During the war on Gaza, two positions seemed to crystallize in the Western political mainstream on the applicability of equal human rights to Palestinians.

Two interviews on on CBC radio’s The Current on Wednesday, January 7, illustrated both positions.One of the interviewees was a Jewish Canadian engineer working as a civilian volunteer at a military base in Israel. The other was another Canadian volunteering with the International Solidarity Movement, a non-governmental organization, in Gaza.

Denial of civilian toll, Palestinian human rights

Citing rocket attacks by Hamas as a threat to the security of Israel, the first interviewee expressed a sense of relief and even pleasure about the war on Gaza. The volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement – who had clearly been putting her own life and security in danger through her activism – spoke with sympathy and urgency about the humanitarian crisis.

The position of the volunteer at the army base was straightforward: Expressions of happiness that a “payback” was taking place; denial of and a seeming apathy towards the level of devastation for civilians, and, effectively, an implicit denial of human rights for Palestinians. While this position is blatantly exclusionary in terms of whom this volunteer includes and excludes in his conception of humanity, it was in fact something the second interviewee uttered that I would like to problematize.

Denial of Palestinian political agency

When protesting the belligerent attacks and defending the innocence of civilians in Gaza, the humanitarian activist said that most of the people who were killed and hurt in this attack were “not political at all.” She did not say they were “not militants”; she did not say they were “not terrorists.” She said they were “not political at all.” No doubt uttered, in the case of this activist, in good faith, to argue the innocence of those hurt; to appeal to the sympathy of the general radio audience in hope of their potential solidarity; nevertheless, the choice of words needs to be questioned.

The choice is rather telling as it may actually signal an essential bias and an alarming direction in the use of humanitarian discourse in the case of Palestinians. Without questioning the positive personal intentions of the humanitarian activist, it might be useful to ask how different the logic of this discourse really is from that of the explicitly exclusionary discourse.

More importantly, it is necessary to ask what the political implications of this discourse might be for the kind of shape a “peace process” might take following the period of war on Gaza.

The association of innocence and the need for protection with being “not-political at all” reflects an implicit racism and a central deficiency in the capacity of the human rights discourse to recognize equality of human rights and to address issues of justice and peace. There was a time, not long ago, when human rights discourse was often used to appeal for protection of persecuted political opponents and activists. How do we interpret the seeming conditionality now of granting human rights to Gazans on the ‘not-political’ness of civilians?

The limits of human rights discourses

To some extent, the logic of innocence-as-being-‘not-political’ is rooted in the inherent biases and limitations of liberal human rights discourses in addressing political issues in general. While the liberal bias in traditional discourses of human rights leads to a blindness towards the history, politics and the context of a humanitarian situation, it at least assumes an equal humanity of the victims. It seems that the universalism of the liberal discourse of human rights is lost in the reference to the “non-politicalness” of the innocent civilians.

As several commentators have argued, like David Chandler in From Kosovo to Kabul: Human Rights and International Intervention – there is a significant shift in human rights discourse in the post-Cold War world, a shift in which “human rights” have moved from the margins to the mainstream of politics, and become an important part of imperial foreign policy. In addition to its place in the new geopolitics, we can argue that in the new imperialism this logic also involves a specifically racialized application of human rights principles to specific
populations.

What does it mean to be “not-political at all” in Gaza? What does it mean to be “non-political” in a place where 80 per cent of the population consists of refugees expelled from their land and denied a right to return; an overcrowded, impoverished place which is acknowledged by increasing number of observers to be an open-air prison or even likened to a concentration camp; a place which has in the last 18 months been living under a choking blockade and an embargo?

What does it mean to define “deservedness” of human rights protection by being “not-political at all”? Does this mean that Palestinians can only be considered “innocent” if they can present themselves in, and effectively accept, a state of pitiful, naked humanity, a child-like innocence and helplessness, a non-politico-human status, and complete dependence on the pity and charitable recognition of outsiders?

Does it mean that resistance, struggle for dignity and justice, and an aspiration for self-determination are inherently illegitimate and suspect – as really or potentially “terrorist” – if they are exercised by Palestinians who disagree with the Western mainstream solutions to the Palestinian question?

Resistance to occupation recognized by international law

If the second discourse implies that resistance to occupation and the right to self-determination — both recognized under international law — are “political,” and therefore “not innocent,” how much does this discourse really differ from the logic of Israeli policy of collective punishment for Gazans? In both of the discourses, human rights seem to be stripped of universal principles to be applied equally to Palestinians. Both discourses in effect leave the question of the “deservedness” of human rights protection to the judgment of Western interests and geopolitics.

If, to deserve Western recognition and protection of their human rights, Palestinians need to strip themselves of politico-human status, what does this say about what is left of the “human” in the new human rights language? What does it say about the prospects of creating just and lasting peaceful solutions to the present status quo, solutions that can only be achieved through the specifically political democratic participation of the Palestinian people themselves?

 

Sedef Arat-Koc teaches in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada.