A VIEW FROM WITHIN: PROBLEMS CONFRONTING HUMAN RIGHTS ORGANIZATIONS IN ISRAEL AND THE OCCUPIED TERRITORIES.

WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE A HUMAN RIGHTS activist in Israel and the occupied territories? In both areas, one is contending with a context very different from the one that gave rise to the state of Israel. While I was growing up in Jerusalem, a newspaper passed from hand to hand in the rooms my family shared with two other families. Every morning I read the same slogan underneath the title of the newspaper: "For Zionism, For Socialism, For Fraternity of Nations." I honestly think that for Jews then living in Palestine and later in the new state of Israel, the principles of social justice, equality, and legality were tremendously important. We were socialists. And while even then the needed sense of fraternity towards Palestinians was missing, Jews shared a set of assumptions about what was important. Even my parents were considered relatively normal in their conviction that nobody should own land and that people should share what little they had with those who had less. In that way, equality mixed with solidarity in my childish understanding of social justice.

Years later, as an adult, I could see that those wonderful social values, this sense of fairness, existed mainly for one segment of the Israeli Jewish population. Moreover, "socialism" was being overcome by capitalist-oriented policies, "Fraternity of Nations" was being replaced by xenophobic Zionism, and "Zionism" itself, which was a kind of secular national liberation movement, was largely turning into a Messianic religion.

These historic shifts in socioeconomic structure and ideology gave rise to three distinctive gaps:

1) The social justice gap, between the haves and the have-nots.

2) The legal gap between Israelis and Palestinians under the law.

3) The psychological gap, between the Israeli ideal self-image and reality.

These gaps have defined the context for the activities of Physicians for Human Rights (PHR). The first two gaps, leading to discrimination and violations of human rights, are the problems that triggered the establishment of PHR in the first place. Only later did we discover that what sustains them is the third disparity, the gap between the way Israelis see themselves and the reality of how they behave.

The theme that will run throughout my discussion is respect: the multiple consequences of lack of respect and the relevance of respect to human rights activism.

THE SOCIAL JUSTICE GAP

In the first years of the state, the gap between the haves and the have-nots (among Jews) was minimal. Statistical records collected after 1957 show that for nearly twenty years there was little change in the income gap between the richest and poorest Israelis. Now wealthy Israelis earn 48 times the amount earned by the poorest Israelis (A. Kaspi, Ha'aretz, 2 October 1998).

The ever-growing economic inequality has contributed a lot to the unhinging of solidarity and social justice among Israeli Jews. What had been a cohesive society founded on social justice values became a society whose social fabric is best characterized by illegality and violence.

Palestinian workers who were "illegal" according to the Israeli definition were, since 1967, the backbone of agriculture, construction, and low paid service work in places like restaurants, hotels and municipal garbage collection. In the past 6-7 years, as an Israeli reaction to the Intifada, foreign workers from Africa, Thailand, the Philippines, and Eastern Europe have replaced most of the Palestinian workers. These foreign workers, like the Palestinians before them, are exploited; they do not receive social security or social benefits and are cruelly treated by their Israeli employers. This exploitation compounded by the regular violation of their civil and human rights has become an accepted part of the Israeli social and psychological environment.

An Israeli story illustrates this reality. A grandfather points out a building to his grandson and says, "Years ago I was one of the workers who built this place." His grandson responds, "Grandpa, I can't believe it, I didn't know you were an Arab when you were young." The grandfather in this story could have been my father. The adults I knew believed in work. The ideology of Zionism called for the establishment of a Jewish labor force. Work -- manual labor and agricultural work -- was seen as sacred. Indeed, the notion of labor was so crucial to the Zionist agenda that the first Zionists talked about the "religion of labor." But in the last three decades respect for labor and workers has disappeared.

Respect for the law has disappeared as well. In many ways the law has become a dead letter in Israel. This development has extreme consequences. People frequently take the law into their own hands which translates into violence. Violence has become a defining characteristic of Israeli society. The targets of this violence are the weak: Palestinians, foreign workers, women, children, the elderly, and the poor.

