If you have the patience to read this and to get to the heart of the
authors' argument, I think you'll find it interesting.
Miriam
How Human Rights Groups Reinforce Israeli Colonialism |
PopularResistance.Org
How Human Rights Groups Reinforce Israeli Colonialism |
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https://www.popularresistance.org/how-human-rights-groups-reinforce-israeli-
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How Human Rights Groups Reinforce Israeli Colonialism
A passer-by carries a Union Flag umbrella past a pro-Palestine demonstration
outside the Houses of Parliament in London October 13, 2014. REUTERS/Luke
MacGregor
A passer-by carries a Union Flag umbrella past a pro-Palestine demonstration
outside the Houses of Parliament in London October 13, 2014. REUTERS/Luke
MacGregor
Coauthored by political scientist Neve Gordon and anthropologist Nicola
Perugini, this book is a challenging and unorthodox examination of "how both
liberal and illiberal forces appropriate and deploy human rights in a way
that corroborates, reinforces and rationalizes domination instead of
destabilizing it."
The authors use the Palestinian struggle against Israeli settler-colonialism
to exemplify how a human rights framework can be misused to help maintain
the status quo and allow Israel's colonial domination over the Palestinians
to go unchallenged.
In doing so, they criticize the work of
Amnesty International, the Israeli human rights group
B'Tselem and
Human Rights Watch, marshalling convincing arguments concerning the
limitations of a strictly legalistic framework for human rights.
Many readers may find the opening chapters of this book difficult to
comprehend and somewhat ambiguous as the authors construct a point of view
that frames the nation-state itself as an intrinsic instrument for the
"human right" to dominate and to kill.
Much of this discussion lacks clarity and historical support and ignores
political and economic factors influencing the nature of the nation-state
and its behavior in specific periods of time. The authors' frequent use of
phrases such as "in other words" and "put differently" suggests that they
themselves lack clarity regarding their theoretical framework.
Nevertheless, the authors have opened a discussion that will hopefully prod
these human rights organizations to reexamine their approaches and inspire
the larger Palestine solidarity community to appreciate the importance of
boycott, divestment and sanctions as a political movement that seeks
liberation from colonial oppression rather than reform.
"Unbiased" and "nonpartisan"
The authors call it "the paradox of human rights" that much of the Western
world regarded Israel's creation as a "natural reparation for human rights
violations carried out by Nazi Germany and other European states," even
though "this reparation assumed the form of a settler nation-state (in
Palestine) whose colonial practices generated new human rights violations."
It was not until the
first intifada in the 1980s that many Palestinian organizations also began
to frame their struggle in the language of human rights, rather than
national liberation, according to the authors.
This transformation alarmed the Israeli government, which soon began to
depict nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) focused on human rights as a
national security threat. The authors argue that the government crackdown
caused many Israeli NGOs to internalize the accusations against them and
practice self-censorship, preventing them "from mobilizing human rights as a
real threat to the state and its colonial order."
One of the first repercussions was that liberal NGOs sought to portray
themselves as "unbiased" and "nonpartisan" so that they could lay claim to
legitimacy. However, the authors argue, this merely resulted in their
ignoring "the structural underpinnings of domination," allowing the
perpetrators of human rights violations to act as arbitrators, ultimately
"normalizing" the existing relations of domination.
It's here that Gordon and Perugini are at their most convincing as they show
systematically how this came about.
They cite the
New Israel Fund (NIF), the largest donor to Israel's human rights
organizations, which came under fire from the right-wing Israeli movement
Im Tirtzu and the Zionist watchdog
NGO Monitor.
One of the NIF's first concessions was to disavow
universal jurisdiction, under which Israeli officials could be charged for
war crimes and crimes against humanity in countries with vigorous human
rights laws. The NIF agreed to support only those NGOs that called for
prosecutions solely within Israel; hence, the very state that was practicing
human rights violations became the sole arbitrator over those violations.
Antidemocratic ethos
Next to crumble under pressure was B'Tselem, which ignored the asymmetry in
power and military capability between Israel and Hamas in its
report on the former's November 2012 attack on Gaza. B'Tselem issued a
report accusing Hamas of war crimes while concluding that Israel was merely
"suspected" of violating international law.
This tendency became more manifest when liberal NGOs began to accommodate
the notion that precision weapons could be lawful as long as "collateral
damage" was limited, thereby establishing a justification for
extrajudicial assassinations and recognizing the Israeli military's claim
that international law allows it to attack civilian populations being used
as "human shields."
