Peace By Any Means Necessary?

By B'Tselem's Development Director, Jessica Montell.

Peace is everywhere in Israel, in rhetoric if not in practice. Every political project defines itself in relation to something called peace. So perhaps it is inevitable that human rights has also been recruited to advance these various definitions of peace.

Take, for example, the current government, which only mentions human rights with regard to the policies of adversaries in the peace process. In his 1996 address before the U.S. Congress, Netanyahu called for “the states of the Middle East to put the issues of human rights and democratization on their agenda.” A stable peace, Netanyahu argued, must be based on three pillars: security, reciprocity and “democracy and human rights.” Later that same year, the government cited “abuse of human rights” as one of the “ten most egregious PLO violations of the Oslo Accords.” The government even had the nerve to cite reports by Amnesty International on the PA’s poor human rights record. Although Oslo equally obligates Israel to respect human rights, what Amnesty has to say about Israel was not mentioned.

The Right is not alone in using human rights to advance its political agenda. In fact, one might argue that much of the Left’s current interest in human rights is politically motivated. The issue of administrative detention illustrates this point. Throughout the occupation, both left and right-wing governments used military orders to administratively detain Palestinians for months and even years at a time, based on a suspicion that the detainee will pose a future danger. For years, human rights groups campaigned against these detentions with little success, either on the individual or the policy level. The High Court of Justice served as the rubber stamp of the military commander; the Knesset only spoke out when Jewish militants were administratively detained; and the public appeared indifferent to the widespread use of detention without trial.

It was not until 1997 that the human rights community succeeded in organizing a public campaign against administrative detention - perhaps the most successful human rights campaign ever conducted in Israel. Unprecedented numbers of Israelis took part in various protest activities. Prominent among the participants was a new group - Open Doors - composed almost entirely of activists from the Meretz party. This campaign successfully pressured the authorities to release dozens of detainees after years in detention. No analysis of human rights in a vacuum can explain the popular success of the administrative detention campaign. Instead, it is clear that members of the Left joined this cause as an outlet to express their political frustration as they watched Netanyahu freeze and reverse the progress made by the previous Labor-Meretz government. Human rights became a means to an end, and not an end in itself.

As Palestinian activists have discovered, however, those using human rights as a means eventually have to make a political choice between the moral absolute of individual rights and political expediency. For Palestinian activists, this moment of truth came after Oslo.

During the intifada, many used the human rights cause to advance the essentially political project of ending the occupation. Even the PLO espoused human rights rhetoric and distributed B’Tselem reports. The Oslo process forced a re-evaluation of this tactic, however: once the Palestinian Authority took over territory and started violating rights, organizations and activists had to formulate a response to these violations. This required them to redefine whether they were human rights activists - in which case they must speak out against violations regardless of the perpetrator - or instead were using human rights to fight against Israel’s occupation - in which case they must continue to condemn Israel, and ignore PA abuses. Sadly, the leading Palestinian human rights organization, al-Haq, collapsed because it could not resolve this dilemma.

While less traumatic, Oslo proved a watershed in Israel as well, forcing peace activists to reconsider their motives and assumptions. When B’Tselem published its 1995 report on human rights violations by the Palestinian Preventive Security Service, longtime activist Uri Avneri condemned B’Tselem for doing so. Avneri arguing that, in this period, critique of the PA was counter-productive to the more important project of advancing the peace process and creating a Palestinian state.

The Rabin-Peres government also justified many of its human rights violations as necessary to achieve peace. When suicide bombings threatened to erode popular support for the Oslo Process, the government approved greater use of what it calls “moderate physical pressure” and the human rights community calls torture. Only a few months after the 1992 election brought the Labor-Meretz government to power, this same government approved the mass deportation of over 400 Palestinians. The list of cabinet members approving the deportation included several founding members of B’Tselem who argued that violent opponents of peace had to be removed from the Occupied Territories.

Both the Right and the Left have used human rights rhetoric to advance political goals, and have justified violation of rights in the name of those goals. But the comparison is unfair, some might argue, because Netanyahu’s is a disingenuous manipulation of human rights, whereas the Left genuinely strives to achieve a long-term solution to human rights problems. According to this argument, violations of human rights are to be accepted - though with regret - as the necessary price for a peace that will ensure greater enjoyment of human rights for Palestinians.

This argument is spurious both in principle and in practice. The instrumental approach to human rights contradicts the very foundations of the human rights movement. No goal, no matter how lofty, can justify human rights abuses. This principle ensures that each individual is recognized as an end in herself who cannot be sacrificed for any greater good.

One could also argue that no genuine peace can be achieved by generating suffering, hostility and resentment along the way. Furthermore, there is no indication that an independent Palestinian state will bring greater respect for human rights. The Palestinian Authority has an atrocious human rights record, including the most brutal forms of torture, prolonged detentions with no legal basis, and most recently, execution of a man for “inciting the public against the Palestinian National Authority.” True, in an independent Palestine, Israel will no longer be responsible for these abuses; some argue that this is precisely the motivation for the Oslo Process: to have someone else do the dirty work of fighting terrorism. “If we find a partner for peace with the Palestinians,” Yitzhak Rabin said in September 1994, “they will run their internal affairs without the High Court of Justice, B’Tselem, or all sorts of groups of mothers and fathers and bleeding hearts.” For human rights activists, the fact that Israeli hands will be clean is no consolation. No, there can be no justification of unjust means even to achieve what appears to be the most just of ends.

Thus while our usual allies rally behind leftwing candidates, human rights activists face the upcoming elections with some ambivalence. It is true that this government has perpetrated grave violations against the human rights of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. Yet, there is no basis to hope that a government headed by Barak or Mordechai would be significantly different - Rabin and Peres were guilty of equally grave human rights violations.

Furthermore, the pragmatists among us argue, the only difference between a left and a rightwing government in terms of human rights is that, if a leftwing government wins power, we are likely to lose most of our parliamentary allies. Can we expect MK Anat Maor to continue to speak out against violent interrogation methods if the head of her party again volunteers to sit on the committee that approves those methods?

Perhaps our best hope is that the public will not accept these violations. We can hope that the same people who condemned administrative detention under Netanyahu will continue to do so under Barak. That this time they will not accept the argument that abuse and humiliation are the necessary means to achieve peace.

A just alternative to Israel’s military occupation over the Palestinians is a goal shared by human rights and peace activists alike. But we cannot reach that goal through immoral means. Remaining true to human rights principles enables us to reach this goal, rather than some Orwellian distortion called peace.

Comments to Jessica Montell

This article also was published in the May/June 1999 issue of Tikkun magazine.

B'Tselem: The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories - is the leading Israeli organization monitoring, documenting and advocating to improve human rights in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Founded in 1989, B'Tselem publishes reports, engages in advocacy and serves as a resource center.

http://www.btselem.org

Yahoo's 1998 Israeli Election Page

Ariga's coverage of the 1996 Israeli elections

To the current election editorial from Ariga