The Rise and Fall of Human Rights: Cynicism and Politics in Occupied Palestine
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The Rise and Fall of Human Rights: Cynicism and Politics in Occupied Palestine
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Overview
The Rise and Fall of Human Rights provides a groundbreaking ethnographic investigation of the Palestinian human rights world—its NGOs, activists, and "victims," as well as their politics, training, and discourse—since 1979. Though human rights activity began as a means of struggle against the Israeli occupation, in failing to end the Israeli occupation, protect basic human rights, or establish an accountable Palestinian government, the human rights industry has become the object of cynicism for many Palestinians. But far from indicating apathy, such cynicism generates a productive critique of domestic politics and Western interventionism. This book illuminates the successes and failures of Palestinians' varied engagements with human rights in their quest for independence.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804785518 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/24/2013 |
| Series: | Stanford Studies in Human Rights |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 280 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Rise and Fall of Human Rights
Cynicism and Politics in Occupied Palestine
By Lori Allen
Stanford University Press
Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-8551-8
Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The First Human Rights NGO Al-Haq's Faith in Evidence
IN 1979, twelve years into the occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem, Israel was successfully pursuing its expansionist strategies (which are ongoing)—confiscating Palestinian land, building Jewish-only settlements, controlling the Palestinian economy, and denying Palestinians most of their political and civil rights. Unlike today, however, at that point Israel was still able to maintain a facade of "benevolent" occupier, despite the fact that human rights violations, from torture to detention without trial, were a daily occurrence. For Palestinians, however, the occupation meant arbitrary rule by a foreign military, and lack of civil, political, and human rights. Then, as today, humiliations and harassment at the hands of Israeli soldiers were a feature of daily life, leaving people in a constant state of insecurity and uncertainty. Among the many abuses that underwrote Israel's occupation was the widespread use of torture against Palestinian political detainees in Israeli prisons, where inhumane conditions were the norm. Excessive and sometimes lethal force was used to quell demonstrations (see, for example, UNGA 1971, 1976). Attacks by settlers were rarely investigated. West Bank residents, including suspected political activists and city mayors, were deported, in contravention of the Fourth Geneva Convention (Kretzmer 2002:187), which "prohibits individual or mass forcible transfer within and beyond the borders of the occupied territory" (Article 49). Demolition of the homes of prisoners' and suspects' families was used as a form of collective punishment. In addition, a range of occupation policies inhibited Palestinian infrastructure and business development and tied the Palestinian economy to Israel's in conditions highly unfavorable to the former.
Although some international organizations and Western government officials knew about Israel's abuses, and even though Palestinian newspapers consistently covered UN activities related to Palestine (Rangwala 2002), Israel's violations were not widely acknowledged in the West. The occupation's humiliations, harassment, and brutalities were a daily experience for Palestinian residents of the occupied territory, but most Palestinians believed that the rest of the world did not care, believe, or even know about their situation, taking as truth Israel's claim to be "the only democracy in the Middle East" (see also Shehadeh 1984:viii). Indeed, Israel was for many outsiders still a "symbol of human decency," as the New York Times labeled the country as late as the mid-1980s (quoted in Chomsky 1999:79).
It was frustration at the contradiction between Israel's self-representation and Palestinians' lived realities that brought three people together in 1979 to establish the first Palestinian human rights organization (HRO), Al-Haq. Charles Shamas, a Lebanese-American graduate of Yale, was a behavioral scientist and business entrepreneur; Raja Shehadeh studied philosophy in Beirut and had trained in London as a lawyer; and Jonathan Kuttab, also a lawyer, had emigrated with his family to the United States from Jerusalem when he was a teenager. One thing that brought this innovative trinity together in an effort to reframe the terms of the debate over Israel's occupation was a shared respect for, and hope in, the power of law, logic, and rationality. They believed that law could expose the inconsistencies and disrupt the image of Israel as a law-abiding democracy. They also had an assertive faith in facts and logic, which fueled their earnest optimism that they could confront the occupation successfully through law.
In an interview, Kuttab said to me that he "had a tremendous interest in understanding how the Israelis could possibly claim and even believe that they were a democratic country; that they were progressive, modern, liberal, even Western; and at the same time they were carrying out really horrible, fascist policies toward the Palestinians that were as despotic as those of any Middle Eastern country." Shehadeh described the mission of Al-Haq as "working for promotion of rule of law and keeping correct records of Israeli violations and addressing them." According to Joost Hiltermann, sociologist and early researcher at the organization, "there was a faith in the rule of law as something that would resonate with a wider public anywhere in the world."
Contrary to those who would condemn the human rights system for disabling collective action (W. Brown 2004:461), or dismiss it as "a false ideological universality, which masks and legitimizes a concrete politics of Western imperialism, military interventions and neo-colonialism" (Zizek n.d.), the concept of human rights helped motivate a novel form of collective action and became a constitutive element of Palestinian nationalist politics. Human rights and international humanitarian law were sources of creativity and even courage for some people living under occupation.
