Palestinian human rights activism under Israeli occupation: the case of al-Haq.

AuthorRabbani, Mouin
  1. Letter from Yitzhak Rabin to Jimmy Carter dated 27 October 1989. Cited in Al-Haq, A Nation Under Siege, pp. 628-629. Mr. Rabin's statement gained international exposure in a New York Times column by Anthony Lewis, "Self-Inflicted Wound," New York Times, 18 November 1989.

  2. See Al-Haq, Punishing a Nation, pp. 204-205; Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, An Examination of the Detention of Human Rights Workers; and various other letters to this effect retained in the files of al-Haq.

  3. Given the relative ease with which an Israeli court could convict al-Haq staff in the absence of incriminating evidence, it may appear irrational from MUCH HAS BEEN WRITTEN ABOUT THE SYSTEMATIC VIOLATION of Palestinian human rights by the Israeli military during the popular uprising (al-Intifada al-Sha'biyya) in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.(1) At the same time, there has been no examination of how Palestinian human rights organizations in the Occupied Territories have faced the dual challenge of increased repression and growing international concern since the uprising began in December 1987.(2) In order to shed some light on their activities, this paper examines the experiences of al-Haq, the West Bank affiliate of the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ).(3)

    In order to put Palestinian human rights advocacy during the uprising in proper perspective, it is first necessary to examine the development of al-Haq in the larger context of twenty-three years of Israeli military occupation. Accordingly, this paper examines the formative issues encountered by al-Haq by virtue of its existence under prolonged military occupation before dealing specifically with its experiences during the uprising.

    A PROFILE OF AL-HAQ

    Located in the West Bank city of Ramallah to the north of Jerusalem, al-Haq was established in 1979 by a group of Palestinian lawyers as the West Bank affiliate of the Geneva-based International Commission of Jurists. Reflecting this institutional affiliation, it has throughout its existence been exclusively concerned with the promotion of the rule of law and the protection of human rights.

    As the first organization of its kind in the Occupied Territories, al-Haq from the outset has been at least as involved with understanding its environment as it has been with attempting to change it. In this respect, the increasingly incomprehensible nature of the judicial system in the Occupied Territories during the 1970s was equal to its arbitrary implementation, thereby creating the need for such an organization. In an accurate reflection of these concerns, legal research, as opposed to human rights monitoring and intervention as narrowly understood, assumed pride of place during al-Haq's formative period, and to this day the organization defines itself as both a legal research and human rights organization.

    Structurally, al-Haq's staff is divided into a fieldwork unit, whose members are geographically dispersed throughout the Occupied Territories to collect primary documentation about human rights abuses; a database unit, which systematizes the data collected by the fieldwork unit; a research unit, which conducts both legal and human rights research and has primary responsibility for the production of al-Haq's interventions; a library unit, which operates the only public law library in the Occupied Territories; and support staff. In addition, al-Haq maintains a field representative in London. Ongoing communications between staff, as well as between staff and administration is maintained through a weekly general meeting, during which the organization's agenda, formulated in its broad outlines by a strategic planning committee, is further defined. Given the highly interdependent nature of their work, the fieldwork and research units maintain additional links through regular meetings, the office of the fieldwork coordinator (who is resident at al-Haq), and a fieldwork liaison from within the research unit. Administratively speaking, al-Haq has gone through several phases during which an increasingly developed decision-making structure has emerged to cope with the expansion of both staff and work. Traditionally, however, its governing body has sought to play an active role in the organization's day-to-day management rather than relegate executive powers. Al-Haq is funded almost exclusively by Western foundation grants, with additional donations coming from its associate membership and other individuals. It does not accept donations from states, government agencies, or political parties. While al-Haq has actively cultivated and sought to expand its associate membership, members have not been actively involved in pursuing the organization's agenda by, for example, being asked to complement its interventions with their own.

