Water Rights of West Bank Palestinians

Water Rights of West Bank Palestinians

On May 17, 2013 I posted a blog on Palestinian property rights: http://rhodahassmann.blogspot.ca/2013/05/property-rights-of-west-bank.html. I was interested in this question because of my research on malnutrition in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), comprised of the West Bank and Gaza. This is part of a larger research project on malnutrition which also includes North Korea, Zimbabwe, and Venezuela. I’ve also posted a blog explaining my position on criticizing Israel: http://rhodahassmann.blogspot.ca/2013/06/on-criticizing-israel.html I believe that Israel is a state that has the right to exist in peace, but that it must also obey international law. From what I’ve learned, Israel is not obeying international human rights and humanitarian laws that require that Palestinians enjoy their right to clean water. Some of what I’ve written in this post is based on a 2009 report by Amnesty International, “Troubled Waters-Palestinians Denied Fair Access to Water: Israeli-Occupied Palestinian Territories https://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/MDE15/027/2009/en/e9892ce4-7fba-469b-96b9-c1e1084c620c/mde150272009en.pdf.  I’ve also used other sources that I can provide to interested readers.

The United Nations has proposed a human right to water, referring especially to the right to “an adequate standard of living” mentioned in Article 11, 1 of the 1976 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and the right to the “highest attainable standard of physical…health” mentioned in Article 12. Israel ratified this Covenant  in 1991.The right to water is most clearly elaborated in the 2002 General Comment 15 of the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, “The human right to water is indispensable for leading a life in human dignity. It is a prerequisite for the realization of other human rights.” International humanitarian law also states that an occupying power must ensure that the occupied population has sufficient water. Israel is also obliged under international law to ensure equitable distribution of groundwater between itself (as occupier) and the inhabitants of the area it occupies.

Access to clean water is a major problem for Palestinians in the West Bank. While Israelis in 2009 consumed about 300 liters of water per day,  Palestinians consumed about 70 (Amnesty International 2009, 3). According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, the percentage of people with access to improved water sources in the OPT as a whole declined from 97 in 1991 to 85 in 2010.

Israel has expropriated much of the water in the West Bank for its own use. The main source of water in the West Bank is the Mountain Aquifer, but Palestinians in 2009 had access to only 20 per cent of the water it produces, while Israel used the rest. The right to water also includes protection from arbitrary interference in the water supply, yet Israelis authorities frequently cut off water from Palestinians. Individual Israeli soldiers often destroy private water cisterns and other traditional means by which Palestinians collect and conserve water. The Israeli military requires that Palestinians obtain permits to build new cisterns, yet often does not grant them.

States are also obliged by international law to “prevent third parties from interfering in any way with the enjoyment of the right to water,” yet Israel permits Jewish settlers in the West Bank to draw on water supplies traditionally used by Palestinians, even permitting individual Jewish households to have swimming pools while nearby Palestinians endure severe water shortages.  Many Palestinians rely on water brought in by tankers, yet segregated roadways often make it difficult for the tankers to reach Palestinian villages. Palestinians also have to tolerate deliberate contamination of their water supply by Jewish settlers who, for example, throw garbage or even dirty baby diapers into Palestinians’ water containers. Lack of water for agriculture means Palestinian farmers must rely on purchased food. As one farmer told Amnesty International (p. 23 of the AI report), “We can’t keep more goats because we can’t afford the water, and we can’t grow food for us and fodder for the animals, so we have to buy it and this is too expensive.”

As of 2008 Israel obtained almost 50 per cent of its drinking water and 40 per cent of its agricultural water from the West Bank. As early as 1990 the Israeli Agriculture Minister warned that Israel would lose nearly 60 per cent of its water if it relinquished control of the West Bank (Amnesty International 2009, 47). This strategic need for water may explain the desire to occupy the West Bank even more than does the desire for Jewish settlements. Peace between Israel and the Palestinians will require a detailed agreement on water resources, but Israel may not be willing to give up its access to West Bank water.

I used to be impressed when I heard people say that the Israelis have “made the desert bloom.”  Yet I now realize they’ve done so by using stolen water.

