Has the Israeli human rights community abandoned human rights in favor of political expediency?

A commitment to human rights and civil liberties includes an inherent even if unwritten oath to uphold the principles of human dignity, regardless of any political or ethnic considerations.

For example, in 1992, in the course of work as a journalist, I found that fifteen Arabs who worked in Kiryat Arba and lived with their families in the village of Bani Naim, had been served with arbitrary home-demolition orders. Our news agency printed the story, and also joined with a human rights group based in Efrat and Kiryat Arba to help these families bring a petition to the Israel High Court of Justice. The petition was successful. For those of us who became involved in this case, the point was not the political allegiance of those families or our views thereof. The point was that an injustice was being done to them, and it had to be corrected.

The themes of human rights, civil liberties and human dignity have been on prominent display in Israel-Arab relations, and earn banner coverage in the media.

Advocacy groups for the Palestinian-Arabs made very effective use of these themes in diverting public attention from Arab-PLO terrorism and belligerency as moral issues, to Palestinian Arab-rights as a moral issue. They thereby won wide support from a well-meaning if not always keenly perceptive public.

News coverage of these rights peaked during the first two years of the intifada, The PLO encouraged youngsters to get onto the front lines of riots, knowing full well that they would be most exposed there and presented by the news media as child victims. This was a propaganda device that brought the PLO great dividends in public relations.

The Palestinian Human Rights Information Center, based in Jerusalem and in Washington, coordinated a campaign that succeeded in igniting the passions of human rights groups throughout the world and, eventually, throughout Israel.

By 1990, at least sixteen internationally respected human rights organizations were monitoring the human rights policies of the government of Israel. All of them had Israeli members and Israeli counterparts. During the Gulf War in 1991, when the PLO sided with Iraq and its supporters cheered the Iraqi scud-missile attacks on Israel, these human rights groups clung to their support of the PLO cause.

In the United Nations-sponsored (UNRWA) camps for displaced Arabs, the relief workers gave moral and logistical support to the PLO campaign, while helping to propagate false rumors that the camps faced starvation at the time of the Gulf War.

In this period, espousal of the PLO cause might have wanted with its support and encouragement of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and its scud attacks.

Yet the human rights coalition, in Israel and abroad, remained fixed in its pro-PLO stance.

These organizations contributed mightily to shaping a public opinion that pushed Israel into recognizing and dealing with the PLO in the Oslo Accords of 1993.

In the spring of 1994, a self-governing Arab-Palestine entity was set up under the rule of Arafat. There was by then a long record of Arafat’s autocratic methods and executions of opponents. Nevertheless, human rights groups hoped that the establishment of a Palestine National Authority with an intricate governmental structure, parliament and legislative council would provide a new era of human rights, civil liberties and human dignity for the Arab-Palestinians.

In August 1994, Arafat closed the Palestinian Human Rights Information Center and put its staff in prison. That was just the beginning of his ongoing campaign to ignore the complaints of human rights organizations, and indeed to crush the organizations entirely.

The writer brought this to the attention of the Israeli group Rabbis for Human rights, which then forwarded a letter of protest to Arafat. There was no reply. That did not inhibit the Rabbis for Human rights from making cordial visits to Arafat in Gaza and putting his grinning face on their brochures.

Arafat’s suppression of human rights and civil liberties seems in keeping with Israeli government views at the time of Osclo Accords, On September 2, 1993, the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot quoted then Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin: This will be a process that will give the Palestinians an entity without Bagatz [right of appeal to the High Court of Justice] and without Bitzlem (a human rights organization that worked on behalf of Arab-Palestinian human rights).

Thus, a process that had been driven by human rights organizations on behalf of the Arab-Palestinians culminated in depriving those people even of the rights that had been accorded to under Israeli administration. Those organizations that had for years stood so loudly for Arab-Palestinian rights succeeded in placing them under a rule with no human rights or civil liberties.

The government of Israel government pays 62 percent of the budget of the Palestine Authority. Yet the Israeli human rights establishment refuses, as a matter of policy, to make aid to the Palestinian Authority contingent in any improvement in PA human rights policies.

Bassam Eid, an Arab who had been active in Bitzelem, found that his organization and the Israeli Left were less interested in human rights and more interested in the success Of the Oslo process.

Shortly after he left Bitzelem, on December 5, 1995, Eid stated: “I would sooner trust Rehavam Ze’evi [leader of the nationalist Moledet party] over Yossi Sarid [leader of the left-wing Meretz party] any day.”

Israel Resource News Agency has therefore put some questions to the Association for Civil Rights In Israel (ACRI), an umbrella organization supported by the New Israel Fund in the United States: 1. Would ACRI support aid to an entity that denies human rights and civil liberties as a matter of policy? 2. Can ACRI be silent while a government of Israel proposes to strip human rights and civil liberties from Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem and hand them over to the rule of Arafat and his security chief Jibril Rajoub? 3. How does ACRI respond to the June 2000 series in the newspaper HaAretz, that documented how Israeli police look on and watch while Rajoub’s “police” abduct, interrogate, torture and even murder Israeli Arab citizens of Jerusalem.

The reply from ACRI came from its chairwoman Edna Margolit and its director Vered Livne: ACRI does not and will not interfere with political issues.

ACRI legal counsel Dan Yakir did say that ACRI did not approve of Israeli police subcontracting law enforcement to Rajoub to enforce the law. However, he would not put this in writing or recommend that ACRI issue any policy statement on the subject. He also said that he was not familiar with the reports in HaAretz. (Yet, ACRI retains media professionals who comb the press to monitor human rights abuses.)

Israel Resource News Agency placed the same questions to Rabbis for Human Rights. There has not been any response.

Amnesty International, that had long been very active on human rights for Arab-Palestinians when they were under Israeli administration, has recently issued a scathing report on the human rights abuses of the Palestine Authority. Neither ACRI nor the Rabbis for Human Rights has addressed itself to this report.

It would seem that the Israeli human rights establishment, including its rabbinc component, has adopted Rabin’s view that an independent Palestinian entity must be set up and supported at any cost to its subjects in human rights and civil liberties.

Despite this indifference by their former Israeli champions, Arab-Palestinians have been developing an underground network on behalf of human rights and civil liberties, freedom of speech and press, due process of law, police reform and more. When Bassam Eid was interviewed in the television film Vanishing Peace (BBC/CBC, May 1999), he pointed out that the salaries of Arafat’s PA security men are paid directly by the United States, Canada and the European Union, who do not make any respect for human rights a condition for their subsidies.

It would seem that Israel’s human rights establishment, along with much of the international community, is willing to subject Palestinian Arabs to a regime that denies them any semblance of justice or liberty. If this facilitates their political goal of a PLO state, then so be it.

In what way the achievement of the political goal forwards their avowed cause of human rights has yet to be explained.