Gordon and Perugini artfully note that this position creates a divide in
which technologically advanced nations capable of making precision weapons
(usually Western imperialist and formerly colonial nations) have an
advantage under international law over other nations (usually the formerly
colonized) without this capability.
In effect, a legal divide exists between the technological haves and
have-nots, which the authors say "reinscribes the long-standing gap that
existed in international law between colonizer and colonized." It is yet
another example, they argue, of how "Humanitarian law is structured to favor
the dominant."
The authors then discuss the emergence of Israeli settler NGOs, such as
Regavim and Yesha for Human Rights (also known as the Yesha Human Rights
Organization), which began to "mirror" the techniques and strategies of
liberal human rights NGOs by claiming the "right to colonize."
They attempted to completely invert the language of human rights "by
transforming the settler into the native and the indigenous into the
invader." They have been successful within Israel. Settler NGOs brag that
they are routinely invited to participate in discussions on human rights in
the Israeli parliament, the
Knesset.
Finally, the authors take up the problems associated with the
professionalization of liberal human rights NGOs and what they call an
"antidemocratic ethos."
They cite the example of a
Human Rights Watch
report on
drone warfare in
Yemen that upheld the practice of targeted killing while failing to account
for how the people of Yemen felt. Instead of challenging drone warfare,
Human Rights Watch restricted its report to a "legalistic-professional
discussion about the kinds of weapons used."
In their conclusion, the authors ask whether human rights can "still be
deployed as a counterhegemonic and counterdominant discourse." They answer
in the affirmative, calling for human rights to be "redefined in a new way
that mobilizes people to struggle for emancipatory projects."
Instead of being law-centered, human rights NGOs should raise questions
about the "morality and legitimacy of the law itself," especially targeting
laws that "enhance domination." The NGOs that claim to speak for an
oppressed people should democratize and "align with grassroots social
movements." Finally, they should call for the dismantlement of colonial
systems, not their reform.
Reconceptualizing and reframing human rights is exactly what happened in
Palestine with the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, the authors
maintain.
Instead of trying "to solve isolated legal cases in colonial courts, the BDS
movement translates human rights in order to challenge the existing
structure of domination." The point, they might say, is justice, not lending
legitimacy to "an unrecoverable apparatus of injustice."
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How Human Rights Groups Reinforce Israeli Colonialism |
PopularResistance.Org frame
popularresistance.org
https://www.popularresistance.org/how-human-rights-groups-reinforce-israeli-
colonialism/
How Human Rights Groups Reinforce Israeli Colonialism
A passer-by carries a Union Flag umbrella past a pro-Palestine demonstration
outside the Houses of Parliament in London October 13, 2014. REUTERS/Luke
MacGregor
A passer-by carries a Union Flag umbrella past a pro-Palestine demonstration
outside the Houses of Parliament in London October 13, 2014. REUTERS/Luke
MacGregor
Coauthored by political scientist Neve Gordon and anthropologist Nicola
Perugini, this book is a challenging and unorthodox examination of "how both
liberal and illiberal forces appropriate and deploy human rights in a way
that corroborates, reinforces and rationalizes domination instead of
destabilizing it."
The authors use the Palestinian struggle against Israeli settler-colonialism
to exemplify how a human rights framework can be misused to help maintain
the status quo and allow Israel's colonial domination over the Palestinians
to go unchallenged.
In doing so, they criticize the work of
Amnesty International, the Israeli human rights group
B'Tselem and
Human Rights Watch, marshalling convincing arguments concerning the
limitations of a strictly legalistic framework for human rights.
Many readers may find the opening chapters of this book difficult to
comprehend and somewhat ambiguous as the authors construct a point of view
that frames the nation-state itself as an intrinsic instrument for the
"human right" to dominate and to kill.
Much of this discussion lacks clarity and historical support and ignores
political and economic factors influencing the nature of the nation-state
and its behavior in specific periods of time. The authors' frequent use of
phrases such as "in other words" and "put differently" suggests that they
themselves lack clarity regarding their theoretical framework.
Nevertheless, the authors have opened a discussion that will hopefully prod
these human rights organizations to reexamine their approaches and inspire
the larger Palestine solidarity community to appreciate the importance of
boycott, divestment and sanctions as a political movement that seeks
liberation from colonial oppression rather than reform.