Canada: Malnourishment of Aboriginal Children

Canada: Malnourishment of Aboriginal Children

This week (July 15-19, 2013) the Canadian media has been awash with stories about  malnourishment of Aboriginal (“Indian”) children in nutrition experiments carried out from 1948 to 1952. The source of the media’s information is an article by historian Ian Mosby, “Administering Colonial Science: Nutrition Research and Human Biomedical Experimentation in Aboriginal Communities and Residential Schools, 1942-1952” (Histoire Sociale/Social History, vol. 46, no. 91, May 2013, pp. 145-172; http://www.ianmosby.ca/about/ ). Mosby recounts experiments in Indian residential schools from 1948-52 that would violate today’s ethical standards. In an attempt to improve Indian children’s nutritional status, researchers gave experimental nutritional supplements to some children in some schools, but left other students and schools without such supplements, as “control” groups. They also denied some children dental care in order to observe the effects of malnourishment on the children’s teeth and gums.  

A Photograph of a Canadian Residential School, Wikimedia Commons

The larger story behind these experiments, as Mosby makes clear in his article, is severe malnutrition among Canada’s Aboriginal populations in the 1930s and 40s. According to Mosby, the children who were the subjects of these experiments were already malnourished in the residential schools where they were forced by the government to live, with little if any contact with their parents or other Aboriginal adults. The experimenters who left some “control” children malnourished while feeding others experimental nutritional supplements were trying to find ways to improve Aboriginal peoples’ diets without addressing long-term, structural problems. These structural problems included erosion of Aboriginal people’s traditional diets and inadequate funding both of schools and Aboriginal reserves by the relevant national government departments.

The economist and philosopher, Amartya Sen, has famously suggested that “there has never been a famine in a functioning multiparty democracy” (see his Development as Freedom, 1999, p. 178). The reasons for this, Sen argued, are that in democracies citizens have access to a free press, they are allowed to criticize their governments, and they can vote their governments out of office. But Aboriginal Canadians did not have these rights in Canada at the time that they were suffering from severe malnutrition. Indeed, if you were recognized as a “status Indian” and lived on a reserve, you couldn’t simultaneously be a citizen with the right to vote in federal elections until 1960. The government also restricted Aboriginal Canadians’ rights to freedom of association.

And of course, Aboriginal children had no rights at all. Those who lived in residential schools were effectively prisoners in “total institutions,” institutions where the inmates were totally controlled by those in authority. Total institutions of this kind—residential schools, prisons, orphanages, homes for the disabled—are notorious in Canada for abuse of the inmates; over the last 30 years Canadians have heard horrific story after horrific story about these places, often, like Indian residential schools, run by various Christian denominations. Aboriginal children were torn from their families, who in turn had no say over how their children were treated in residential schools, whose notorious purpose was to “take the Indian out of the child.” And the children knew that if they complained about their hunger, there would be “consequences,” as one survivor of the residential school system said on the radio. This survivor was so hungry that he used to go into the woods with his friends after school and hunt for small birds to eat. When I heard him say this, I thought of what I’ve been learning recently about state-induced famine in North Korea in the 1990s. There, if you foraged for food, you ran the risk of execution. At least things weren’t that bad in Canada, but Aboriginal children did go hungry for years on end, afraid to say anything to their “caretakers” for fear of brutal punishment.

Ironically, the reports of Ian Mosby’s article broke in Canadian newspapers just as Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission is trying to find out the truth about white Canada’s relations with Aboriginal people, and in acknowledging that truth to come to some form of reconciliation between the two groups. Yet at the same time, the Commission is having trouble getting access to all the government’s records of how it has, historically, treated Aboriginal people. Now we know why.

Not surprisingly, Canada’s Aboriginal leaders are demanding an apology from the government for these nutritional experiments. But that is not enough. Every living survivor of this experiment deserves substantial financial reparation. And I think those survivors’ children and grandchildren deserve apologies and reparations too, as the long-term effects of malnourishment may well have reduced the survivors’ abilities to make a living and support their descendants.

The American legal scholar David Marcus coined the term “faminogenesis” in 2003 to refer to state activities “creating or aiding in the creation of famine.” He described four degrees of faminogenic behavior. These four degrees are intentional famine, using famine as means of extermination; reckless famine, continuing policies despite evidence of famine; famine by indifference, turning a blind eye to mass hunger; and famine as a consequence of incompetence (see David Marcus, “Famine Crimes in International Law,” American Journal of International Law, vol. 97,no, 2, 2003, pp. 245-81). Canada didn’t create famine, but it did recklessly contribute to the malnourishment of Aboriginal children and adults, in its overall policy of underfunding reserves and schools and in the experimenters’ decision to leave some children malnourished in the interests of “scientific” rigor. The experimenters could easily have fed the children they were studying enough food, but they didn’t; they were indifferent to the children’s suffering.  If anyone who conducted these experiments in the 1940s and 50s is still alive today, he or she should be held accountable, as should the federal government. This is one week that I am truly ashamed to be a Canadian.

