Israeli Right Targets Human Rights Organizations

Author: أنطوان شلحت

This comes alongside the genocide war that Israel has been waging on Gaza for two years, coupled with an internal political assault on Israeli human rights organizations. This is a continuation of what the Israeli right initiated and has intensified for over a decade and a half, when it simultaneously proposed to the Knesset during the war it launched on Gaza in late 2008 to form a commission of inquiry to investigate the actions of these human rights organizations and their sources of funding. The foundation that the right has started from regarding human rights organizations within Israel is that its ideological interpretation of these rights is the only legitimate interpretation, leaving no importance or space for interpretations based on the prevailing global values.

These recent values are even presented as if they are a deviation from the right path, in addition to the fact that the critique of government policy and practices necessitates the expulsion and sidelining of critics, completely detached from the substance of the criticism.

An Israeli army radio broadcaster summarized the entire matter with the question: "Aren't leftist traitors suffering from an identity crisis spying on us for the other camp, so why shouldn't our strong ones beat them brutally and send them home with visible scars?" He was specifically referring to members of the organization "Breaking the Silence," who provided testimonies about Israel's violations in Gaza before the UN inquiry commission formed by the UN Human Rights Council in April 2009 (Goldstone Commission).

On the eve of establishing the current government, the head of the "Religious Zionism" party, Bezalel Smotrich, who holds the dual positions of Minister of Finance and second minister in the Ministry of Security, confirmed that human rights organizations operating against the State of Israel represent an existential threat to the state, and the new government will have to take strict measures against these organizations as soon as it takes office.

If we want to summarize the main developments related to the Israeli right's campaign against human rights organizations, two issues must be highlighted. First, the dissemination of ideas that reinforce the notion that organizations focused on advancing global values are immediately suspect for standing against the state, and global values are viewed as rejected and not considered legitimate standards for criticism in national discourse. The aim behind this is to keep the distinction in public space between the individual and the state blurred or obscured, thus stripping the individual of their individuality and enlisting them as part of the national collective to fend off criticisms directed at the state. Criticism against specific government policies is often portrayed as criticism directed at the nation.

The second issue is the resort of right-wing organizations to adopt a human rights discourse to justify the goals and interests of Zionism. Initial indications of this phenomenon appeared in the early 2000s among political activists and members of Knesset from Israeli right-wing parties. This discourse received a boost in 2005, following the evacuation of nearly eight thousand Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip as part of the unilateral "disengagement plan," where right-wing organizations began to claim that forcibly removing Jewish settlers from their homes is considered against the human rights discourse. Following this, we began to notice that opponents of the "two-state solution" were using human rights discourse against the eviction of Jewish settlers from a specific area to establish a Palestinian state with a homogenous population. This claim found expression when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the possibility of evicting Jewish settlers from Palestinian territories as "ethnic cleansing."

These approaches quickly gained acceptance among Israelis, who showed indications prior to the war on Gaza that 90% of them believe that Israel maintains the human rights of Palestinians in the territories of 1967. A vast majority of them believe that the practices of the occupying state against Palestinians do not constitute a violation of human rights; in contrast, more than half of them believe that similar practices against Israeli settlers do constitute a violation of human rights.