    Al-Haq's human rights agenda, methods of documentation and intervention, and also its practical ambitions regarding the enforcement of the rule of law and human rights standards have been flexible over the years, tending to reflect changes in the operating environment itself as well as the changing international appraisal of the Israeli occupation. Turning firstly to the formative impact of the occupation upon al-Haq's agenda and activities, it becomes clear that the organization's response to the uprising could not have been nearly as sophisticated without the experience it had gained since 1979. At the same time, a number of issues essential to its mandate which had remained unresolved throughout this first period continued to hamper its work in the period after December 1987.

    GROWING UP UNDER OCCUPATION

    Al-Haq at its very inception in the late 1970s faced a series of challenges which would have sorely tested the capabilities of even the most experienced human rights organization. It was a Palestinian institution under Israeli occupation. The occupation, despite its everyday brutality and lawless rule, enjoyed an international reputation for being benign and scrupulous in its respect for the rule of law, while Palestinians were generally held to be incapable of dispassionate investigation of anything concerning Israel. Furthermore, the realities of politics, in which the Palestine question stood at the nexus of the Arab-Israeli conflict, as well as those between East and West, North and South, and Europe and its past, meant that the prospects for reasoned discussion of human fights in the Occupied Territories were slim at best. Additionally, the international human fights community did not appear to be actively interested in Israel's human rights practices. This reflected not only what can be described as a pro-Israeli political bias,(4) but also its assessment that Israel was not a serious offender in the context of the larger Middle East region.

    From the outset, al-Haq's response to this predicament was to deny the relevance of politics to human rights and to refer exclusively to the universal standard of international law in its appraisal of Israeli conduct. Where previous Palestinian efforts confronted the prevailing mood head-on by explicitly mobilizing Israel's human rights record in support of Palestinian political objectives, al-Haq sought to isolate the human rights debate from its political context altogether. In doing so, it became the first Palestinian institution concerned with understanding the judicial system and the status of human rights in the Occupied Territories as an end in itself, ensured that its credibility would rest upon factors amenable to at least a degree of scientific verification, and forced the international human rights community to take it seriously by removing the pretext that its findings were suspect on account of political motives.

    At the same time, the attempt to de-politicize the human rights debate also bore its costs. If only subconsciously, it translated into an emphasis on micro-violations to the detriment of the bigger picture and a reluctance to actively engage the points of intersection between human and national rights. In the clearest example, that of the right to national self-determination, al-Haq has always upheld it as a fundamental right yet never systematically examined it in the manner of, for example, administrative detention without charge or trial or prison conditions.(5) The same could be said for the right of repatriation, although an added complication here has been that al-Haq's mandate is limited to the Occupied Territories and does not extend to Palestinian communities in exile.(6)

    Al-Haq's next obstacle was, perhaps predictably, the paucity of information on the judicial system in the Occupied Territories. In the context of the occupation, this was no small matter, as one could not simply go to a library and locate a compendium of applicable laws. This did not, and does not, exist. The problems involved were manifold. To begin with, seven separate and in many ways contradictory bodies of legislation were involved: Ottoman law (various statutes of the 1858 Land Code); British Mandatory law (primarily the Defence [Emergency] Regulations of 1945); the Jordanian Civil Code (only in the West Bank); Gaza Strip law (the corpus of laws passed by the Egyptian administration in Gaza between 1948 and 1967); Israeli military law (by 1979 amounting to hundreds of military orders different versions of which were passed in the West Bank and Gaza Strip); international humanitarian law (the laws of war and belligerent occupation); and international human rights law. Secondly, the major inconsistencies between the judicial regimes in the West Bank and Gaza Snip led al-Haq to confine its limited resources to the West Bank until 1989. This resolved little, however, as each judicial system was itself fraught with immense difficulties and is perhaps best characterized as the law of rules masquerading as the rule of law. Plainly inapplicable and/or illegal laws, such as the 1945 Defence (Emergency) Regulations, were systematically applied; the validity of...

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