The widespread violation of human rights towards Palestinians in the occupied territories and the illegality and violence that have become a given for Israelis within Israel proper are inter-related. In committing these violations, Israel is breaking numerous international laws, including international declarations of human rights to which Israel is a signatory. These human, civil, and economic rights violations include the illegal confiscation of Palestinian land and water, the execution of "wanted" Palestinians, the torture of as many as 20,000 Palestinians over the past ten years, and the detention of people without trial for extended periods of time. Israel has also engaged in collective punishment of Palestinian civilians in some of the following ways: cutting off electricity or water supplies, denying sick and wounded Palestinians access to medical facilities, and preventing travel of medical workers to hospitals and clinics. Punitive demolition of Palestinian homes and the deportations of Palestinians from the Occupied Territories to Lebanon and elsewhere.

When Israelis talk with pride about 'our democratic state', they do not consider the Palestinians within Israel, (i.e., Palestinians living inside Israel since the 1948 war) who constitute approximately 20% of the Israeli population. Over one hundred thousand hectares of Israeli Palestinian land have been confiscated and given to Jewish citizens since 1948. Israeli Palestinians are not allowed to serve in the army, and thus, they are deprived of the privileges associated with military service such as housing and career opportunities. They receive approximately one-fourth of what Jews receive from the state in terms of education, culture, sports, health, and municipal services like sewage, roads and more.

The lack of a democratic egalitarian attitude toward Israeli-Palestinians has not followed other predictable traditional left-right distinctions. Every Israeli government has practiced discrimination against Israeli-Palestinians. I believe it serves all governments as a means for creating the emotional basis for what is called 'separation' between the two populations, thereby avoiding feeling discomfort with the 'separation'.

Let me provide a recent illustration: On 2 October 1998, there were two demonstrations -- one by Israeli-Palestinians against confiscation of their lands in Urn al-Fahem and one by Jews on the northern border against a new rule that would deny their income tax privilege.

The Palestinians and the Jews demonstrated in similar ways. While nothing happened to the Jewish demonstrators, the Israeli-Palestinians from Um al-Fahem were beaten, arrested and fired on by the police. Approximately 500 people, including school children, were wounded. This disparity in treatment mocks any idea of democracy, but there is no real outcry by Israeli Jews against this discrimination.

THE LEGAL DOUBLE-STANDARD FOR ISRAELIS AND FOR PALESTINIANS

This point leads me to the second major gap -- the operation of one legal standard for Israeli Jews and a different one for Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. When a Jewish settler murders a Palestinian, he usually receives a mild punishment, if any. However, a Palestinian who commits even a minor crime usually serves many years in prison. He will certainly serve a life sentence for murdering an Israeli Jew. Although capital punishment is illegal in Israel, "wanted" Palestinians, who are suspected of anti-Israeli actions, are often summarily executed by special Israeli military units.

A few statistics should be mentioned to illustrate this point: In the last 10 years, Jewish settlers killed 135 Palestinians, 23 of them children under 17. Nonetheless, only 4 Israelis who were convicted of murder received life sentences were subsequently reduced to 10 to 16 years of imprisonment. Thirty-eight cases were closed with no measures taken and in other cases the charges were dropped. (Those numbers do not include the 1350 to 1400 Palestinians that were killed by the army during the Intifada.)

During the same period, Palestinians killed 90 Israeli citizens in the Occupied Territories, among them four under the age of seventeen. Israel's response was very different. Ten Palestinians were "eliminated" by security forces as "wanted men." Twenty-three received life sentences, and only one file was closed with no measures taken (Bet'selem).

