René Cassin was the embodiment of all that modern Jewry could aspire to. A French Jew who for many years served as the President of the League of European Jurists, he was the chief author of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, called the “Magna Carta of all humankind.” And the “Jewish element” of this story does not end here. The fundamental human rights conventions, which form the basis of international law, managed to gain acceptance in the rare window of opportunity between 1945-1952, before the Cold War descended. During those years the Holocaust and its aftermath weighed heavily upon the international community. René Cassin, together with Eleanor Roosevelt, spearheaded the UN’s adoption of the Declaration in 1948 over the opposition of governments jealous of surrendering any of their sovereign powers. It is worth noting that without vigorous lobbying of American Jewish groups – those very organizations today defending Israel’s massive violations of human rights– the Declaration and the subsequent Geneva Conventions might never have been adopted. Cassin was the founder and first president of the Consultative Council of Jewish Organizations (CCJO), an organization linking French, British and American Jewry in the conviction that “support for the human rights of all people is an obligation incumbent upon all Jews, as we believe that universal human rights are intrinsic to Jewish values.”
In 1968 René Cassin, who at that time served as president of the European Court of Human Rights, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his part in drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. He is buried in the Pantheon in Paris together with other illustrious heroes of the French Republic, among them Voltaire, Rousseau, Victor Hugo, Émile Zola and Jean Jaures.
Cassin had had articulated what most Jews, especially of the post-Holocaust Diaspora, realized intuitively: that only in a world based on universal human rights would Jews find the security and equality that had so long eluded them. Hence the disproportionate Jewish involvement in the labor, civil rights and anti-war movements. Prophetic Judaism had finally linked up not only with its natural extension, the notion of universal human rights, but with an emerging set of practical instruments of implementation – human rights conventions covering a wide range of issues, an ever expanding corpus of international humanitarian law and institutions of enforcement such as the International Court of Justice and the recently created International Criminal Court (which Cassin dreamed of and which Israel, accompanied by China and Bush’s America, has refused to recognize). And a Jewish hero, together with a once-heroic organized Jewish community, had played a key role – indeed, the only role a responsible Jewish community could be expected to play.
Israel, part of whose rationale was to protect and provide refuge for Jews, ironically threatens all of this. Its demand that world Jewry uncritically support policies that perpetuate its Occupation is bad enough. As long as a genuine two-state solution was possible with the Palestinians and not a “two-state solution” in which an expanded Israel dominates forever a Palestinian Bantustan, a balance could have been found between the right to (and need for) a Jewish state and the equally just rights, claims and needs of the Palestinians. But given the fact that Israel’s settlement project has progressed to the point that it forecloses a viable Palestinian state, Diaspora Jews are further called upon to uphold one of the last expressions of the very 19th century “organic” nationalism of Eastern and Central Europe of which they were the chief victims. There’s an unspoken element of Zionism that Diaspora Jewry would reject outright if it was ever proclaimed in their own countries that underlies Israeli aggressiveness towards the Palestinians, and which took me years to fully grasp. This is the role that exclusivity and privilege played in the Zionist framing of things. This element, seldom if ever stated explicitly (and then only by settlers and the extreme right), can be put as follows:
The Land of Israel [from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River] belongs exclusively to the Jewish people. There is no other people with valid national rights over or claims to the country. Although Arabs live in the Land of Israel, they do not constitute a collectivity that in any way challenges Jewish exclusivity. Since the Land belongs to the Jews, only they have the prerogative to decide its fate. Any political solution to the conflict, even one in which a Palestinian state may emerge, will be decided solely by Israeli Jews. Arabs might be consulted, but genuine negotiations based upon the notion that the Palestinians have a right of self-determination in the Land of Israel are out of the question.
If this is the case, then “supporting Israel” does not mean supporting the Jewish right to self-determination, but rather Israel’s pro-active and exclusive claim to the entire country between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, pockmarked by islands of Arab autonomy. Although Israel wins international (and Diaspora Jewish) support by invoking “security” as the basis of its policies, in fact almost no element of the Occupation can be explained by security: not the establishment of some 300 settlements, not the annexation of East Jerusalem, not the expropriation of most West Bank land, not the demolition of 18,000 Palestinian homes, not the uprooting of more than a million olive and fruit trees, not the tortuous route of the Separation Barrier deep into Palestinian areas – none of it. Something else is going on here. The matrix of control that Israel has laid over the Palestinian areas, I would submit, has only one purpose: to ensure permanent Israeli hegemony and control over the entire country. This is the only way to read the so-called “convergence” (or “realignment”) plan, a plan based by necessity on oppression, an ever-expanding violation of Palestinian human rights and, ultimately, the institutionalization of as permanent regime of domination – apartheid. It is the nightmare for any Jew, in which the Jews of Israel become the new Afrikaners.
