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Now
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 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.
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