborators,
though common in the West Bank and Gaza, are much despised -- and for
good reason. They make the goal of national liberation impossible.
Palestinians have been struggling to find ways to make collaboration
less appealing. When the Israeli army is threatening to jail your son,
or refusing a permit for your wife to receive the hospital treatment
she needs, you may agree to do terrible things. Armed groups and many
ordinary Palestinians countenance the lynchings because they are seen
as a counterweight to Israel’s own powerful techniques of intimidation
-- a deterrence, even if a largely unsuccessful one.
In issuing a report on the extra-judicial killing of Palestinian collaborators,
therefore, groups like HRW have a duty to highlight first and with much
greater emphasis the responsibility of Israel and its decades-long occupation
for the lynchings, as the context in which Palestinians are forced to
mimic the barbarity of those oppressing them to stand any chance of
defeating them.
The press release denouncing the Palestinians for choosing collectively
and peacefully to resist house demolitions, while not concentrating
on the violations committed by Israel in destroying the houses and using
military forms of intimidation and punishment against civilians, is
a travesty for this very same reason.
Common sense: And finally human rights organisations must never abandon
common sense, the connecting thread of our humanity, when making judgments
about where their priorities lie.
In the past few months Gaza has sunk into a humanitarian disaster engineered
by Israel and the international community. What has been HRW’s
response? It is worth examining its most recent reports, those on the
front page of the Mideast section of its website last week, when the
latest press release was issued. Four stories relate to Israel and Palestine.
Three criticise Palestinian militants and the wider society in various
ways: for encouraging the use of “human shields”, for firing
home-made rockets into Israel, and for failing to protect women from
domestic violence. One report mildly rebukes Israel, urging the government
to ensure that the army properly investigates the reasons for the shelling
that killed 19 Palestinian inhabitants of Beit Hanoun.
This shameful imbalance, both in the number of reports being issued
against each party and in terms of the failure to hold accountable the
side committing the far greater abuses of human rights, has become the
HRW’s standard procedure in Israel-Palestine.
But in its latest release, on human shields, HRW plumbs new depths,
stripping Palestinians of the right to organise non-violent forms of
resistance and seek new ways of showing solidarity in the face of illegal
occupation. In short, HRW treats the people of Gaza as mere rats in
a laboratory -- the Israeli army’s view of them -- to be experimented
on at will.
HRW’s priorities in Israel-Palestine prove it has lost its moral
bearings.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel.
His book “Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and
Democratic State” is published by Pluto Press. His website is
www.jkcook.net
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