Let me give you the details of a recent murder case. It occurred on 16 June 1998. Two youths, settlers from a West Bank Israeli boarding school, Beit Hagai, murdered a Palestinian passerby, striking him with a large wooden stick as they rode past in a car. Many politicians, including the Prime Minister, loudly condemned the crime promising to "punish the killers with the full severity of the law." Mussa Abu Turk, one of the victim's 12 children said at that time: "I don't trust your courts. Like so many previous cases, you will say that the murderer is insane. You will release him immediately or after a short while -- a year or year and a half." (Ha'aretz, 20 November 1998)

In November 1998, the judge, Zvi Cohen, sentenced the killer to two years in jail. He found the second youth guilty of negligence but declared him incapable of understanding his actions. The driver of the vehicle who did not stop to transport the murder victim to the hospital was acquitted. So Mussa Abu Turk quite accurately predicted what would happen in the Israeli court.

The question that I, as a human rights activist, must confront is what one should do when the law has come to represent lawlessness. When the judicial system operates according to a double standard, what are we to do? Within this context, how do we understand human rights work?

I believe that within the Israeli context, human rights work must go beyond acts of protest and documentation, however effective they are, to assert some alternative sense of morality, to advance social values based on equality, dignity and respect for the other.

During the eleven years since our founding, Physicians for Human Rights has attempted to face both challenges. We as doctors are guided by the conviction that human dignity and the integrity of body and mind are basic human rights, without reference to class, gender, race, nationality, sexual orientation or religion. We begin with the belief that without deeply rooted convictions, activism means very little; and that without concrete actions, convictions, no matter how noble, are lacking. Our convictions support us in tough moments when we feel quite alone in our own society, particularly because our activity takes place in our own backyard, not in another part of the world.

A plethora of questions consistently plagued us. What is the role of a human rights organization in a society that respects neither laws nor human rights? Should we respect the law? Should we break the law? This question is a critical one, due to the fact that without law, society can not function. However, I believe that obedience to the law should not be automatic, but should rather be contingent upon whether the law is just and equitable. When the legal system does not respect human rights, how can we, in turn, obey the law?

In a complex situation, the organization's actions must also be complex: we break the law consciously on numerous occasions. Yet, we diligently try to respect the law.

For example, when the state outlawed talking to PLO members, punishable by three years in prison, we broke the law. We talked with Palestinians all the time, both in clandestine and overt ways. We talked to them lawfully in conferences and UN conventions (Geneva, New York, Vienna, Strasbourg, and Moscow), and unlawfully in the Occupied Territories. Talking to Palestinians, not talking about Palestinians, was PHR's way of embodying our respect for them.

We broke the law on a weekly basis, when we circumvented the army's roadblocks in the roads of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. For example, in 1991 during the Gulf War, we distributed baby food and medications donated by the American-Israeli Civil Liberties Coalition in West Bank refugee camps and in the Nablus Kasbah. I remember hiding behind a green curtain in a supply area next to the operating room in al-Ittihad Hospital in Nablus while soldiers searched for me. I could hear them just a few feet away from me, on the other side of the curtain, almost as if we were playing a game of hide-and-seek. There was fear, but there was also a kind of childish joy in breaking the law then, no pangs of conscience. In the end, I was not found and nothing happened to the Palestinians who helped hide me. We successfully distributed the baby food to the needy families.

On other occasions we decided not to break the law. For instance, I did not break the more serious law of "treason" by taking money from the PLO. The first time the Palestinians offered financial assistance to the PHR, I immediately responded, "No, thank you." Money, as you know, is an emotionally loaded issue. Despite my enormous phone bills and the stamps I had to buy, it never occurred to me that I could ease the burden by accepting this money. My refusal was an effort to protect the purity of our motivations, to say that our intentions were not in any way for sale. It was also a question of loyalty to -- to what? Perhaps loyalty to the "virtuous" state of Israel, the state that ideally should exist.

In the first instance we defied the law; in the second we obeyed it. But our main goal was to challenge the law to make the law do what it was supposed to do -- to protect everyone equally. During the Gulf War, for example, when Israel faced the threat of chemical missiles from Iraq we appealed to the Supreme Court challenging the state decision to deny Palestinians from the occupied territories gas masks while at the same time distributing them to every Israeli.

