A poverty of respect: human rights, honor, dignity and respect in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

• Author: Hunt, Cecil J., II

1. INTRODUCTION

   I am honored to be among the distinguished company gathered at this conference sponsored by the Albany Law Review and the Albany Law School to discuss the work and scholarship of Professor Alan Dershowitz, the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Professor Dershowitz's distinguished career as a trailblazing and courageous Law Professor, appellate advocate, and public intellectual qualifies him to be one of the most illustrative members of what Jeffrey Friedman characterizes as the "group of creative ideological synthesizers who generate the ideas" (1) that stimulate others to think more deeply about contentious social and political issues. Friedman calls these creative synthesizers "ideologists" and sharply distinguishes them from "ideologues" by noting that "ideologues are the ones with predictably constrained political 'attitudes.' The ideologists are the ones who have established that these attitudes flow from 'premises about the nature of social justice, social change, "natural law," and the like."' (2) For example, as Professor Dershowitz has written himself, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict "is no longer so much between the Israelis and the Palestinians as it is between those moderate pragmatists who favor peace and those extremist ideologues who favor a continuation of the conflict, with its resulting bloodshed." (3)

   Throughout his career, Professor Dershowitz has been one of the most passionate supporters and ardent defenders of the embattled state of Israel in what has been variously referred to as the Israeli Palestinian conflict. (4) He has long been a strident voice arguing that "defending Israel against a double standard is a human rights issue of the greatest significance." (5) This is why Professor Dershowitz has always encouraged "reasoned, nuanced, constructive, and comparative discussion--including criticism--of Israeli policies and actions." (6)

   Since the creation of Israel in 1948, the entire region has been engulfed in a cycle of violence and turmoil that has appeared to be a "seemingly intractable dispute." (7) The political tensions in this area of the world have given birth to one of the most agonizing, but not hopeless, (8) political and human rights struggles on the planet. As both a practical and pragmatic matter, the prospects for peace and reconciliation between Israel and her Arab neighbors seem as remote today as they did at the beginning of the conflict. In light of this political reality, I do not pretend to have any magic answers that could miraculously resolve the conflict and achieve peace in the Middle East in a single stroke.

   However, this elusive peace is made all the more unattainable by varying degrees of political and financial corruption on both sides of the conflict. For many of the principal players in this production, the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is a wellspring of considerable political power and economic wealth. For these constituencies, by any metric, peace would be enormously bad for business. But for those true believers on the Israeli side that hold fast to the attainability of a meaningful and sustainable peace, their rhetoric of peace would be well served by a leavening dose of a measurable grammar of respect, honor, and dignity.

   This perspective is vitally important because in this conflict, "respect is the number-one target ... and the first casualty." (9) This riddling of respect is readily evidenced in the Israeli political rhetoric demeaning Palestinian humanity. For example, in a tone distressingly representative of the political mainstream of Israeli views of Palestinian humanity, there has been "a long [political] tradition of Israeli leaders implying that Palestinians are devoid of values, or not exactly human." (10)

   In this tradition, in his public pronouncements, Manachem Begin often referred to Palestinians as '"beasts walking on two legs."' (11) Raful Eitan, who served as Begin's chief of staff similarly described Palestinians as '"drugged cockroaches in a bottle." (12) Former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir characterized Palestinians as "a plague of locusts" who should be '"crushed like grasshoppers ... heads smashed against the boulders." (13) Prime Minister Ehud Barak referred to Palestinians as '"crocodiles--the more you feed them, the more they want."' (14) In fact, many Israelis have expressed the view that, to the Palestinians, '"human life means nothing"' and that "[i]f the Palestinians were not less than human," they were, "at least, less human than Jews." (15)

   The political facts on the ground in this conflict over the central contentious issues of "borders, settlements, refugees, and Jerusalem" (16) are like tectonic plates that are not likely to shift forward in any measurable way anytime soon. However, like Bernard Wasserstein has correctly observed, my "optimism is founded neither on an unduly rose-coloured view of the harsh facts of Middle Eastern politics nor on innocent faith in the likelihood of a sudden outbreak of sweet reasonableness." (17) Instead, my purpose is to bring "into the foreground some relatively neglected aspects of Israeli-Palestinian relations," (18) not in terms of the substantive historical and political debate itself, but rather the context in which it is framed and conducted.

   Toward this end, I want to suggest a new and potentially helpful perspective on the conflict that consists of looking more closely at the human rights implications of the cultural, social, and political values of dignity, honor, and respect on both sides of the ideological divide. Such an analysis may offer an enhanced perspective on the central importance of, and the subtle differences between, the cultural and political interplay of these values, not only to Israelis, but also to the Arab culture generally and the Palestinian culture specifically. This enhancement may also yield a more nuanced appreciation of the role that respect plays as a necessary prerequisite to a recognition of human rights, dignity, and honor in each of these cultures. A great deal can be learned about the consciousness and motivations of Palestinians to engage in violent political resistance and acts of terrorism through the lens of the relative cultural and political values of human rights, dignity, and respect from the perspective of the Palestinians as a traditional and still meaningful honor culture.

   Perhaps viewing the Palestinian-Israeli conflict from the perspective of their respective cultural values regarding honor, dignity, and respect could be accurately characterized as excessively nai've and simplistic. However, even if that is true, and I don't believe it is, that should not be a barrier to its serious consideration because the same could be said about the prospects of the creation of a non-secular Jewish state just a little over fifty years ago. And that, too, was more achievable than it first appeared.

   As Professor Dershowitz has accurately perceived, a lasting peace in the Arab-Israeli conflict can only come about by the "intervention ... [and] participation of many people, with different ... worldviews." (19) Generally speaking, when the preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights declares that its signatories mean to "reaffirm[] their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women," (20) the term "dignity" is properly understood to be a property interest. It is a right between people with respect to an intangible thing. It consists of an expectation of recognition and respect by others, and protection by the sovereignty of individual conscious and the various recognized central, collective, and coercive political authorities of both domestic and international communities.

   Analytically, the concept of human dignity is particularly slippery and elusive, and frustratingly resists a comprehensive or precise definition. In trying to define this term, Orit Kamir observed that "[l]ike honor in honor cultures, dignity relates to the core of a person's worth as a human being. It is viewed as an axiomatic human quality." (21) Mindful of this definitional difficulty and limitation, perhaps in a fashion similar to the concept of justice, dignity is best understood in relief against its binary opposite--honor. Socrates famously once observed that honor, which he characterized as "thymos," was a quality that all humans desired to attain in the esteem of others. (22) As Socrates described it, the quality of honor is a natural object of the human soul and the source of a sense of meaning in life. (23) Michael Lerner expressed a similar sentiment when he described an aspect of "real oppression" to be a "deprivation of meaning ... [which] leads people to despair, to violence, and to living lives of pain every bit as experientially real as pain generated by poverty." (24) Thus, honor consists of the opinions of others and a person's view of their esteem in the eyes of their fellows. From this view of themselves, as supplied by others, honor can be given or withheld on the basis of the largess of the community to which one belongs. This sense of honor is the basis for a social sense of being able to control one's life and thus to have a sense of one's own meaning within the community. Honor is thus, at its heart, community-based and others-focused.

   In stark contrast, dignity is distinct from both respect and honor because it is best understood as a quality that all humans already possess as an inherent function of their humanity, and thus exists independently from the opinion of others. It is a quality that is internally experienced and recognized, not one that is externally bestowed or withheld. Thus, honor must be earned, defended and maintained. As such it can also be lost, taken, or damaged, either by one's own actions or the actions of others, and is thus subject to redemption and restoration. However...