Iranian Prison Massacre: 25th Anniversary

Iranian Prison Massacre: 25^th Anniversary

 

 

This week, with his permission, I am re-posting a blog by Jafar Bekhish, originally posted at:

http://jbehkish.blogspot.ca/2013/06/mothers-of-khavaran-strong-voice-for.html .

Jafar is an Iranian who immigrated to Canada in 2002.  As you will see from his post, he spent 15 months in jail in the 1980s, and lost several siblings who were executed, three in the Evian prison massacre of 1988.  Jafar’s post is about the search for truth and justice by his family and the many other families who lost loved ones in prison executions.  These family members do not know why their loved ones were killed, or where exactly they are buried, but they continue to memorialize them every year. Jafar’s sad story shows us how important it is to their survivors to know exactly what happened to family members who are murdered by vicious political regimes.

 

 

Mothers of Khavaran; a Strong Voice for Truth and Justice in Iran

 

Kaveh Shahroz’s article in Ottawa Citizen on May 28, 2013, “How Canada Can Lead On Iran”

explains very well the pain that has been inflected by the Islamic Republic of Iran (the IRI) on the victims and victims’ families in last thirty five years, prevalence of “The culture of impunity” and a long overdue proper reaction/action by international community on systematic and widespread human rights violations by the IRI. However, I would like to look at the 80s atrocities and their consequences from a different aspect, which has not been elaborated in Kaveh’s article.

Kaveh wrote about his young uncle, Mehrdad, 20 at the time of arrest in 1980. Mehrdad was sentenced to ten years imprisonment in the early 80s. After seven years of hardship and torture inside prison, Mehrdad was hanged along with four thousands political prisoners, in the 1988 prison massacre, under the direct order of ayatollah Khomeini, the then supreme leader.

It is heart breaking when Kaveh wrote:

“We still don’t know exactly when he was executed or where his body is buried.

My family has never truly recovered from that loss.  My grandmother and mother have both passed away since then, both with the unfulfilled wish of seeing justice in Mehrdad’s case. “

This is a pain shared by many similar families in Iran.  

In transitional justice literature, it is claimed that although, dictatorial regimes suppress political and social activists, ironically, the suppressions lead to other types of resistance. Victims’ families and many others become active in order to save the life of their loved ones and ask for truth and justice. Is Iran an exception?

It has been 33 years since the mass executions of political activists in the early 80s, and 25 years since the 1988 prison massacre, yet victims’ families still do not know the truth and have not seen justice. It is important to ask, with about 20,000 thousands victims, and hundreds of thousands of political prisoners and exiles; why has a strong movement for truth and justice not been established in Iran? Is it only because Canada and other countries did not act properly? Then, why is it that such a strong movement for truth and justice in Latin America and other parts of the world is evident, despite the fact that in many cases, United State, Russia (Former Soviet Union) and China and their allies supported the dictators?

In the 80s, the IRI put enormous pressure on the victims’ families to stay silent in the face of the atrocities that were happening inside prisons all around Iran. Although a majority of victims’ families were forced to comply with this brutal policy, few hundreds of victims’ families, known as Mothers of Khavaran, became a voice for justice and truth inside Iran.  

Before 1988 prison massacre, these families, tried to save their loved ones or improve the prison condition. They knew that the prisoners did not have any right to defend themselves. So it was up to family to do that. I remember in the 80s, my mother along with other mothers, sisters and wives of political prisoners, gathered in front of governmental buildings to submit their requests for fair trial and improvement of prison conditions

In the 80s, each Friday, and despite all the harassment, they went to Khavaran cemetery, a piece of land where non-believer victims were buried in single or mass graves. The authorities named it “doomed land”, to show their disrespect.

In the 80s, family arrest was very common. In 1984, when I released from prison, after they kept me inside for 15 months, without any accusation, two of my siblings were killed and were buried in unknown grave in Khavaran and three others were in notorious Evin prison.  Families like mine acted as a connecting point between families of political prisoners and executed.

