ONLINE FORUM
Human Rights and the Legacy of Decolonization in the Middle East
by Robert Blecher, UICHR Visiting Scholar and an editor of Middle East Report
2006, like many years before it, has been a bad one for human rights and international humanitarian law in the Middle East. Violations of legal codes have been legion, and perhaps more ominously, human rights activists themselves are on the defensive. Significant constituencies among Israelis and Palestinians alike believe the protections of international law have failed them – and not without reason.
Many Palestinians have felt this way for a long time, but never more so than since the Palestinian Legislative Council elections in January 2006. Following these elections, the international community imposed a variety of financial sanctions on the Palestinian Authority until it meets three conditions: renouncing violence, recognizing Israel, and accepting previous diplomatic agreements. The Israeli government, for its part, refuses to transfer to the PA the customs revenue it collects on behalf of the Palestinians. These taxes constitute the largest single component of the PA budget.
The sanctions precipitated an economic and social freefall. With virtually all outside money transfers blocked, unemployment, poverty and food insecurity have risen rapidly. Since January alone, poverty has grown by 55 percent in Gaza to 80 percent overall, leaving more than three-quarters of the population dependent on food aid, which Israel has allowed to enter only intermittently. Many Palestinians say the situation has never been worse, an assessment confirmed by the numbers: in certain areas of Gaza, the anemia rate stands at 72 percent. With people unable to obtain crucial goods and services with money, many have turned to force. In a territory already gripped by a culture of militarism after years of armed struggle, the result is an environment of unprecedented lawlessness.
Politically speaking, perhaps the biggest losers have been those Palestinians who campaigned for democracy, rule of law, civil society and human rights – in short, for political ideas based on ostensibly universal values that are in fact of Western provenance. “It’s not just that the organizations that fight for these things have lost the respect of others,” says an NGO staffer in Ramallah. “It’s worse than that. They have lost respect for themselves. All this time we thought that certain ideas were universal, but it turns out that they are not. The donors were not funding us because we were doing what was right in an abstract sense; they were giving us money because we were doing what they wanted us to do in a political sense.”
On the Israeli side, there is dismay with the way in which the international community condemned it for the disproportionate use of force in its summer war against Hizballah and Lebanon. “What happened was a failure of morality,” complains Gidi Grinstein, the director of the Re’ut Institute, an Israeli think tank. “Hizballah was launching rockets and missiles indiscriminately and purposefully into our cities, and Israel, the victim, was blamed.” International law will need to be reinvented in response to the challenge of groups who do not accept its standards. “As it is, the side that undertakes obligations under IHL [international humanitarian law] is compromised, since IHL has become a one-sided constraint.”
Grinstein was talking here chiefly about Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International (AI) reports that blasted Israel’s “excessive” military campaign. HRW and (later) AI accused Hizballah of war crimes as well, but this move did not placate the critics, who charged the organizations with drawing a spurious moral equivalence between the antagonists. Israeli Jews of all political stripes were supportive of the war and many were troubled by the attacks on their military’s conduct. When what started out as a border skirmish was recast as an existential threat, the laws of war came to be seen as a hindrance.
Hizballah evinced a similarly dismissive attitude toward IHL. When questioned about the AI report, Hizballah MP Hasan Fadlallah retorted, “How could we confront the Israeli aggression? With roses?” His words were reminiscent — in indignation if not in irony — of a quip in Gilles Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers. Asked by a journalist if he didn’t “think it’s a bit cowardly to use women’s baskets and handbags to carry explosive devices that kill so many innocent people,” rebel leader M. Ben Hidi replied: “And doesn’t it seem to you even more cowardly to drop napalm bombs on defenseless villages, so that there are a thousand times more innocent victims? Of course, if we had your airplanes it would be a lot easier for us. Give us your bombers, and you can have our baskets.”
Indeed, debates over the place of sub-state actors in international law are nothing new. These debates reached their peak in 1977 when the Protocol Additional to the Fourth Geneva Convention extended Geneva protections to “armed conflicts in which people are fighting against colonial domination and alien occupation and against racist régimes in exercise of their right to self determination.” What has become known as “Protocol I” granted retroactive legitimacy to national liberation struggles after most had been concluded. And even then, the US (and Israel) refused to ratify the protocol, in no small part because of reluctance to afford Geneva protections to Palestinian and other fighters deemed terrorist. The parallels to today’s debates over “enemy combatants” are striking.
Yet today’s disputes occur at a different historical moment, when the parameters of national liberation are no longer so clear and the nature of resistance movements is more ambiguous. First, the proliferation of ethnically and religiously inflected nationalisms has helped fuel the perception that the achievement of self-determination is a zero-sum game, with the liberation of one party coeval with the subjection of its antagonist. Hamas’ resolute refusal to officially recognize Israel unsettles many in the Jewish state, although Israel and the US have refused to explore the considerable flexibility that Hamas has signaled in this regard. Second, the Palestinian and Lebanese resistance movements have been drawn into government participation even before their goal of liberating territory (be it fully or partially occupied) has been achieved. The PA, since its establishment in 1994 as part of the Oslo process, has been trapped between national liberation and (quasi-)state governance. Beginning in 1992, Hizballah found itself in a similar bind, continuing its armed struggle against Israel’s self-proclaimed “security zone” in southern Lebanon after winning seats in the Lebanese parliament. Hamas followed Hizballah’s example, running first in municipal then legislative elections. Third, these Islamic resistance movements have been catapulted into leading roles in a global drama. National liberation struggles in the mid-twentieth century were often Cold War proxy battles, but in the post-9/11 world, sub-state organizations have become — or been positioned as — primary actors. Hamas and Hizballah have become central addresses in Washington’s war on terror.
In this time of surging conflict, human rights organizations have been pinned between highly mobilized political constituencies. Israel’s supporters were critical of HRW and AI this summer, while many on the left were disappointed by the organizations’ seeming foot-dragging in the face of self-evident war crimes. But the main issue here is not political bias in one direction or the other. It is, rather, the unresolved legacy of colonialism in a post-colonial world, where the structural conditions of struggle, legal instruments, and movements themselves have been incompletely transformed. It also is a world in which “terrorism” has replaced “war crimes” as the operative category of international justice, thus rendering IHL of secondary consequence. Israelis and Palestinians — and probably many Lebanese, too — are keenly aware of this state of affairs, and are therefore skeptical about what international law, and human rights more generally, have to offer them in their struggles.
Copyright ©2006 Robert Blecher
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