Now little of what I have written above was evident to me when I moved to Israel in 1973. The Zionist paradigm made sense to me, especially the notion of Jewish national self-determination (another Zionist ideal supported by Diaspora Jews only in the breach. Less than 1% of American Jews ever emigrated to Israel.) In the years immediately following the 1967 war, the Occupation had not yet become entrenched, Israel still exuded a progressive socialism, Begin and Sharon were not considered serious candidates for power and the two-state solution was still alive (though, at that time, it was anathema to Israel and the organized Jewish community abroad). I knew, of course, about the conflict with the Arabs and immediately upon landing in Israel I joined Siakh, the Israeli New Left, where I met my wife Shoshana. For all its flaws, Zionism might still have worked out had Israel relinquished the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza and allowed a Palestinian state to emerge there. As it turned out, the Labor government soon asserted its claim to half of the Occupied Territories, and whatever legitimate the security concerns did exist were overrun by the settlement project, the most explicit indication of Israel’s pro-active claims to the entire country west of the Jordan, especially evident following Menachem Begin’s victory in 1977 but pursued vigorously by subsequent Labor governments as well.
But “Arabs” (we generally don’t use the word “Palestinian” in Israel) are largely invisible, and are certainly irrelevant to us. The vehicle that propelled me beyond the purely Jewish space inhabited by Israeli Jews and into the seething, angry yet unseen poltergeist of our Arab victims was ICAHD, the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, which I helped found in mid-1997. The election of Binyamin Netanyahu in May of 1996 clearly spelled the decline, if not the end, of the Oslo peace process. The mainstream Israeli peace movement had become dormant, hoping against hope that peace might yet emerge from the roller coaster of negotiations, but under Netanyahu the Occupation brutally reasserted itself. Seeking to re-engage in resistance, a number of us sought the views of Palestinian activists over how we might best cooperate. Israel’s policy of house demolitions, now on the rise again, arose repeatedly in those conversations, and in a meeting attended by people representing the Israeli women’s peace group Bat Shalom; Yesh Gvul, the movement of reservists who refuse to serve in the Occupied Territories; Rabbis for Human Rights, representing some 100 Israeli rabbis; the Public Committee Against Torture; and Palestinians and Israelis for Non-Violence; as well as several members of the Meretz party and Peace Now, it was decided to establish ICAHD.
The decision to pursue the issue of house demolitions marked not only a return of the Israeli peace movement to active opposition to the Occupation but fundamentally changed the very way we worked. Palestinians needed neither our “solidarity” nor our symbolic protests. Facing the demolition of their homes, they wanted to know what we would actually do for them. Could we prevent the demolitions? If the bulldozers arrived at 5 AM, could they call us and expect us to come running? Would we actually resist demolitions together with them, putting ourselves at risk to save their homes? And if demolitions did take place, would we, could we, help them secure legal building permits? Would we help refinance and rebuild the homes? And what were we prepared to do to change Israeli government policy? How would we let the world know what was happening?
Suddenly protest was no longer sufficient; we had to deliver. In 95% of the cases of houses destroyed by the Israelis, there has been no security reason: the people neither committed any security offense nor were ever charged with any. After more than twenty years of political involvement, I discovered how little I knew about the Occupation. The Civil Administration, Israel’s military government in the West Bank, seemed to be the source of much of the suffering, but I didn’t even know where it was located. I couldn’t have told you who actually issues demolition orders, on what authority, and why this particular house was targeted from among the thousands targeted for demolition. In the West Bank it is the Civil Administration that demolished; in Jerusalem there are two government bodies—the Ministry of Interior and the municipality. Nor could I have explained the connection between the “facts on the ground” and Israel’s overall political aims. In fact, it took us more than a year before we even witnessed a demolition. That finally happened on July 9, 1998, the day my Palestinian friend Salim calls “the black day in my life and in the life of my family,” the day the bulldozers of Israel’s Civil Administration demolished his home for the first time. The reality of Israel’s Occupation was finally brought home to me. That was the day my protest against the Occupation turned into resistance.
