An Education in Human Rights in the West Bank

Human rights classes don’t end abuses, political change does.

Across the West Bank, hundreds of Palestinian security officers have been receiving “human rights education.” As I describe in my book, The Rise and Fall of Human Rights, these classes are one of the ways that western governments are trying to turn the Palestinian Authority into a state deserving of the name. In courses funded by the European Union and state development agencies, and delivered by local NGOs, Palestinian employees of the various security forces are told all about the Palestinian Basic Law, their constitution. They are told why torture is bad and illegal, and how many haircuts and blankets every prisoner should be provided. They are given copies of the Geneva Conventions, and encouraged to discuss the death penalty and understand why it is not a just form of punishment. As much as a third of Palestinian human rights NGO budgets go to teaching Palestinians to respect human rights. And thus the culture of human rights is spread to Palestinians living under Israeli occupation.

Meanwhile, Palestinians continue to live under a belligerent military occupation that is fundamentally a violation of their human rights, collectively and individually.

Why is there so much focus on teaching Palestinians about human rights when Israel is the primary violator?

The Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 14 December 1960. It affirms that the “subjection of peoples to alien subjugation, domination and exploitation constitutes a denial of fundamental human rights.” It goes on to say that this “is an impediment to the promotion of world peace and co-operation.”

Generations of people are growing up under a military occupation that has continued and expanded unabated for decades. And every day Israel’s occupation destroys people’s lives, often in small and creeping ways. Through restricting the movement of people and goods, for example, “stocks of essential supplies, including basic foodstuffs and cooking gas” are denied to people in the Gaza Strip, as the UN humanitarian monitoring organization OCHA has reported. These undramatic forms of oppression eat away at thousands of people’s lives, ensuring that daily existence is a relentless struggle.

And sometimes Israel’s occupation destroys people’s lives in catastrophically debilitating ways.

Two days ago, my friend, a Palestinian lawyer who works at a human rights NGO in Bethlehem, had to visit his son in a military base prison called Ofer. In order to be able to continue to visit his son and represent him in front of the Israeli occupation courts, he had to act as a lawyer, not as a father.

No hugs, no kisses. Hand shaking was the most he was allowed. He wrote: “As a lawyer, I had to deal with all my son’s jailers: the judges, the guards, the military prosecutor, translators…etc. In the midst of this, I had to exchange with them morning greetings, smiles, chatting…”

His son had been in prison for four days before his father– his lawyer– was allowed to see him. This was several days after he was dragged out of his bed in the middle of the night by Israeli soldiers who had invaded the refugee camp where he has lived all of his nineteen years. Twenty of these armed gunmen broke into their house and forcibly took the eldest son, clothed only in shorts and slippers. (Another twenty soldiers apprehended another young man in the camp that same night.) It was only because his father ran after them and threw clothes onto his handcuffed son that the young man had any protection. But it was no protection, really. He was an unarmed young man, small and wiry, handcuffed and shoved by several armed, helmeted, foreign men who, all of a sudden, were in complete control. Pushed into a jeep, transported to a prison, probably insulted and threatened on the way—all part of an intentional regime designed to break Palestinian political prisoners’ spirits. All well-documented by human rights organizations like the Israeli NGO B’Tselem.

The young man is in prison because some other Palestinian under similar duress told an Israeli agent that he threw a rock at a soldier. A rock from an arm at an armed man.

Or it may be that the informer told the Israeli agent that my friend’s son took part in making a 40cm hole in the Separation Wall. The barrier that mostly runs through the West Bank itself, not along the de facto border with Israel, the Green Line. A hole the size of a couple of basketballs in a wall that is 709–kilometers long, six to eight meters high, and contrary to international law.

The United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3236 (adopted in 1974) recognized the Palestinian people’s right to self determination. It also recognized “the right of the Palestinian people to regain its rights by all means in accordance with the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations.”

One of the purposes of the United Nations is “to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace.”

A military occupation is a breach of the peace. By all means, the international community has asserted, resist that breach, attempt to remove that threat.

There is no explicit prohibition that makes armed struggle for self-determination illegal.

Twenty-four years ago, my friend the lawyer-father, had been captured and imprisoned in the same military base where his son is now shackled, his legs in chains, his hands in cuffs. He was twenty years old, compelled with the audacity to resist that breach to the peace that is the Israeli occupation.

He wrote about seeing his son in chains: “Tens of images came to my mind: faces of those special guards who hit, tortured, and humiliated me when I was a prisoner years ago. Suddenly, only one thought occupied me: my son is facing the same treatment I had received from the guard who was chatting with me, standing there before me.”

What he didn’t write about, because his wife couldn’t bare it if she knew, is that his son was also hit hard, tortured. When they met at the court his T-shirt was torn. He told his father what happened, and my friend could see the signs of abuse on his son. Tortured because he refused to sign the confession that the Israeli interrogators presented him.

There is no credible evidence that my friend’s son has engaged in armed struggle for his nation’s liberation. But there is plenty of evidence that the Israeli occupation forces have been committing human rights violations for decades. A glance at the records of the UN Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People and Other Arabs of the Occupied Territories proves this. For decades this Committee has documented Israel’s “mass imprisonment of Palestinians, the routine demolition of homes and resultant displacement of Palestinians, the widespread violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinians, the lack of effort by Israel to prevent or hold settlers accountable for such violence.” This UN committee is one of scores of organizations with reams of evidence proving Israel’s systematic brutality, its unabated violation of the occupied population’s rights.

Among sons and fathers, mothers and daughters, oppression and violence and the arbitrary acts of a nearly all-powerful belligerent military occupation are experienced every single day. Year after year, generations of Palestinians are subjected to alien subjugation, domination, and exploitation. And year after year, their unwillingness to accept Israel’s acts of aggression is expressed by all means.

In contrast to the millions of dollars that have gone in to making Palestinians rights-respecting subjects, only one NGO provides structured, ongoing educational programs on international humanitarian law and human rights law in Israel. The Red Cross gives the occasional presentation to the Israeli army units operating in the West Bank.

But more human rights classes for Israeli soldiers will not end the violations. Just as more human rights classes will never turn the Palestinian Authority into a state. And none of it will stop Palestinians from resisting the occupation by all means.

If democracy, human rights and the rule of law, and the prevention of human rights violations were really the core values of the Council of Europe, the EU, the United States, they would stop throwing money into pointless human rights classes and just stop the occupation. For it is the occupation that “constitutes a denial of fundamental human rights, is contrary to the Charter of the United Nations and is an impediment to the promotion of world peace.” It is the Israeli occupation that thwarts “a culture of human rights.” It is the occupation that must end.

After they shook hands, my friend’s son asked his father, “How is my mom?” My friend could not tell him that she was missing him horribly, that she was crying non-stop and had not eaten for four days. Instead he told his son that she wants him to be strong, to come back home soon.

He said: I will.

Jessica Winegar is editor of Human Rights Forum, the AN column of the AAA Committee for Human Rights. She may be contacted at j-winegar@northwestern.edu.

via Anthropology-News http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013/06/14/an-education-in-human-rights-in-the-west-bank/