So while sometimes we broke the law, we also appealed to it, even when that meant appealing for the protection of Palestinians' rights to the very body, the Israeli Supreme Court, that was condoning torture, deportations, and house demolitions. The alternative choice would have been to boycott the judicial system entirely. We would not and could not have made that choice. Choosing a boycott option would have meant that we had lost hope that Israel might be a state with respect for human rights and equality.

Often, our ability to effect change via legal challenges was undercut by clever government moves. Time and again, a day before we were to submit an appeal to the Supreme Court, the security forces or the government would offer a concession of some sort concerning the specific case on which we were basing our more general claim. In this manner they prevented the court from considering overarching questions concerning torture, the free movement of medical personnel, and the like. In this way the state limited our work to "the immediate" case; we managed to stop the torture of certain Palestinians or allow the movement of doctors during a specific curfew, but the "structure" which allowed torture and the restriction of movement remained intact.

We realized that a human rights organization must deal with a painful dilemma: how to tend to both long-term systemic structural changes and to the immediate existential dangers faced by individuals and communities within that system. If we focus solely on achieving structural change, we run the risk of neglecting individuals and communities in dire circumstances. However, the danger of working only on the individual level involves the risk of becoming so consumed with individual problem solving that structural issues are never broached and the struggle is in a sense depoliticized. There are dangers on both sides of this dilemma. We must do both -- but this is easier said than done. We were never content with our activity, no matter how hard we worked, because frequently we could not attend to someone's suffering or to some important issue. The nature of our work is one of constantly recognizing the missing elements. At the end of the day, my colleagues in PHR and myself could never feel like our work was do ne.

For example: Dr. Zacaria El-A'ra was administratively detained in Israel during the first year of the Intifada. (Administrative detention means detention without trial.) As we decided to try to get him released we could not help thinking about the thousands of Palestinians in the same condition. What about the basic human right not to be detained without a judicial process? And what about the violation of international law forbidding the imprisonment of a person from occupied territories inside Israel? Should we put our focus on attempts to change the 'structure' that enables the practice of administrative detention or shall we take care of Zacaria? We decided to try to do both: To demonstrate in front of the Ministry of Defense against administrative detention (as a structure) and the detention of Zacaria as an immediate problem. Our achievement was that Zacaria was transferred from the prison inside Israel, Kezi'ot jail, to a prison in Gaza which was a substantial relief for him and for his family, and then he was released after four months. His detention was not renewed, contrary to the usual routine. So, our efforts did some good on the 'immediate' plane, but practically nothing on the 'structural' one.

We never again demonstrated in this manner, despite the echo it made in Israel. The effort invested was too much for us -- for me, as a matter of fact. In order to get twenty doctors to demonstrate on a weekday -- I had to spend ten hours on the phone, which meant three evenings, after my day's work. We did not have any paid staff or an office at that time.

Even when the Supreme Court did hear our appeals and decided in our favor, its rulings were not always respected by the army and the Ministry of Defense. For example, in 1991, we appealed to the Supreme Court in order to obtain freedom of movement for medical teams and patients in times of curfew in the Occupied Territories. In such times neither patients nor medical staff could reach East Jerusalem, the site of most of the medical centers that serve the West Bank and Gaza Strip. When the army closes the checkpoints, they prevent passage of Palestinian pregnant women, sick children, and wounded individuals on the one hand, and they prevent the movement of Palestinian doctors, paramedics, and medical teams on the other. The end result is that people die on the way to the hospital, at the checkpoints, or at home. In this case, the Supreme Court ruled in our favor, but the army did not respect the ruling. Therefore, we had to return to the Supreme Court to plead the same appeal. For seven years, we fought the s ame case, and judicially speaking, we won. In reality, we continue to lose. Today, people are still dying at the checkpoints.

THE GAP BETWEEN THE ISRAELI SELF-IMAGE AND THE REAL SELF

The disparity stems from the gap between how Israelis think of themselves and what their actions show them to be as a people.