The knock on the door informing the Shawamreh family that their home was about to be demolished had caught them by surprise as they were sitting down for lunch. Salim, who had tried to reason, and then argue with, the soldiers, had been beaten and thrown out the door. In the commotion, his wife Arabiya had locked the door shut, closing herself and her six small children inside. In the few desperate minutes she had before the army lobbed tear gas canisters into the house (canisters, I later found, were made by a company in Philadelphia and clearly marked with the warning: “For outdoor use only”) and smashed open the door, she managed to make a few calls for help, one of them to me as a member of ICAHD. By chance I happened to be close by, attending a demonstration against Israel’s demolition policy we had organized opposite the Civil Administration offices in the nearby settlement of Beit El. As I rushed down the hill towards the house, the bulldozer suddenly appeared before me. Almost instinctively I did what I have done many times since: I threw myself in front of it to stop the demolition. This was the first time anyone had ever done anything like that. No one knew what to do. It was clear, however, that I was an Israeli Jew, so no one was ready to shoot me. After trying to coax me to get out of the way, the soldiers brusquely (but not too roughly) pushed me down the hill, where I found myself lying in the gravel and dirt next to Salim. Wiping the perspiration from his pained face, trying to find words of awkward consolation, I promised him that the world would hear his story.
More to the point, the Jewish community in Israel and abroad should hear his story and draw lessons from it. René Cassin did not reject the idea of Zionism; in fact, he was distressed when, in 1975, soon before he died, the General Assembly of the UN passed the resolution declaring that Zionism is racism. But he would have insisted that Israel’s existence be reconciled with the notion of human rights. I am not aware of any statement he made regarding the Occupation. He died a year before Begin came to power, before Sharon was charged by the Israeli government to do all that is possible “on the ground” to incorporate Judea and Samaria (and Gaza) into Israel proper and to foreclose forever the establishment of a viable Palestinian state. But seeing the absolute impossibility of removing a half million Israelis from the Occupied Territories, he might well have reached the conclusion I have: that a viable two-state solution is no longer possible. If that be the case, he would have been at a loss to explain how permanent Israeli control over millions of Palestinians could ever be transformed into what he would undoubtedly have pronounced the only just and sustainable solution to the conflict, one that insists on Palestinian rights to self-determination in a viable state of their own. Being a French patriot (Cassin was one of de Gaulle’s closest advisors in WWII), a cosmopolitan Jew who rejected communitarianism in favor of Jews’ involvement in progressive human affairs and an advocate of human rights, Cassin might have come around to a one-state solution. He may even have come to support the vision of Monnet, the father of modern Europe with whom he shares a vault in the Pantheon, of a Middle East Union in which self-determination is integrated with wider concerns of economic and political life more in tune with our contemporary global reality.
A turn to human rights and international law offers the best – I would say the only – hope of rescuing an Israel gone fundamentally wrong. But insisting on the primacy of human rights is of prime importance to Diaspora Jews as well. Israel may enjoy short-term benefits from avoiding accountability under international law, but that runs counter to the long-term interests of the Jewish people whose security depends upon a world order based upon universal human rights. The jurist Cassin realized that persecution against the Jews over the centuries derived, in large part, from their exclusion from all forms of law, be it tribal, ecclesiastical or civil. They were history’s ultimate Others, strangers, aliens. Universal human rights finally bring the Jews “under the umbrella” as an integral part of the human family. The fundamental question for world Jewry vis-à-vis Israel, then, is whether we want to step outside the umbrella once more. Is it in the broader Jewish interest to claim, as Israel does, that human rights covenants and international law do not apply to us? Do we really want to be a “special case” again?
As an Israeli peace activist I am fighting for an Israel that conforms to human rights and international law, whatever fundamental changes in Israel’s existence that may engender. I am honored to have been nominated for the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize by the American Friends Service Committee, together with the Palestinian intellectual and activist Ghassan Andoni, for my work with ICAHD. The nomination is especially meaningful in that it draws me closer to Cassin. It would have been nice, however, to have that nomination seconded by a Jewish organization, if only to show that Jews, too, understood the crucial connection among resistance to the Occupation, helping Israel make the transition from an ethnocracy to a democracy, and saving the very soul of the Jewish people. For this is what I believe is at stake, nothing less. If Diaspora Jews take the path their religious and organizations leaders are urging on them, namely support for Israel’s violations of Palestinian human rights and international law with no genuine security justification, they will alienate themselves from the very ground of our collective moral being, namely the ethical monotheism that defines our people. After René Cassin, no one can represent Judaism, be they Israelis or Jews of the Diaspora, without reference to human rights.