MANY OF THE rabbis present at the Dec. 11 ceremony at Manhattan’s Rodeph Sholom Synagogue for the Raphael Lemkin Human Rights Awards had just returned from staging a protest outside the Israeli Consulate. They had been expressing their outrage over the destruction of yet another Palestinian home, this one the Dari family’s in Arab East Jerusalem. The protesting rabbis were members of Rabbis for Human Rights (RHR), three of whose founders were among those receiving awards that evening. The other recipients were the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem and the Center for Constitutional Rights.In his opening remarks, Rabbi Edward Feld, noting the Jews’ sad history of trying to find a home in the world, reflected gravely on “what it means to take someone’s home.”

Feld went on to cite as “heroes of the human rights business” Raphael Lemkin, the unheralded lawyer who coined the term “genocide”; Bassem Eid of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group; and award recipient Rabbi David Forman, one of the founding members of RHR, which was established in 1988 to counteract Israel’s human rights abuses of Palestinians.

Rabbis for Human Rights co-founder Rabbi David Forman (Photo Carolina Kroonl).

Forman related the story of his own daughter, who once was set upon by a crowd of angry Israelis at a bus station for wearing a T-shirt that read “FREEDOM FOR THE PRESS.” At the time Israelis had taken to wearing T-shirts proclaiming “PEOPLE AGAINST A HOSTILE [meaning pro-Palestinian] PRESS.” Among the epithets hurled at his daughter was “Arafat’s whore.” She returned home shaken, Forman recalled.

“Father,” she told him, “I now know what it feels like to be an Arab.”

Speaking next, Rabbi Rolando Matalon cautioned that, in the eyes of the world, “Jews and human rights are no longer connected. We have to act in a way so that Jews and human rights should never be questioned. We ask everyone to be a messenger for the message of human rights.”

To emphasize the danger of that not happening, the audience was reminded of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s response to the question: “What is your greatest political fear?” The rabbi’s answer: “Good people will act too late.”

A standing ovation was accorded Rabbi Arik Ascherman, executive director of RHR in Israel, whom Israel has arrested and tried for trying to block bulldozers from destroying Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem. “The homes were demolished not because their occupants had engaged in terrorism,” wrote Susannah Heschel, the rabbi’s daughter, but because they had sought permits to enlarge their homes, which “the Jerusalem municipality procrastinated endlessly in issuing&hellipdespite the absence of any legal barriers.”

The award to B’Tselem, for “bringing to the public spotlight human right violations in the occupied territories,” was accepted by B’Tselem’s executive director, Jessica Montell. She called Israel “a laboratory for some of the worst anti-terrorism atrocities in the world.”

Montell made no great claims for B’Tselem’s accomplishments in its 17 years of existence. But there were a couple of successes of which she was quite proud, she told the audience: Stripping naked the monstrously bland euphemism “moderate physical pressure,” and getting Israelis to call it by its proper name—torture; and, in the same vein, insisting that Gaza be called what it’s become—an Israeli prison.

Eid and Ascherman at an Evening For Human Rights

The following evening, Bassam Eid and Rabbi Arik Ascherman appeared together at a human rights event sponsored by Brit Tzedek V’ Shalom (Jewish Alliance for Peace and Justice) and held at New York’s Shaare Zedek Synagogue. Rabbi Ascherman, who spoke first, described Rabbis for Human Rights (his group) and The Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group as “partners in a coalition of hope.”

There was little hopefulness, however, in the words of either Ascherman or Eid. Even when recalling the hopeful days after Oslo, Ascherman sounded despairing.

“What was the basic fault line that divided the way Israelis and Palestinians saw Oslo?” he asked. “From the Palestinians’ point of view, by signing the Oslo accords they were giving up claims on 76 percent to 78 percent of what they see as historic Palestine. And therefore, the assumption was the remaining 26 percent to 28 percent would be a Palestinian state. The Israelis said no, this is to be negotiated. The Palestinians said, ‘What are you talking about? We gave up the store, we have nothing to negotiate.’”

People like himself, the rabbi continued, knew the first intifada was coming because they had been listening to the voices of Palestinians on the ground.

“What made Palestinian society ripe for the intifada,” he explained, “was knowing that because of Israel’s human rights violations nothing was going to go anywhere.”

Rabbis for Human Rights was born out of those violations, which have grown much worse since the second intifada erupted six years ago.

“When I go to help rebuild a Palestinian home,” said Ascherman, who has been arrested many times for planting his long body between Israeli bulldozers and Palestinian homes, “parents always insist on bringing out one of their kids. They say, ‘He has seen his home demolished in front of his eyes. He has seen his parents humiliated. What do you say to him when he says, I want to be a terrorist?’”

Who is doing more for Israel’s long-term security, Ascherman asked: those who destroy homes, tear down trees and violate human rights, or those who help rebuild homes, replant trees and protect human rights?

Bassem Eid, who had been working for B’Tselem at the time, also began his remarks with recollections of Oslo. “The day after the signing of Oslo,” he said, “friends called me and told me, ‘Peace is coming. You are going to be jobless. You will make a very good tourist guide.’”

Eid was not so sure, he said. He reminded himself that much of the Palestinian leadership had developed under dictatorships in Jordan, Syria, Yemen, Algeria.

“Mr. Arafat arrived in the occupied territories on July 1, 1994,” he continued. “On July 2, 1994, a Palestinian prisoner died in a prison in Gaza as a result of torture. Nobody said a word. We, the Palestinian and Israeli human rights groups, used to shout when Palestinian prisoners died in Israeli prisons. We called in third parties to participate in the autopsies to prove that their deaths were from torture.”

So, he said goodbye to B’Tselem, and established the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group (PHRMG) to investigate and document Palestinian human rights violations.

Eid feels frustrated, he said, over the lack of action taken by Fatah and Hamas leaders to investigate the hundreds of non-Israeli killings of Palestinians over the past six years.

“The same day Israelis demolished the Dari home in Jerusalem,” Eid told those assembled, “gunmen opened fire on a car in Gaza, killing three brothers. What was the reason? The father was a member of the security forces, and was a corrupt person. Punish the father. You have courts in Gaza. Why kill the children?”

Eid said he looked forward to a new generation of Palestinian leaders, concerned with human rights and free of political paternalism.

“We thought after Arafat’s death, we would be rid of the Abus,” he explained. “But we went from Abu Ammar [Arafat] to Abu Mazen [Mahmoud Abbas], and there are at least 10 other Abus waiting in line to become president.”

Of the present Abu, Eid claimed that one of his “biggest failures” was the high regard in which Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert held him.

“Since he was elected president two years ago, what did Abbas get from the Israelis?” Eid concluded. “Nothing. Just good words.”

Robert Hirschfield is a New York City-based free-lance writer.

From Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, March 2007, pages 48-49

Find this article at: http://www.wrmea.com/archives/March_2007/0703048.html

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