The problem of how to make themselves audible and visible has been a central stumbling block of Palestinian nationalism, which has always operated in a context of competition with Israelis, who have been involved in their own struggles for legitimacy. After the dispossession and dispersal effected by the war of 1947–1948 and the resulting transformation of Palestinians into a refugee population, Palestinians were without any territorial or institutional platform from which to express their national aspirations. Israel focused on stifling any expression of Palestinian identity (even banning the colors of the Palestinian flag and nationalist songs) and preventing the development of any infrastructure for the coalescing of collective organization, including among Palestinians who became citizens of the state. By scratching away at the occupation's whitewash that painted Israel's domination as beneficial to the colonized Palestinians, Al-Haq revealed the gritty truths of the occupier's brutalities.
Al-Haq's approach was logical, orderly, and methodical, which the organization's founders perceived to be the way to put right a system of occupation that was built on illogical notions and arbitrary rule. With painstaking attention to fact-finding methodology and a deep faith in the language of reason and law, Al-Haq produced meticulous documentation of rights violations that would challenge the reigning Israeli narrative of their supposedly benevolent occupation. Al-Haq's founders established these principles that would continue to undergird the organization's work throughout the subsequent decades up to today.
Palestine's occupiers had fastidiously underwritten their structure of colonial domination and their powers of Palestinian dispossession with an edifice of military rules and an entire legal system (Hajjar 2005; Kretzmer 2002; Shamir 1990). Palestinian human rights activists responded in the same language, a universal language that they perceived could be a source of neutral authority transcending national and political boundaries.
Although human rights activism is now a recognized sphere of activity both in Palestine and globally, when Al-Haq was established in 1979 its terms were obscure, its proponents mostly unknown. To be sure, human rights discourse was evident in certain elite spheres. For example, in his speech to the UN General Assembly in 1974, Yasir Arafat invoked the Universal Declaration of Human Rights several times and mentioned Israeli violations of human rights and of the Geneva Conventions (UNGA 1974). Israeli human rights lawyer Felicia Langer has been arguing Palestinian cases in the Israeli courts since the 1970s (see Langer 1995), but it was Al-Haq that helped establish human rights as a general discursive framework, an institutionalized form of activity, and a novel mode of political appeal in Palestine.
How were the lines around this arena of debate, these forms of knowledge claims, engraved? How did rights and their violations come to be newsworthy topics in the mainstream media, in Palestine and elsewhere, and with what consequence for the nature of political debate in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict?
The development of human rights as a field of knowledge production in Palestine was a contested process involving cultural assumptions about experts and expertise, about intention and motive. In seeking to produce information about rights violations that was credible in a highly charged political context, Al-Haq introduced into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict a specific methodology. AlHaq's methods—collection of affidavits, production of a database of violations, eyewitness reporting, unemotional testimonials, forensic pathology—became part of the typical approach for Palestinian HROs that came after it.
Impressions into Proof, Truth, and Credibility
With all of these methods, Al-Haq was trying to argue, to Israel and eventually to the world, that Palestinians deserved the rights, protections, and respect that are supposed to follow from inhabiting the basic status of "human." Hannah Arendt's description of the stateless person, penned in the wake of two world wars, fits the Palestinian situation well: a "human being in general—without a profession, without a citizenship, without an opinion, without a deed by which to identify or specify himself—and different in general, representing nothing but his own absolutely unique individuality which, deprived of expression within and action upon a common world, loses all significance" (Arendt 1994:302). As a colonized people generally seen through a colonialist framework as irrational, Palestinians were compelled to go to the extremes of objectivity. The standards of objectivity at play in Al-Haq's human rights work was not the sort of rhetorical politics evident in formulations of journalistic "objectivity" that demand a supposed "balance between the two sides" (Bishara 2012), or the criteria adopted by Human Rights Watch (HRW) that requires reports condemning Palestinians and Israelis in a tit-for-tat cycle (Rabbani 2009a). Al-Haq's methodology involved multiple techniques for producing disinterested knowledge specifically and for revealing "objective evidence" by "rationalizing" both their information and themselves as subjects through the statistical and legalistic idioms of law and human rights.
The structural problems that Palestinians faced shaped the particular way in which Al-Haq developed the practice of human rights advocacy. The founders' position as Palestinians struggling against occupation by a state that enjoyed considerable international credibility and sympathy was a key factor, but it was also a locally specific framework of nationalist values and the resonant social category of "nationalist activist" that allowed the human rights approach to flourish in Palestine.
All three of Al-Haq's founders were educated abroad and gravitated toward what they saw in law as an objective standard against which Israeli practices could be measured and, ultimately, condemned and stopped. Shehadeh thought their work "could reveal to the world the true nature of the occupation while promoting among Palestinian society an appreciation for the principles of the rule of law" (2002:138). Shehadeh had returned from his law studies in England in 1976, "brimming with ideas of how things should be, enthusiastic about advocating principles of fairness, justice, and human rights" (Shehadeh 2008:36), his self-described "blind faith in reason" already deeply ingrained (Shehadeh 1984:66). By holding Israel to its word, calling on it to live up to its obligations as a state that adhered to the rule of law and human rights standards, Al-Haq sought to reveal the violations and injustices that were inherent to Israel's occupation.