In summer of 1988, when the authorities canceled all prison visits and isolated prisoners, again this group of families went to the officials to find out what was happening inside of the prisons. They felt that something terrible was happening. It was autumn of 1988, after about four months of being in the dark, we received the horrible news. My brothers, Mohammad-Ali and Mahmoud, and my brother in law, Mehrdad Panahi, were among four thousands victims of the massacre.

In 1989, the first anniversary of the 1988 prison massacre, Mothers of Khavaran decided to hold a public commemoration in Khavaran cemetery. Each year on September first or the closest Friday to it, the only semi formal commemoration inside Iran has been held In Khavaran cemetery by Mothers of Khavaran, despite of all the harassment by the IRI. In the last thirty three years, many of them have been arrested or summoned by the authorities.

Mothers of Khavaran also hold commemorations in their residence. Many times the authorities have attacked the ceremonies and summoned the participants. They have collectively gone to officials, sent collective and personal letters, filed complaints, given interviews to media outside of Iran and written numerous articles about the atrocities and harassment that the families have faced.

My mother and my sister are among them. In the 80s and 90s, my mother was summoned several times to the ministry of intelligence to prevent her pursuit of justice and truth. My sister, Mansoureh Behkish, has also been arrested and summoned many times. I was part of this group of courageous families before I immigrated to Canada in 2002.

Shirin Ebadi, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, in her book, “Golden Cage”, explains her experience when she went to Khavaran cemetery:

“I recognized the woman they called Mother, the spokes-woman of their grief… She was about seventy years old.

Mother slowly raised her arm and began to speak. The buzzing stopped,

“Today we’re here to remember. We know that blood can’t wash away blood. We are women, not guerrilla fighters. Wives and mothers and daughters and sisters who have already seen more than enough violence. Killing the murderers will not bring back the victims…”

“silence, infidel! They weren’t victims—they were traitors, and they deserved to die!”

We’d been surrounded by women and men of the goruh-e feshar. The forces that attacked and broke up public demonstrations were once again ready to act.

With the persistence of Mothers of Khavaran, Khavaran cemetery became a prominent symbol of systematic and widespread human rights violation in Iran and Mothers of Khavaran became a strong voice for truth and justice in Iran.

I agree with Kaveh Shahrooz that it is very important that the international community recognize the massacre of 1988 as a “crime against humanity”, it is long overdue.

But it is more important to emphasise that without active and effective dialogue with the younger generations, without an attempt to involve civil society in this discourse; it will not possible to pursue truth and justice.

Facing past atrocities and asking for truth and justice is a social process. Mothers of Khavaran are a nucleus for such social movement. But both opposition political parties that want to overthrow the IRI by any means and reformist faction of the IRI, who have direct and indirect responsibility for the 80s massacres are ignoring them.

 After 33 years of systematic suppression in Iran, and after 33 years resistance by some victims’ families, there is no recognition for Mothers of Khavaran and other groups of families, such as families of the victims of political killing in 1998. May be because, Mothers of Khavaran, distanced themselves from political parties. May be because the families did not discriminate against each other because of political affiliation of the victims? Or maybe because their goal was to neither forget, nor overthrow the government

They simply ask for their basic rights; why, where, when, by whom and under whose orders were the victims executed? Where are their bodies? Why aren’t the families allowed to hold commemorations in public and private spaces? Why do the authorities harass the families when they ask for their basic rights?

  .      

This year is the 25^th anniversary of the 1988 prison massacre. I urge and ask the human rights community in Canada to recognize and acknowledge the efforts that have been made by Mothers of Khavaran for truth and justice and to ask the IRI to stop their harassment.

Jafar Behkish

June 2^nd, 2013 

Note: This article was sent for publication to Ottawa Citizen Newspaper, on June 2^nd, as a complimentary article to Kavaeh Shahrooz article on 1988 prison massacre and Campagin88, published by the same newspaper. It has not been published. So I publish it in my weblog.

In defense of Marriage (Gay and Straight)

In Defense of Marriage (Gay and Straight)

Celebrations outisde the US Supreme Court after DOMA was ruled unconstitutional, Wikimedia Commons

Last week the US Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act by a vote of five to four. Shamefully, President Bill Clinton had signed this act in 1996. It outlawed federal benefits to same-sex partners of individuals who worked for the federal government, even if two same-sex individuals had been legally married in a US state. Marriage in the US is regulated by the states, and the federal government is supposed to recognize the marriages that the states authorize.

