Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, December 1997, Pages 74-75
Human Rights
DR. LISA HAJJAR, assistant professor of sociology at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania and an expert on human rights in the occupied territories, described the status of human rights groups in the area on Aug. 14 at the Center for Policy Analysis on Palestine. Although cooperation still exists, tensions over the Oslo accords have started to chip away at ties between Palestinian and Israeli human rights groups.
In the beginning, said Hajjar, both Israeli and Palestinian human rights activists put Palestinian rights on the map. In 1979 the Palestinian group Al-Haq began to internationalize the criticism of Israel’s occupation, and challenged it on legal grounds. Hajjar pointed out that lawyers were on the front lines because “they were the only ones able to visit the prisons and write about what they saw.”
Most of the lawyers working for Palestinian human rights fell into three categories, Hajjar said. They were Jewish Israeli liberals opposed to Israel’s blatant disregard for its own guidelines, “leftists” who wanted to end the occupation, and Palestinian Arabs from Israel, who felt an ethno-solidarity with Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza.
But while their work registered some successes, their legacy now is in danger, said Hajjar. “Through 1993, there was a large amount of cooperation between human rights groups because of the occupation,” she continued. “In 1994, this cooperation began to break down.”
The signing of the first Oslo accord was a major reason for this change. “Oslo is not about human rights,” said Hajjar. The clauses which protect Israeli security, such as mass arrests, are by their nature antithetical to human rights, she continued.
Because of the new areas of Israeli and Palestinian authority, responsibility for reporting and advocacy began to blur. A “Green Line mentality” formed, which cut off Israeli and Palestinian human rights groups from each other.
Because of their opposition to Oslo, both Israeli and Palestinian groups were attacked for being “anti-peace” by both the Israeli and Palestinian governments, said Hajjar, and some liberal Jewish Israeli human rights groups began to give up on the Palestinians. Some even chose to represent Israeli extremists. The president of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel has recently stated that her organization “should now consider the rights of settlers,” and spoke of defending the use of “moderate physical pressure” to interrogate Palestinian prisoners.
Other Israeli human rights groups have had to redefine their mission according to post-Oslo realities. According to Hajjar, the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem had to decide whether to criticize only Israel, or the PA as well. Finally, it agreed to make Israeli violations a priority and only report PA offenses when there is Israeli collusion.
Hajjar also observed that many Jewish human rights activists complain that Palestinian lawyers now employ a double standard of criticizing Israeli offenses and overlooking PA ones. She confirmed that some Palestinian human rights lawyers have been silenced or co-opted, but added that many had continued their work and were seeking to continue cooperation with Israeli groups.
Concluding, Hajjar called on supporters of human rights to begin addressing the shortfalls of Oslo, and said that it was vital that both Israeli and Palestinian groups begin constructing a new post-Oslo vision of human rights activism.
—John Vandenberg
