Do Palestinians have (only) human rights?
Founder of Human Rights Watch Robert Bernstein has openly attacked his former organization for its recent reports on Israeli human rights violations, which occur in the context of the occupation of Palestine.
While it is not difficult to see the weaknesses in Bernstein’s outdated and reprehensible version of human rights, his intervention raises the question of whether Palestinians have human rights, and whether that is all they have. With a liberation movement that has been strangled to death by corruption, collaboration and repression, international activists rely increasingly on the discourse of human rights rather than the discourse of liberation. Bernstein’s column, as objectionable and incoherent as it is, should provoke us to consider the benefits and limitations of this strategy.
Bernstein’s opinion that we should overlook Israeli human rights violations is not new. It belongs to another era in history, an era in which not only is it the White Man’s burden to enforce rights, but also to decide what they are and who gets them. Bernstein explains that as chair of HRW he “sought to draw a sharp line between the democratic and nondemocratic worlds, in an effort to create clarity in human rights.” However, he does not explain why or how this distinction is functionally useful. Furthermore he does not explain what kind of “clarity” is thus produced. To limit the scope of human rights work according to such a meritless distinction that is nothing more than a reflection of Bernstein’s political prejudices actually guts the entire normative framework of human rights.There is nothing universal about human rights if some actors can violate them with impunity. What would it mean to exclude Western countries from the ambit of human rights work in the age of Guantanamo, Abu Ghreib, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Gaza siege? Such an inconsistency opens the door to the old accusation that human rights activists have double standards when it comes to Palestine. Bernstein’s arbitrary distinction creates confusion and inconsistency, not clarity.
For that reason Bernstein’s criticism of HRW sounds more like a way of letting Western countries off the hook when it comes to human rights than a way of protecting the integrity of human rights work. With regards to Israel’s cowardly and barbaric attacks in Gaza, Bernstein asserts–once again obscuring his true claims with innuendo–that “there is a difference between wrongs committed in self-defense and those perpetrated intentionally.” Bernstein does not ever tell us what that difference is. Indeed, his circular claim actually defeats itself, as he admits that both kinds of acts can actually be “wrongs”–which is the job human rights researchers are tasked with anyway.
Israel ironically strikes the same tone when it responds to allegations that its military campaigns leave entire populations devastated in violation of international norms. The claim that Israel acts exclusively in self-defense cannot stand, but whether as Bernstein claims there is a difference between self-defense and intentional attack, and whether these are actually mutually exclusive categories, is irrelevant to the question of whether or not a wrong has been committed. The human rights framework must only be concerned with the latter question if it is to have any coherency. Unless Bernstein suggests that the ends always justify the means, thereby eliminating the usefulness of human rights, he actually offers nothing of substance to explain why human rights organizations should turn a blind eye to Israeli crimes. The evidence of Israel’s guilt is mounting, but Bernstein and the Israeli propaganda machine do not even try to rebut it. They simply ask we ignore it.
Bernstein’s plea that we ignore Israeli human rights violations is outrageous, but so too is the historically inaccurate tale he tells about Israel. For example, he blames Hamas and Hizballah for “depriving Palestinians of any chance for the peaceful and productive life they deserve” even though Palestinians were deprived of this “chance” decades before Hamas and Hizballah, which is not Palestinian, even existed. Both of these organizations were created to respond to Zionist violence and dispossession in Palestine and Lebanon. Israel precipitated them. Nevertheless Bernstein characterizes Israel as “the repeated victim of aggression” without providing any historical evidence for his claim. No country in the contemporary Middle East has started as many wars as Israel, nor does any country have so powerful an arsenal that is actively and continuously in use. Yet because Israel falls into Bernstein’s arbitrary category of “open” societies, it should be, by nature, immune from scrutiny by human rights organizations. Such immunity cannot stand if human rights organizations are to have any credibility or if human rights are to exist as more than a tool of imperialist interventionism.
As Bernstein’s example discloses, the idea of human rights has a shadow history of colonial-like attitudes that arbitrarily exclude certain groups and classes of people from their scope. While organizations like Human Rights Watch have taken a new direction, international solidarity activists must continue to ask themselves what the appropriate role of human rights is when it comes to Palestine. Even if we reject Bernstein’s imperial school of thought on human rights, we must still recognize that even the scope of alternative human rights analysis is severely limited. The Palestinian struggle has more grievances than a human rights analysis can address or remedy. Indeed, reports by Human Rights Watch and other organizations demonstrate their insufficiency when they repeatedly create a moral equivalency between Israeli apartheid and Palestinian freedom fighters.
We must therefore keep in mind that, while the evidence convincingly shows that Israel is an egregious violator of Palestinian human rights, that human rights alone are not sufficient for the cause of Palestinian liberation, and that the political solidarity front must be expanded so that it encompasses a discourse far broader than that offered by the human rights project. Any role that human rights will play in a solidarity movement must be transformative of the environment in which it operates, rather than confined by it. By this sense it should be obvious that a solidarity movement has more to contend with than the logistics of US aid to Israel and the Israeli regime, but also all those other discursive and institutional limitations that restrict modes of political mobilization and expression. Many activists and intellectuals restrict themselves to human rights claims when it comes to Palestine because they believe this is the “safest” or most “promising” course of action, but the same environment that produces that situation must also be challenged if a robust solidarity movement is to emerge. Otherwise, we will end up with little more than the corrupt political lobbies and fangless NGOs that we see before us.
