NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #20/NN_1992_20.iso/spool/misc/activism/progress/6465

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Subject: Human Rights in Israel and Occ. Territories
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HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS IN ISRAEL AND THE OCCUPIED
TERRITORIES
Speech by Leah Tsemel
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Presented at the Manila 1991 International Symposium on Democracy,
Development and Human Rights, sponsored by the World Organisation
Against Torture (OMCT/SOS-Torture).

Reprinted by permission. From the symposium document, "Manila '91
- International Symposium on Democracy, Development and Human
Rights." E-mail requests to OMCT/SOS-Torture at OMCT Geonet 2
([e-mail]); also available for viewing in the AWAIR
library (Arab World And Islamic Resources and School Services,
2095 Rose Street, Suite 4, Berkeley, CA  94709; open M-F 9am-6pm;
Tel.[phone]; e-mail: [e-mail])

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I did not hear the earlier speeches, but I am sure that the
situation I come from is very, very exceptional. There, we are not
talking about a state that oppresses its own people, not about a
government that oppresses its own population, we are talking about
a situation of occupation. In presenting the situation, my
position is even more complicated because I am an Israeli Jew, who
has worked for the last 20 years in defense of Palestinian rights.
I am very sorry that we do not have a Palestinian representative
here, and will do my best to represent what a Palestinian
representative would have said. I hope I will do it correctly.

In the part of the world that I would call Israel and the Occupied
Territories, unlike other places which have been mentioned, the
human rights situation is not an indicator of social and economic
conditions. We are confronting a phenomenon which is rare at the
end of the 20th century, a phenomenon where the colonial process
is still taking place, and is almost fully accomplished, I'm
afraid. A process that was begun almost one hundred years ago by
Zionism, and has now completed one quarter of a century of
occupying both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In this
situation, Israel is preventing the self-determination of the
Palestinians - and here we are talking about close to one third of
the total population, close to two million people, and we are
talking about the longest occupation in modern history.  At the
same time, the State of Israel has a role to play towards the
other countries in the Middle East. Israel is there to maintain
order, and is the representative - so Israel sees it and so the
rest of the world sees it - the representative of the Europeans
and of the Americans in that region.

Israel has sometimes been called the tail which the dog wags and
sometimes the tail that wags the dog. But obviously, she has a
very significant role in the Middle East; if we bear in mind the
fact that Israel, they say, possesses nuclear weapons, the threat
is there, even if she doesn't launch a shooting war. Living in
Israel, one realises very quickly that there is what we in this
region used to call "the Crown". The Americans are now our
"Crown". It is as if Israel has had a mandate given to her by the
Crown, and has to fulfill it; Israel is America's agent and client
at one and the same time.

Within Israeli society, in what is openly defined as a Jewish
state, Jews are obviously privileged. Jews enjoy democracy. We
cannot talk about oppression of Jews as such. We can see
differences here and there among Jews of various classes and
national origins, there are social and other differences, but
oppression of Jews as Jews does not exist. On the contrary, any
Jew, wherever he lives in the world, the moment that he arrives at
the airport in Israel, and declares that he wants to become a
citizen, automatically becomes a citizen with full rights, he and
all his immediate family.

Israel is massively indulged by the Americans, and therefore
enjoys plenty; we are talking about a modern society, modern
industry, modern academia.  Israel has been able, I think with
quite enormous success, to absorb so far, almost half-a-million
Jews and non-Jews who left the Soviet Union recently. And of
course, this has been made possible, not by resources that exist
in the country, but by this massive American support. In Israel,
we have almost no homeless people among the Jews, we have
relatively little unemployment, and all this, undoubtedly as a
direct or indirect result of aid from the U.S.; whereas in the
United States, as we know the situation is deteriorating. Still,
aid to Israel is high on America's list of priorities. Now, an
enormous proportion of Israeli economic efforts go into carrying
out the colonisation process. It began a long time ago, it
continues day after day.

In Israel today there are about 750,000 Palestinians who, as
citizens of the state, are more privileged than Palestinians in
the Occupied Territories, but still of course are, I would say,
second class citizens.

Israel totally ignores all international covenants, including the
Geneva Convention for Times of War, which relates to occupation,
and all regulations governing the behavior of the occupier. Israel
has not adopted the Geneva Convention, saying that her presence in
the West Bank and Gaza Strip is not to be considered as
occupation. She says she has liberated these territories. Israel
does not recognize human rights or any of the human rights
conventions, as relating to the Palestinians.

