Jeff Halper | ICAHD Israel

Rene Cassin and Resistance to the Israeli Occupation

Needless to say, the European Enlightenment had a profound if uneven
impact on world Jewry as it moved steadily throughout the nineteenth
century from Western through Central and finally to Eastern Europe,
where the vast majority of Jews lived. By the time Russian Jews,
including my grandparents, established themselves in the U.S.,
Talmudic-based ultra-Orthodoxy had given way to more secular forms
based, if on anything beyond a vague sense of Jewish “culture,”
“tradition” and “community,” then upon universalistic values generally
associated with the prophets. When I taught Sunday School in our
rabbi-less Conservative synagogue in Hibbing, Minnesota, I learned that
Judaism can best be defined as “ethical monotheism.” Although the
monotheism never took root in me, a Judaism defined by ethics certainly
did. And I found confirmation in the movements for social justice,
civil rights and anti-war during the Sixties, in which I proudly noted
the disproportionate number of Jews who participated along with me.

One of the books issued by the Conservative movement was entitled
Jewish Heroes. If I remember correctly it dealt with truly formidable
figures such as Rabbi Akiva, Maimonides, Hanna Senesh, and David
Ben-Gurion. Written in the 1950s, it could not yet have included such
Jewish civil rights martyrs as Michel Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, or
Abby Hoffman, or Betty Friedan or the Jewish hero of my day, Sandy
Koufax. Nor did it mention the five whites arrested with Nelson
Mandela, all of whom were Jews or – well, the list goes on. Yet one of
the great Jewish heroes, perhaps the greatest, René Cassin, could have
been included by that time. Instead, he has been forgotten by all
except perhaps his own French Jewish community.

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.