I live in Canada, where same-sex marriage has been universally recognized since 2006. Before that, most of Canada’s provincial and territorial jurisdictions had already legalized same-sex marriage, although the new government of Nunavut, whose tiny population is composed mainly of indigenous people, hadn’t got around to legalizing it yet. The anti- gay marriage lobby frequently argues that homosexual marriages will undermine male-female heterosexual marriages. Since gay marriage was legalized in Canada, there’s been no evidence that this is true. Straight people aren’t any less likely to get married because gay people can get married. If anything, gay marriage strengthens marriage as a social institution. It affirms the partnership of two people, whether gay or straight; it grants them all the legal rights and responsibilities of straight marriages; and it protects their children.

In 2005 I spent four months teaching in the human rights master’s program at the University of Goteborg in Sweden. While I was there, I was asked to spend a morning at Lund University’s Faculty of Law teaching in one of its short courses for international human rights activists. The group I taught was eleven Muslim activists from Indonesia, of whom one only (if I remember correctly) was a woman. This was a fairly liberal group of Muslims; only one man refused to shake my hand (I am a woman), and all the others stood up and offered their hands to me so that I would not be embarrassed.

The morning’s topic was human rights and cultural relativism, and I had been advised not to discuss gay rights, so of course I did. Immediately, the activists told me that they opposed gay marriage, so I said, “Let’s start at the beginning.” I wanted to see how far this group of activists would go in defending homosexuals’ rights. Should they be killed, I asked: No, was the unanimous response. Should they be imprisoned? Again, the unanimous response was no.  Should they be denied an education or a job because they are gay? Again, unanimously, no.  Should a landlord have to rent a room to a gay couple if it is in the same house he lives in?  Here, the activists defended the landlord’s right to refuse to rent the couple a room. And finally, should gay marriage be recognized?  The answer to this one was no, all around. So this group of Indonesian activists had more or less the same attitudes to homosexuals as existed in Canada around 1980, when homosexual acts were no longer illegal and discrimination against them was gradually being outlawed. 

Marriage Equality symbol, Wikimedia Commons

 I mention this discussion because of the recent upsurge of anti-homosexual lawmaking in some African and Eastern European countries. President Obama was in Senegal last week, and when he mentioned the rights of gays in his speech there the Senegalese President responded with a defense of anti-homosexual laws. It’s common in Africa now to argue that gay rights are just another Western imperialist plot (much as many Africans used to argue that women’s rights were a Western imperialist plot, until so many African women scholars, lawyers and activists started defending women’s rights that that argument became ridiculous). Also, anti-gay evangelical Christians are influencing the debate in Africa. At the same time, Russia has passed a law outlawing homosexual “propaganda.” This is a nationalist assertion of Russian “values” against the “corrupt” West, and a way for President Putin to gain cheap points against human rights defenders.

These reactions against gay rights are a worrisome trend, and show us that there is nothing inevitable about progress toward their complete defense. Gays still face execution in some countries, imprisonment in more, and rampant discrimination in many places.  But the thoughtful exploration of gay rights that I had with my class of eleven Indonesian Muslim activists in 2005 gives me hope that more and more people are beginning to acknowledge them. It will take quite a while before every country gives gays and lesbians the right to marry each other and become what they are; ordinary people who want to establish families, raise their children, and have their relationships acknowledged by their relatives, society and the state.  Indeed, this may never happen, if we are not vigilant in protecting gay rights/

I think marriage is a useful social institution. It regularizes each party’s rights and responsibilities, and makes sure that children are protected in cases of divorce or death. Society’s commitment to the relationship—through the legal institution of marriage- also strengthens the partnership. Everyone has an interest in making sure the partnership survives. Children of the partnership feel more secure knowing that their parents have legal commitments to one another. This doesn’t mean that I favor the old-fashioned patriarchal marriage that existed in Canada, and everywhere else, until the 1970s or so. But I do think it’s a good idea to defend the institution, and to extend it to everyone.

On Criticizing Israel

On Criticizing Israel

In the past few weeks I’ve had conversations with three Jewish friends about the ethics of criticizing Israel’s policies in Gaza and the West Bank.

