David Bedein, MSW
Media Research Analyst
Bureau Chief
Israel Resource News Agency
Beit Agron International Press Center
Jerusalem, Israel

WHEN HUMAN RIGHTS ORGANIZATIONS ABANDON HUMAN RIGHTS IN FAVOR OF POLITICAL EXPEDIENCY

When you get committed to human rights and civil liberties, you sign an unwritten hippocratic oath to uphold the principles of human dignity, over and above any political or ethnic considerations.

The themes of human rights, civil liberties and human dignity have featured widely in the Arab-Israeli conflict and in its media coverage..

In my own work as a journalist, I uncovered a sad and tragic abuse of Palestinian Human rights abuse in 1992, where fifteen families of Arabs working in Kiryat Arba who lived in the village of Bani Naim had been given arbitrary home demolition orders. After writing up the story, our news agency collaborated with a Efrat-Kiryat Arba based human rights group to help these families bring a successful petition to the Israel High Court of Justice, otherwise known as the "Bagatz". It did not concern me what the political loyalties were of these people. The point was that an injustice was being done, and it was corrected.

The effective use of human rights and civil liberties themes by Palestinian Arab advocacy groups created a moral underpinning for an Arab movement that had previously been perceived by public opinion as little more than a terror gang of thugs.

The news coverage of Palestinian Arab human rights reached its height in the first two years of the Intifada, while at the same time the PLO encouraged young people to get on the front lines of riots, knowing full well that they would be the first in the line of fire.

By 1989, the campaign coordinated by the Palestinian Human Rights Information Center, based in Jerusalem and in Washington, had igniting passions of human rights groups throughout the world and, eventually, throughout Israel.

By 1990, at least sixteen internationally respected human rights organizations were looking into human rghts policies of the government of Israel.

All of these organizations had Israeli members and Israeli counterparts.

In 1991, when the Gulf war broke out with the PLO siding with the Iraqi missile attacks against Israel, this loose network of human rights groups in support of the Palestinian Arab cause PLO remained intact. The relief workers in the UNRWA camps lent moral and logistical support to the campaign, while contributing to rumors that the UNRWA refugee camps faced starvation at the time of the Gulf war.

In other words, at a time when the support for the Palestinian cause might have been at its lowest point because of the PLO support for Iraq, the PLO human rights support groups in Israel and abroad were still able to maintain international momentum and support for the Palestinian cause at an even keel.

Human rights organizations played an active role in catapulting public opinion in Israel and abroad to push Israel into an international peace conference with PLO representatives in Madrid in October 1991, a process that led to Israeli government recognition of the PLO less than two years later in Oslo.

The establishment of a self-governing Palestinian Arab entity in the Spring of 1994 held out hope for the human rights activists who had worked on behalf of the Palestinian Arab cause.

Despite Arafat's autocratic tendencies that had in the past caused the PLO leader to order the execution of opponents and of those accused of cooperating with Israel, human rights groups hoped that the establishment of a Palestinian National Authority with an intricate governmental structure, parliament and legislative council would provide a new era of human rights, civil liberties and human dignity for the Palestinian Arab people.

That was not to be. In August, 1994, Arafat gave an order to close down the Palestinian Human Rights Information Center and to jail its employees. That was just the beginning of a longstandstanding campaign that Arafat has led to crush human rights organizations and ignore their complaints.

When I brought the situation to the attention of the Rabbis for Human Rights in 1994, the RHR forwarded a letter of protest to Arafat, to which they received no reply. For whatever reason, that did not prevent the Rabbis for Human Rights from making cordial visits to Arafat in Gaza and putting Arafat's smiling face on their brochures.

It would seem that Arafat's suppression of human rights and civil liberties was in keeping with the way the Israeli government viewed the Oslo process..

In the words of Yitzhak Rabin as he was quoted in Yediot Aharonot, on September 3, 1993, "This will be a process that will give the Palestinians an entity without Bagatz ( the right of appeal to the High Court of Justice) and without Bitzlem (a human rights organization that worked on behalf of Palestinian human rights)".

In other words, the culmination of a process that had been energized and galvanized by human rights had turned against human rights and civil liberties with a vengeance.

In the words of Bassam Eid, a former worker for Bitzelem who found that Bitzelem and the Israeli left were no longer interested in the cause of Palestinian human rights, "I would sooner trust Rehavam Zevi over Yossi Sarid any day". Eid made that statement on December 5, 1995, shortly after leaving Bitzelem, after which he founded an independent Palestinian Arab center for human rights.

Meanwhile, althought the Israeli government provides the PA with 62% of its budget, the Israeli human rights community refuses, as a matter of policy, to make aid to the Palestinian Authority contingent in am improvement of human rights policies.

This has led our news agency to ask questions of the umbrella organization of human rights in Israel, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel(ACRI), an organization supported by the New Israel Fund.

We have ACRI if it would support aid to such an entity that denies human rights and civil liberties as a matter of policy.

We have asked ACRI how it could remain silent in light of an Israeli government proposal to strip human rights and civil liberties from Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem and hand them over to the rule of Arafat and the forces under the control of PLO security chieftan Jibril Rajoub.

We have asked ACRI to respond to the investigative series that ran in June, 2000 in HaAretz that documented how the Israeli police were looking by and watching while subcontracting Rajoub's "police" to abduct, interrogate, torture and even murder Israeli Arab citizens of Jerusalem.

The response that I have gotten from Edna Margolit, the chairperson of ACRI, and from Vered Livne, the director of ACRI, has been that they do not and will not interfere with political issues.

ACRI legal counsel Dan Yakir did say that ACRI did not approve of Israeli police who would stand by and subcontract Rajoub to enforce the law. However, Yakir would not put his response in writing nor would he recommend that ACRI issue any policy statement in that regard.

Yakir also indicated that he was unfamiliar with the series that HaAretz ran during June. That is strange, since ACRI retains media professionals who comb the press to monitor human rights abuses.

We have asked the same questions of the Rabbis for Human Rights, to which we have gotten no response.

There has also been no response from either ACRI or the Rabbis for Human Rights or to the scathing report that Amnesty International issued concerning the human rights abuses of the Israeli funded Palestinian Authority.

It would seem that the Israeli human rights community and their Rabbis have adopted the idea that the ends justify the means. They seem to belive in Rabin's idea that an independent Palestinian entity should be established at the expense of human rights and civil liberties.

Despite Israeli indifference, we have witnessed the development of a network of underground Palestinian organizations who work on behalf of human rights and civil liberties, in the area of press freedom, free speech, due process, police reform and more.

However, as Bassam Eid mentioned, when he was interviewed in the movie VANISHING PEACE (BBC and CBC, May 1999), the salaries of the PA security personnel are paid directly by the EU, Canada and the US, none of whom have placed any human rights restrictions on the way in which they behave.

While there may not be peace, an entity is in place, with international sanction, and the tacit agreement of Israel's human rights establishment, to subject the Palestinian Arabs to a regime that denies them protection of any system of justice or human rights organizations.

This is what the Israeli human rights organizations are ready to live with: Israel has simply subcontracted the PLO to deprive Palestinian Arabs of human rights and civil liberties.

In their world, the end justifies the means.

The question remains: why are ACRI and the Rabbis for Human Rights are ready to go along with that?

END