Taking Back Human Rights

Israel finds itself increasingly in an adversarial position today on the issue of human rights, constantly defending itself from the newest report of Amnesty International or the UN, like Goldstone Report. Reportedly, "Turkish human rights" groups have sought the arrest of Defense Minster Ehud Barak during his visit to Ankara. There are repeated reports in the international press of arrests of "human rights activists" by Israeli security forces as a result of protests at the security fence near Bilin or Naalin. Something is fundamentally wrong with the position in which Israel finds itself.
 
Sixty years ago, in the aftermath of the Second World War, the Jewish people were in the forefront of the drafting of the critical documents that formed the core of international humanitarian law. Human rights was a Jewish initiative.  It was Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew, who invented the word "genocide" and fathered  the 1948 Genocide Convention.
 
That same year the UN General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, whose main drafter was the Nobel Prize winner, Renee Cassin, who grew up in Southern France and studied in a Jewish religious school. Cassin wrote years later that "Judaism gave the world the concept of human rights." The  Israeli legal scholar, Shabtai Rosenne, laid the groundwork for the eventual establishment of the International Criminal Court to prosecute war criminals in the future.
 
Indeed, when Judge Eli Natan headed the Israeli delegation to the drafting of the Rome Treaty in the summer of 1998 for establishing the International Criminal Court, he correctly noted in his public address: "This was Mr. President, our idea." Natan was responding to a problem that had arisen in the negotiations establish the court. The Israeli delegation agreed with the Rome Statute that the court was necessary "to address unimaginable atrocities" and "grave crimes which deeply shock the conscience of the whole international community."
 
But the Arab states hijacked the International Criminal Court by suddenly adding Israeli settlements to what it was to regard as "the most heinous war crimes." What happened to the International Criminal Court summarized what Israel was experiencing with the whole human rights movement, which had become increasingly politicized. Judge Natan told the delegations that came to sign the Rome Treaty: "it causes me considerable pain, both personally as a victim of the Nazi persecution of the Jewish people, and on behalf of the Israeli delegation which I proudly head, to have to explain the negative vote which Israel has been unwillingly obliged to cast today."
 
Whether the Israeli diplomats attending the Rome meeting supported the settlements or opposed them, there was a fundamental problem that has arisen when the building of Israeli homes in Judea and Samaria came to be compared to genocide, ethnic cleansing, and other war crimes. But what happened in Rome in 1998 is what is happening now globally as states that could care less  about human rights are using it as a weapon to wage political warfare against Israel. Look who voted in the UN Human Right Council in Geneva on January 12, 2009 to establish what became the Goldstone Commission in order "to investigate the grave violations of human rights in the Occupied Palestinian territory" : China, Cuba, Pakistan, Russia, and Saudi Arabia--not exactly beacons of human rights.
 
 In London there are several Palestinian human rights organizations that work with European lawyers and have sought the arrest of Israeli officers visiting Britain from Doron Almog to Bugy Yaalon. Recently, they targeted former Foreign Minister Tzippi Livni. But who are the partners of these human rights activists? It turns out that the material for the British lawyers is collected by al-Tawthiq, the legal arm of Hamas. In other words, British human rights lawyers are cooperating with a radical Islamic terrorist organization that calls for destroying Israel (and the West as well). These lawyers are not only hijacking human rights, but also twisting its original purpose beyond recognition, in order to serve their own narrow political agendas.