One of the fundamental rights of a person is the right to have a
family, and the family is described as the fundamental unit of
modern society, which should be defended by every government. In
the occupied territories, for years now - for 24 long years -- a
Palestinian who establishes a family with a person who is from
outside the area, cannot bring his wife (it is normally the wife)
and children to live with him permanently. They can come for brief
periods, as tourists, and then they are obliged to leave. There
are families, where for years, the children have had to go with
the mother or live elsewhere, in Jordan or Egypt, for most of the
year, and they are allowed to visit and stay with the father only
for two or three months at a time. But this is, of course, only
one aspect of a whole mechanism that is aimed at making life
impossible for Palestinians in the occupied territories, at
encouraging the emigration of Palestinians. In hundreds of very
long court decisions, when we have challenged this situation in
court, they would say that we are not like the Soviet Union - we
have not erected an iron curtain to prevent people from leaving
the country. On the contrary if this man wants to live with his
wife and children, if he wants to unify his family he is welcome
to. The doors are open he call always leave. And the way out has
always been there available to the Palestinians.

In order to encourage Palestinian emigration, their land is taken.
Today, we can point to more than 60% of the land in both the West
Bank and Gaza Strip, that has already changed hands, from
Palestinians to Jews. I am including lands that are held for
military purposes, that were taken for military purposes: you take
the land for 'military purposes', after a while, you put in a
military camp, a while later you populate it with civilians,
Israeli Jewish civilians, sometimes immigrants who came from the
Soviet Union, and after a while it becomes a city, and it grows,
and grows and grows and takes more and more land.

Take archaeology, for instance: if the Palestinians believe that
archaeological remains in the region, from their historical past,
belong to them, they can forget it. Every site of historical
importance or of interest to tourists has already been taken over
by the Israelis and by Israeli settlers. You talk about the
richness of the land, about the landscape, the view, the seashore.
Gaza has, or used to have, a beautiful seashore, and Gaza is the
most densely populated area in the world, populated with
Palestinian refugees, who fled back in 1948, from what is today
Israel. The seashore of Gaza is no longer in the hands of
Palestinians, and the Israelis have already built hotels for
Israelis there.

Whereas in South Africa, we can see some decrease in apartheid,
what we are seeing in Israel is only the beginning of an enormous
wave of racism, the seeds of which have long been there. I think
that as soon as Israel declared what we call the Law of Return to
be a fundamental principle of the state - stating that any Jew can
automatically become a citizen of Israel, whereas a Palestinian
who was born there can be deprived of citizenship -- from that
moment you had the seeds of racism. But today the seed is already
an enormous tree, perhaps a whole forest. Differential treatment
of Arabs is the name of the game. This is the message. A large
part of the wealth of Israel over the past 24-23 1/2 years - has
been achieved through exploitation of cheap Palestinian labour,
working there under slavery-like conditions.  Now that the new
wave of immigrants from the Soviet Union is coming, the
Palestinians are not necessary any more, and there are now new
restrictions on their working inside Israel. This means that they
are not allowed to come into Israel, even to work; unless they
have special permits, and you cannot receive a permit unless you
prove your total loyalty to the state, to the satisfaction of the
Security Services, of course. I am sure you know how powerful
security services can be -we represent enough countries here, that
know this very well. But in the occupied territories, you have no
alternative, if you want a normal life.

You don't have industry; not even any successful attempt by the
Palestinian population to develop any local industry. I can speak
about the women's organizations, which encourage small,
home-based, agricultural industries.  Their leaders are harassed
by the authorities, and any such industry that does develop is
destroyed. Everything, as I mentioned, needs permission, and of
course permission will be given only to those who prove their
loyalty, which, again, means no development. Denial of the right
to make a living is denial of the right to exist.

 I can point out enormous buildings that used to be hospitals, and
are now used by the Israeli army, as prisons or as military
centres. Every means possible is employed to make the lives of
Palestinians in the occupied territories impossible and to
encourage emigration. One of the means used, of course, is the
law. And I think that, if anyone wants a good lesson in the use of
the law as a tool of policy, he is welcome to visit us. Not only
do we still use the British colonial laws (Emergency Regulations)
of 1945, military commanders have formulated over 1,000 additional
military orders, dealing with every aspect of everyday life, from
what wild plants you are allowed to gather and what you are
allowed to plant whether you can plant tomatoes on your land or
not - to the colours of your car's license plate (i.e. Blue for
Palestinians in the West Bank and white in Gaza - in contrast to
yellow for Israelis including those living in the occupied
territories) through who will study in which university who will
be accepted for studies, etc. Some of these laws are quite widely
known for the above-mentioned reason - because of their total
contravention of international conventions/covenants.  According
to these laws Israel can collectively punish the family of any
Palestinian who commits a violent offense. According to these laws
it is, so they say, legal to come in the middle of the night to a
family, demand the immediate eviction of all the inhabitants of
the house and usually we are talking about big families, ...many
different branches of the same family - and to destroy the house,
thus violating the entire family's right to shelter.  The Israelis
admit that the family members have not committed any offense but
they should have known better than to have such a member in their
family.

I am sure all of you have heard about Palestinians who are
deported for political activities and perhaps also about those who
are held administratively in prisons without any need for charges
against them to be proven. You can arrest a person for an
unlimited number of 6-month periods and all you have to do is
provide a closed, secret dossier. The lawyers - I am a lawyer, I
work as a lawyer and have appeared in hundreds of such hearings -
are never allowed to see what is in that secret dossier, and I
usually, I can assure you, lose my cases.

Tens of thousands of Palestinians have passed through the
machinery of the military courts, which are all over the Occupied
Territories, and one is within Israel. Reading SOS-Torture's
bulletin, and reflecting that Israel still calls itself the only
democracy in the Middle East, I must tell you that Israel is the
only country I know of, of course in what vou call the "more
progressive" world - but I believe anywhere in the world - that
has legalised torture as such. A special government commission,
named the Landau Commission, after the Supreme Court Judge who
headed it, investigated the Security Service's practices, and came
to the conclusion that it is permissible to use, not only
psychological pressure - this goes without saying - but it is
allowed and legal to use "moderate physical pressure".  These are
the words, moderate physical pressure. Now, according to the
reports that I receive from my clients, this moderate physical
pressure is being used quite often - at least in every second
interrogation. Let me tell you, it is not moderate, but it is
always pressure.

I carefully read the leaflet that I received for this convention,
and I think the issue is important, essential for us. It came at a
time when I had only started to try and think what I could offer
to this assembly, what I could suggest.  What new ideas do I have?
I must tell you, I have hardly any. I must say that, on the way
here, I remembered what happened to us in Israel during the Gulf
War. It seems now - it was only at the beginning of the year, in
mid-January but it seems now that it happened on another planet in
another era. I can still picture myself running into the sealed
room with gas masks, frightened, frightened. I remember the
hysteria that we all felt around this war. And now it seems like
artificially created fear, and it seems like a dream. I know it
was artificial. But I'm afraid the explanation for this nightmare
is that the world is in the midst of a wave of cynicism.

If I look back, I have been fighting for human rights under quite
difficult conditions for 25 years, now. I have been a lawyer in
military courts, trying to fight against the occupation for twenty
years, and throughout this long period of time, I have had the
feeling that the good guys are going to win.  It's sure, that is
the lesson of history, right? If, during all those years, I knew
that this would happen today or tomorrow or the day after
tomorrow, that it is over there, and we can see it coming,
recently I don't feel like that.  I feel quite disillusioned, or
in some kind of shock. And the lesson of this last year is, that
it's not necessarily so that the good guys win. It is not
necessarily so that you get what you deserve: that you get
rewarded if you're good and you get punished if you're bad. It
doesn't work like that.  All of a sudden, I think that the only
strength that counts is money and physical strength. And I
thought, "What can we do besides reporting about torture,
reporting about cases, reporting about atrocities?" And then, this
small guy whispers in my ear, "Who cares?" And this question, "Who
cares?" keeps coming back to me. I try to push it away, I don't
want to look upon myself as having wasted my life. If having
morality on our side - and morality looks quite feeble, quite weak
these days - or justice, isn't effective, I think we should adopt
a more forceful approach. I don't mean the use of weapons or
throwing bombs, I mean being aggressive not begging not
complaining.

On the 9th of December in Washingon Israel will be dragged by its
ears to speak with the Palestinians. Forced to sit with them,
forced to sit with the Arab people. And I assure you that Israel
does not want this with any Arab country. The Israelis do not want
this with the Palestinians, they are very happy the way they are.
But if something comes out these talks in Washington, it will be
because of the economic force which was activated against Israel.

The boycott of South Africa which was effective and the fact that
the United States said, "I am not going to bail Israel out," are
examples of effective economic force. This is the kind of force we
should employ. And at the same time there are people in Israel
sitting in prison for talking to the PLO - I thought I should say
this and remind you and we should remember it - at the same time
Israel is dealing with the PLO face to face in some kind of peace
talks. It is true it is being done in the American "kitchen". It
is true it is being done under the American "apron", dictated by
"big mama", but I think we should all hope it will work somehow.

If I were religious, and I am not, perhaps praying would help
because I feel very weak. So let's hope that these talks for peace
in the Middle East will work not as a consequence of historical
justice not as a result of the victory of morality but perhaps
because of the vision that there could be a United States of the
Middle East, or a Common Market of the Middle East. I hope this is
tempting enough, and let's hope.

Thank you.