Movimiento por la Paz, el Desarme y la Libertad
This speech was originally presented by Connie Hackbarth on 2 April at the Derechos hacia una Cultura de Paz conference of the Movimiento por la Paz, el Desarme y la Libertad.
Good evening. I wish to congratulate the Movimiento por la Paz, el Desarme y la Libertad (MPDL) on
its 20th anniversary and thank them for organizing this important
conference, in which we can together examine the crucial importance of
promoting human rights and democracy as an essential component of
peace-building throughout the world. Specifically, I will speak about how
Israeli violations of Palestinian human rights, together with international complicity
in and even support for these violations, are completely destroying any chance
for a real peace between Palestinians and Israelis.
Further, as a member of the Palestinian, Israeli and international civil
societies, I will also explore the challenges currently facing us in the
struggle for justice in the Middle East and
throughout the world.
Today’s most visible Israeli violation of Palestinian human rights is perhaps
the siege of the Gaza Strip. Despite widespread condemnation and almost universal
legal agreement that the siege violates international humanitarian and human
rights law, the siege continues. International aid agencies have declared this
to be a humanitarian crisis unprecedented in the history of Gaza—all
because of Israel’s
human rights violations. As the head of UNRWA has
pointed out, “hungry, unhealthy, angry communities do not make good partners
for peace.”
The list of Israeli violations of Palestinian human rights is endless.
Yet the one Palestinian human, national and collective right about which there
is almost no discussion within the human rights community is the Palestinian
right to self determination. Human rights organizations too often claim this is
a political issue.
However, we all know that common Article 1 to both the International Convention
on Civil and Political Rights, as well as the International Convention on
Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, explicitly notes that “All peoples have the
right of self-determination.” Self-determination is further a cornerstone of
the UN Charter. While a frequent criticism of international human rights
jurisprudence is that it focuses on the individual at the expense of the group,
common Article 1 clearly demonstrates a theoretical if not practical
understanding that human rights are both enjoyed within communities and enjoyed
by peoples.
Unfortunately, however, international and Israeli human rights
organizations do not address the Palestinian right to self-determination as a
human right. In a report on human rights in the Middle East issued in wake of
the 1991 Madrid Conference, the US-based group Human Rights Watch explicitly
noted that it “does not address the issue of self-determination […] It believes
that the right of self-determination is an essentially political right […] to
avoid undermining the near-universal acceptance of human rights principles,
Middle East Watch therefore concentrates its attention on the traditional core
group of civil and political liberties.”
While others, such as Amnesty International and the veteran Israeli
group B’Tselem are not as direct about their own economically and culturally
biased interpretations and promotion of international human rights, they also
do not research and advocate explicitly for the Palestinian right of self
determination as an internationally recognized human right that must be
respected immediately and unconditionally.
It is an axiom that there can be no peace in the Middle
East without respect for human rights. First and foremost, there
can be no lasting peace and justice in the region without fulfillment of the
Palestinian human right to self determination. Human rights organizations must
be objective and impartial, campaigning for this essential human right as they
do for the rights to freedom of movement and education, for example. Palestinian
self-determination is a human right and must be recognized and campaigned for
as such.
As a joint Palestinian-Israeli organization with a strong
internationalist perspective, the AIC currently faces several challenges in
promoting the rights of the Palestinian people, particularly their right to
self-determination. As these challenges are shared variously by Palestinian,
Israeli and international civil society groups, they can shed important light
on the context in which we are currently working.
On the international level, there exist two primary challenges. The success
of the United States and its neoconservative allies in initiating an imperialist
war of recolonization, in which international law and human rights are
manipulated and blatantly violated, and in which unilateralism trumps dialogue,
multilateral negotiations and compromises, negatively affects local and
international civil societies. This creates a situation in which countries such
as Israel
are able to violate Palestinian human rights with impunity. The ideology of
this war is the so-called clash of civilizations and the enemy is identified as
Islam and Muslims. Global acceptance of this situation renders working against
racism and oppression, whether by Israel
or throughout Europe, extremely difficult.
Secondly, much of the western international community is evading its
moral and legal responsibility to hold Israel accountable for its human
rights violations, particularly in the context of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
Instead of demanding accountability from Israel, both to protect the
Palestinian people and the sanctity of international law in general, the
western donor community invests huge amounts of money in emergency and
development aid in the occupied Palestinian territories. Even the World Bank
has acknowledged that development is not possible under Israeli occupation,
such that these financial investments with no concurrent work and equal
financial investment in groups working for peace is counterproductive.
Within Israel,
most local human rights and peace organizations must acknowledge that they have
little influence within their own society and work to alter this situation.
While the Oslo process globalized the Israeli economy and economically
benefited a small percentage of the European Jewish society and ruling elites, most
Israelis experienced accelerated impoverishment, a dismantlement of the social
welfare net and heightened social marginalization. A future peace process that
involves dialogue amongst only the elites, on both the levels of politics and
civil society, while failing to directly include and address these victims of
the occupation and peace process, is necessarily doomed to fail. The AIC
believes that social exclusion is the root cause of rejecting a culture of
peace in Israel,
and marginalised communities often form the social base for authoritarian
propositions.
Palestinian civil society, and the AIC within it, face several political
challenges that must be addressed in our work. The Palestinian people
democratically elected the Hamas to represent them, and the international
community punished the Palestinian people for this democrat choice with an
international boycott. The PA is now controlled by persons not directly
accountable to the Palestinian people. The PLO has essentially been destroyed,
with only Fatah and Hamas relevant on the political arena, while democratic
forces have been significantly weakened. The Palestinian people understandably
have little faith in the current political process, particularly as Israel
continues its various occupation policies unhindered, and poverty is at an
all-time high due to Israeli de-development of the OPT. How can we make our
call for peace based on justice and human rights relevant in the Palestinian
political scene, which is under massive international and Israeli pressure?
Many blame the AIC and other progressive forces for being utopian. How
can you talk about justice when realpolitik is reality? They ask me. Yet the
realpolitik of the Oslo
process resulted in more suffering, poverty and dispossession, not peace. The
people of the Middle East, not to mention the
world, deserve regional peace, despite the difficulties. The time for respect
of the Palestinian human right of self determination is now.
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