Shamas was inspired by the "Aristotelian tradition that thought you could put your finger on, reconstruct, or represent what the essence of something was, using rational discourse." Rather than making identity claims to "coerce our way to liberation," he saw their task as being one of "reasoning" with the international order according to its normative content, embodied in international humanitarian and human rights law. "Rationality" has long been a category used to justify colonial efforts to discredit and denigrate the colonized, whose supposed irrational passions required the civilizing discipline of the liberal West. Al-Haq's goal was to subvert that colonial logic, and the long history of orientalism that has obscured and distorted the facts of the Palestinians' case. Abiding by these principles of objective proof, and with the eventual help of international supporters, including jurists, American Civil Liberties Union activists, and human rights professionals from the United States, Israel, and Europe, Al-Haq came to be recognized as a credible source of human rights information in the occupied Palestinian territory (Hajjar 2005:65).
For Kuttab, who was a history major before studying law, the tools of historiography also came into play in Al-Haq's practices of information gathering and documentation. There was for him a confluence between "seeking truth" and working for rights. "Always present in my mind, and those of my colleagues," he said, "were the value of corroboration, declarations against interest, a skeptical perspective, a constant awareness of the perspectives and biases of witnesses as we labored to approach objectivity and seek truth in a murky political situation."
The three men also shared a keen awareness of how Israel itself had used the law to bolster its regime of control. Kuttab, who had studied Hebrew and had a Jerusalem identity card, became a member of the Israeli Bar Association and in the process learned how the law can be a mask, offering a procedural disguise for political projects (also Parker 2003:46; Shehadeh 1984:50). Kuttab learned how Israel "uses law as an instrument of illegality" to expand and entrench the occupation by simply making new regulations in order to decree occupation practices legal and official (also Weill 2007:418–419; Hajjar 2001:23). This approach to law, Kuttab explained to me, was based in the "positivist school," meaning that "it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with justice or with fairness." In the positivist tradition, law is not necessarily that which upholds morality (Green 2003; Hart 1994:185–186), but rather is seen as possessing "an objective binding force" imposed by the state (Pollis 1987:588; see also Shestack 1998:209). An "ethic of 'illegalism'" is how Israeli political scientist Ehud Sprinzak characterized it (Gorenberg 2006:45).
Scrutiny of Israeli practices in light of international humanitarian law (IHL), which is meant to regulate military occupation, bears out Kuttab's observations. Israel's Supreme Court, for example, ratified the sealing and destruction of Palestinian homes, thereby institutionalizing the practice and routinizing this exercise of legal power (Bisharat 1995:374). The government's practice of declaring Palestinian land to be "state land" has led to Israel's seizure of 16 percent of the West Bank (B'Tselem 2010). Another example is the Landau Commission report, issued by an official governmental commission appointed to examine interrogation methods. The Israeli government declared as permissible "moderate physical pressure," thereby redefining and legalizing what many experts would call torture or, as Human Rights Watch/Middle East referred to it, "the bureaucratization of torture" (1994:55). The Supreme Court thus lent its "symbolic capital to the military occupation" in order to legitimize the military's practices of control (Gordon 2008:32).
Al-Haq's first major publication, The West Bank and the Rule of Law (Kuttab and Shehadeh 1980), presented a detailed analysis of precisely how Israel established laws in the occupied territory of the West Bank to facilitate Jewish settlement there, which the book notes is a violation of international law (8). One of the bases of Al-Haq's early argumentation was the contention that Israel was bound by international law, and specifically by the Fourth Geneva Convention, in its treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territory. (Israel has continued to argue otherwise.) In responding to Israel in its own legalistic language, Al-Haq "represented the first organized effort to engage law as a form of resistance" in Palestine (Hajjar 2005:62). Shehadeh's memoirs from that period testify to the fear he had of Israeli recriminations for publishing their book (Shehadeh 1984:62–65). The legal system underpinning the military occupation had been unchallenged until then, and Shehadeh's anxiety points to how groundbreaking this kind of publication was at the time.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Rise and Fall of Human Rights by Lori Allen. Copyright © 2013 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword Mark Goodale.................... xi
Acknowledgments.................... xv
Introduction.................... 1
1 The First Human Rights NGO: Al-Haq's Faith in Evidence................... 33
2 The Beginning of the Decline: International Aid and the Production of
Bad Faith.................... 65
3 Teaching Human Rights: Citizens and Security Men in Training............. 99
4 Making Up the Face of the State: Human Rights in the Creation of
Political Authority.................... 131
5 Nationalizing Human Rights: The Political Ethics of Hamas................ 157
Conclusion.................... 185
Notes.................... 197
Abbreviations and Glossary.................... 213
Bibliography.................... 215
Index.................... 251