The Israeli-Zionist worldview assumes that as a collective and as individuals, we (the Jewish people) are always victims, always moral, always humane, and must always be united. They reinforce the idea of themselves as good by thinking of the Palestinians as bad. Israelis perceive Palestinians as inhuman aggressors, unscrupulous and treacherous and lacking the same authenticity as a people.

The existential nature of this gap finds expression in the poet T.S. Eliot's statement that, "Human kind cannot bear very much reality." The circumstances of occupation and the devastating violations of Palestinian human rights have been too much to bear for many people in Israel--so much so that they employ various means to avoid both perceiving and acknowledging this reality. Very many people choose to deny the reality of the Israeli oppression of Palestinians; others fall into despair or apathy in the face of what they acknowledge to be true. Either choice prevents examination and analysis of our political reality, and neither offers much room for effective change.

In 1993, PHR held an international conference in Tel-Aviv: "The Struggle Against Torture and the Case of Israel." The vast majority of the Israeli- Zionists at the time were unwilling to believe that torture could possibly exist in Israel. It was so much against what 'we' wanted to know about ourselves. At such a moment, when people are confronted with a denied fact they cannot continue denying, they attempt to accommodate it within their worldview by arranging a comfortable place for it within the old framework. For example, cases of torture were labeled as 'exceptional' in order to avoid acknowledging of the widespread and systematic practice of torture. Or torture was spoken of in euphemisms such as "moderate physical pressure." The Israeli government actually uses this term; if they do not call it torture, it is no longer torture. Or, as a last resort, torture may be defended as an absolutely necessary means of maintaining state security. In this way, the ideal self-image remains intact. People can keep thinking of themselves as humane and pure, and continue to see themselves as potential victims.

PHR has encountered tremendous resistance to critical thinking on the part of the Israeli public. For this reason, in the long run, this third gap may prove to be the most detrimental to the health of Israel. PHR worked to eliminate denial in the Israeli public, to develop the capacity of self-reflection, and to think critically. To this end, we must constantly confront those who want to kill the messenger.

While critical thinking and self-criticism are crucial to close this gap, we think that at the heart of the matter, at its very core, is the whole issue of respect for other people.

How do I understand the word respect, which has no legal or political currency? I think that respect is the emotional aspect of equality, serving and shaping the relations between equals. Respect allows meaningful and honest engagement between people and peoples full acknowledgement and acceptance of the other.

In psychological language, respect involves maturity. Infants, in the very beginning of their mental development, do not recognize the other as a whole human entity. It is as if they don't "see" the other person. In the second stage of development, babies see only halves or dichotomies -- a totally good person or a totally bad one that they can see. In the final, mature stage they can see a mixture of good and bad, dark and bright sides of one individual. One could add to the above; that to arrive at this stage of full maturity, the individual must first come to acknowledge the mixed nature of his or her own personality.

There is very little respect for Palestinians in Israel today. The Prime Minister does not respect them; neither does the soldier on the roadblock. The Israeli media, as the most powerful tool in creating public opinion, reflects this disrespect, and in doing so, sustains it. The lack of respect manifests itself in different ways. I am not going to discuss the overt manifestations in everyday life -- at the roadblocks or in governmental offices. Rather, I would like to discuss the more subtle aspect of disrespect, to show how deeply rooted it is. Look, if you will, at what happens when well-intentioned Israeli Jews decide to invest their time and energy in creating a dialogue with Palestinians. At first, these Israelis are usually enthusiastic; they actively listen and try to understand what is being said on both an intellectual and an emotional level. Then, at a certain point in the dialogue, they reach a juncture, a crucial moment. The dialogue might touch a hidden, well covered, shameful corner. In that m oment, an inner voice tells the Israeli Jew, "If I were Palestinian, I would do something about it. I would fight for my honor, my property, my land, my life, my culture, and my freedom." This moment of empathy, evoked by one Palestinian or the another, will suddenly, without calculation, reveal itself with words like "If I were you, I would join the PLO," as then Chief of Staff, and now Prime Minister, Ehud Barak once said. Those words, spoken out of empathy, may lead in one of several directions. The Israeli Jew, feeling empathy with the Palestinian's terrible situation, might take it as a threat to his/her own existence. The inner voice will then say: "If I would fight for these things, so would he. And if he did so, I would lose a lot that I don't want to lose." The fact that, to a large extent, what belongs to the Israeli Jew once belonged to the Palestinian, only makes him/her feel worse. In this context, the dialogue runs aground and fades out without accomplishing real change.

