[News] Would HRW Have Attacked Martin Luther King, Too?

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/

November 30, 2006


Would HRW Have Attacked Martin Luther King, Too?


Palestinians Are Being Denied the Right of Non-Violent Resistance?

By JONATHAN COOK

in Nazareth

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 <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0745325556/counterpunchmaga>
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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. 
He is the author of the forthcoming 
"<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0745325556/counterpunchmaga>Blood 
and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State" 
published by Pluto Press, and available in the United States from the 
University of Michigan Press. His website is 
<http://www.jkcook.net/>www.jkcook.net


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