"Unbiased" and "nonpartisan"
The authors call it "the paradox of human rights" that much of the Western
world regarded Israel's creation as a "natural reparation for human rights
violations carried out by Nazi Germany and other European states," even
though "this reparation assumed the form of a settler nation-state (in
Palestine) whose colonial practices generated new human rights violations."
It was not until the
first intifada in the 1980s that many Palestinian organizations also began
to frame their struggle in the language of human rights, rather than
national liberation, according to the authors.
This transformation alarmed the Israeli government, which soon began to
depict nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) focused on human rights as a
national security threat. The authors argue that the government crackdown
caused many Israeli NGOs to internalize the accusations against them and
practice self-censorship, preventing them "from mobilizing human rights as a
real threat to the state and its colonial order."
One of the first repercussions was that liberal NGOs sought to portray
themselves as "unbiased" and "nonpartisan" so that they could lay claim to
legitimacy. However, the authors argue, this merely resulted in their
ignoring "the structural underpinnings of domination," allowing the
perpetrators of human rights violations to act as arbitrators, ultimately
"normalizing" the existing relations of domination.
It's here that Gordon and Perugini are at their most convincing as they show
systematically how this came about.
They cite the
New Israel Fund (NIF), the largest donor to Israel's human rights
organizations, which came under fire from the right-wing Israeli movement
Im Tirtzu and the Zionist watchdog
NGO Monitor.
One of the NIF's first concessions was to disavow
universal jurisdiction, under which Israeli officials could be charged for
war crimes and crimes against humanity in countries with vigorous human
rights laws. The NIF agreed to support only those NGOs that called for
prosecutions solely within Israel; hence, the very state that was practicing
human rights violations became the sole arbitrator over those violations.
Antidemocratic ethos
Next to crumble under pressure was B'Tselem, which ignored the asymmetry in
power and military capability between Israel and Hamas in its
report on the former's November 2012 attack on Gaza. B'Tselem issued a
report accusing Hamas of war crimes while concluding that Israel was merely
"suspected" of violating international law.
This tendency became more manifest when liberal NGOs began to accommodate
the notion that precision weapons could be lawful as long as "collateral
damage" was limited, thereby establishing a justification for
extrajudicial assassinations and recognizing the Israeli military's claim
that international law allows it to attack civilian populations being used
as "human shields."
Gordon and Perugini artfully note that this position creates a divide in
which technologically advanced nations capable of making precision weapons
(usually Western imperialist and formerly colonial nations) have an
advantage under international law over other nations (usually the formerly
colonized) without this capability.
In effect, a legal divide exists between the technological haves and
have-nots, which the authors say "reinscribes the long-standing gap that
existed in international law between colonizer and colonized." It is yet
another example, they argue, of how "Humanitarian law is structured to favor
the dominant."
The authors then discuss the emergence of Israeli settler NGOs, such as
Regavim and Yesha for Human Rights (also known as the Yesha Human Rights
Organization), which began to "mirror" the techniques and strategies of
liberal human rights NGOs by claiming the "right to colonize."
They attempted to completely invert the language of human rights "by
transforming the settler into the native and the indigenous into the
invader." They have been successful within Israel. Settler NGOs brag that
they are routinely invited to participate in discussions on human rights in
the Israeli parliament, the
Knesset.
Finally, the authors take up the problems associated with the
professionalization of liberal human rights NGOs and what they call an
"antidemocratic ethos."
They cite the example of a
Human Rights Watch
report on
drone warfare in
Yemen that upheld the practice of targeted killing while failing to account
for how the people of Yemen felt. Instead of challenging drone warfare,
Human Rights Watch restricted its report to a "legalistic-professional
discussion about the kinds of weapons used."
In their conclusion, the authors ask whether human rights can "still be
deployed as a counterhegemonic and counterdominant discourse." They answer
in the affirmative, calling for human rights to be "redefined in a new way
that mobilizes people to struggle for emancipatory projects."
Instead of being law-centered, human rights NGOs should raise questions
about the "morality and legitimacy of the law itself," especially targeting
laws that "enhance domination." The NGOs that claim to speak for an
oppressed people should democratize and "align with grassroots social
movements." Finally, they should call for the dismantlement of colonial
systems, not their reform.
Reconceptualizing and reframing human rights is exactly what happened in
Palestine with the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, the authors
maintain.
Instead of trying "to solve isolated legal cases in colonial courts, the BDS
movement translates human rights in order to challenge the existing
structure of domination." The point, they might say, is justice, not lending
legitimacy to "an unrecoverable apparatus of injustice."
How Human Rights Groups Reinforce Israeli Col
