Mennonite Weekly Review

Critics of the modern nation-state of Israel can expect to field certain antagonistic questions if they speak or write publicly about Israel’s human rights abuses.

Kathleen Kern, of Rochester, N.Y., serves with Christian Peacemaker Teams.

One of the critiques I find most challenging is, “With all the human rights abuses happening around the world, why are people so focused on Israel?”

I know that conflicts in the Chechnya, Colombia, the Great Lakes region of Africa and the Philippines have killed a lot more people than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has. So why does Christian Peacemaker Teams focus on Israel’s human rights abuses (and for that matter abuses committed by the Canadian and U.S. governments) when these abuses are less egregious than those committed, say, in Sudan?

The answer has to do with the concept of political space — space that allows people to organize against repression. To illustrate this concept, I sometimes use the examples of South Africa and Uganda in the 1970s.

An estimated 21,000 people died in the struggle against apartheid between 1948 and 1994. Many more were tortured, jailed and persecuted. However, black South Africans were much better off during the 1970s than Ugandans were under Idi Amin, who killed 80,000 to 500,000 of them in that decade. In South Africa, black and white opponents of apartheid found ways of organizing against it, because the country’s legal framework made some movement and communication possible.

So was it wrong for the international community to boycott products from South Africa and publicize the inhumane treatment of black South Africans, when Ugandans were in a worse situation? Most people, I suspect, would say that the combined effort of South African resistance movements and the international community to bring down apartheid was a good thing.

Political space also factored into the success of the great nonviolent campaigns of the last century. Movements in India and in the U.S. were able to use British and American laws in their struggles against colonialism and for civil rights. They were able use the British and American conceptions of “fairness” in a way that people suffering under tyrants — who do not aspire to fairness — could not.

Israel’s Declaration of Independence proclaims that the nation “will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets… . It will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants… . It will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; … and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.”

Even though Israel fails miserably to live up to those standards, the standards are there, and they give Palestinian and Israeli activists political space to work against the Israeli occupation. Furthermore, these activists may face jail and harassment for their efforts, but assassination by the Israeli authorities is unlikely (although not unheard of).

So I think the appropriate response for Christians, when presented with calamities fostered by dictatorships, which they have little power to address, should be gratitude that political space exists in Israel, the United States and Canada to confront human rights abuses committed by those governments.

After they thank God for that space, I think they should use it by standing in solidarity with those who have not reaped the benefits of these democracies.