Respect is not cheap. If there is no willingness to share power, authority and resources, there is no true respect, and therefore, no true dialogue. Instead, there is only a conversation between occupier and occupied, between have and have-not, between radically unequal power systems, in which one system fights to preserve the power structure, while the other system fights to change it. Israel's unwillingness to share power ultimately makes Barak's words of genuine empathy meaningless. In fact, under pressure from politicians who understood his words to legitimize the struggles of the Palestinian, he issued a public statement of apology.

I would like to say again that dialogue and the empathy evoked by it can move in a variety of directions. Dialogue can open new ways of understanding and relating to each other. Out of my experience I can tell that a dialogue that follows mutual activity might be fruitful and long lasting. This is the story of PHR.

We have paid strict attention to our language, because we want to avoid any possibility of patronizing the Palestinians with whom we work. After all, we as Israelis have freedom, power, resources and force; Palestinians in the Occupied Territories have little. If we forget to be self aware for even a little while patronizing words find their way into the text and into people's minds, and we can say things that diminish others and ourselves.

For example, I remember a trip to the West Bank with our Israeli-Palestinian field worker, when on the way we encountered a roadblock. The line of cars at the roadblock extended for at least two miles, bumper to bumper. It was hot -- so hot. There was no air-conditioning in the cars. People were boiling. The young field worker, frustrated, pulled the car out of the line, and sped along the outside of the queue. In doing so, he referred to the Palestinians in the queue as "soles of shoes," one of the most degrading ways in which to refer to a group, especially one's own group. Then he smiled at me broadly and with something like complicity. I did not know what to do.

When I went home that night, I realized that we at PHR were in trouble. In the staff meeting that same week, I talked generally about our feelings about those who are dependent upon us. People began to evaluate their responses, and we gradually came to the insight that no matter how devoted we are, we may develop resentment and contempt for the people who are receiving our help. They may be patients, Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, family members or friends. I brought to the meeting a quote from an Aboriginal Australian woman: "If you have come to help me - go home. However, if you have come because your liberation is tied with my own, then let's work together."

It is important to understand that none of us at PHR had any standardized theory from which to work, any prescription, any rulebook to follow. What we did was to take the intuitive, in reaction to the reality we observed. We worked so hard at the time that we did not reflect much on the group itself. Only now, more than a year after I resigned as chairwoman, can I see the forest, where before I could only see trees.

As I think about the past in order to write my recollections I see that respect for the Other is the best inner compass a human rights activist can have. Having it, one will not fall into the trap of patronizing, despising, degrading or humiliating while 'doing good'. Respect monitors the dignity of both sides.

PHR's respect for the Palestinians threatens the Israeli-Zionist "fiction" that everybody wants to partake of Jewish-Israeli morality, purity, and righteousness. On this issue in particular we have decided to remain outside the partisan system, outside the Israeli consensus - in the words of Hannah Arendt, we have decided to be pariahs.

If respect is to be the guiding principle for Israelis and Palestinians, the political end result will he genuine power sharing - in other words, a relation between two peoples based on equality and social solidarity. A visionary might even recommend one state for two people based on those principles. The fact that neither the Israeli nor the Palestinian community is mature enough to engage in this vision is no reason to give up the struggle for mutual respect.

Ruchama Marton, a medical doctor, is the founder and former chairwoman of the Israeli-Palestinian Physicians for Human Rights. In 1998-9, she held the Jeanne and Joseph Sullivan Women's Middle East Peace Fellowship at Radcliffe College. She is currently a fellow at the University of Chicago, Human Rights Program.