Israel is a pariah state; the world pays much more attention to its many wrongdoings than to the terrible events than occur in many other parts of the world. I believe that the inordinate amount of attention paid to Israel in the United Nations, especially in the Human Rights Council (so-called) is partly caused by anti-Semitism. Also, as one friend pointed out, Israel is a democracy, and there’s lots of criticism of its policies from the press, academics, and activists. So there’s lots of information for the Human Rights Council and other agencies to draw on.  

Many critics also think of Israel as the last Western colony. People who hold this view often think that all Jews in Israel are from the West. But many Israeli Jews, or their immediate ancestors, are or were from the Middle East. At one point, for example, there was a large Jewish community in Baghdad, which centuries ago was a centre of Jewish learning. Critics of Israel should be aware of the many Middle Eastern Jews who live there and should accept that as the cradle of the three Abrahamic faiths, the Middle East for centuries housed Muslims, Jews and Christians living together. The ethno-religious cleansing facing Christians in some Middle Eastern countries today is another aspect of the tragedy there.

Jewish activists claim that as many as 800,000 Jews were expelled from Middle Eastern countries after the expulsion of Palestinians from Israel before and after Israeli independence in 1948 (on this, see Ian Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, London, Oneworld Publications, 2006). Some activists think that reparations to Palestinians for their expulsion from Israel should be tied to reparations to Jews for their expulsion from other Middle Eastern countries. I disagree with this point of view: Israel is a sovereign state and it is responsible for what it does, regardless of what other states do. As a pragmatic matter, financial reparation to displaced Palestinians is a crucial aspect of the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Another criticism that bothers me is comparison of Israel to Nazism. A couple of years ago, some students at my university staging “Israel Apartheid Week” put up a poster of a man in striped pajamas lying behind a fence: the idea was to compare the situation of Palestinians to that of Jews in Nazi concentration camps. As one of the students said to me, “Oppression is oppression, right?” But she wasn’t right. If Israel were a Nazi state, there would be no Palestinian problem. The Palestinians under Israeli control would have been long-since murdered. Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli attack on the Gaza strip in 2008-9, would have killed one and a half million people, not (at the upper estimate) 1400. We should be able to criticize Israel without making such a nefarious comparison.

Israeli apartheid week is a week to suggest that Israel is imposing apartheid on Palestinians. Indeed, some aspects of Israeli control of the West Bank resemble apartheid, especially the existence of Jewish-only settlements and the existence of segregated roads (about which I wrote in my post of May 17, 2013) on which Jewish, but not Palestinian, residents of the West Bank can travel. There is also de facto and de jure discrimination against Palestinian citizens within Israel. I oppose all these measures, as I also oppose declaration of Israel as a Jewish state. I am against all full or partial theocracies, even though Israel does not prevent citizens from other religions from practicing their own faith.

But as one of my Jewish friends, originally from South Africa, said to me, apartheid there was a much more pervasive system. Blacks could not vote or form political parties. They were not allowed in “White” cities without passes. And families were often split up, with mothers and children legally confined to Bantustans while fathers worked in the cities or the mines. Everyone was racially classified: families were split up if the government deemed that members did not all belong to the same “race.” This is not a defense of the many discriminatory aspects of life for Palestinian citizens of Israel, but it does point out some of the differences.  Palestinians in Israel can vote, can form political parties, and they do have freedom of movement. The government does not deliberately separate their families or use “racial” criteria to judge who can live with whom.

Another criticism of Israel is the contention that Zionism is racism. I am sure there are some Zionists who are indeed racists against Arabs. But Zionism is principally a philosophy that argues for a Jewish homeland. Some Zionists think that means they should be allowed to take over the West Bank, which they call Judea and Samaria. I don’t think they should: again, Israel is a sovereign state, and it should follow international law, which says that its settlements in the West Bank are illegal; indeed, they are theft of Arab land and water.  But the key here is, indeed, land, not race. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is about land, although it’s also morphed partially into a religious conflict, in part because of the world-wide rise of Islamism. 

So these criticisms of Israel: that Israel is a Western colony; that Israelis are like Nazis; that Israel is an apartheid state; and that Zionism is racism, all have serious flaws. They are rhetorical exaggerations that don’t help to solve the very real problems of Israel’s increasing occupation of the West Bank and its control over Gaza. I don’t like Israel’s policies, but I think the best way to criticize it is to refer to international human rights, humanitarian law, and the laws of occupation. Israel is a state that has the right to exist without being attacked, but as a state, it has to follow the same laws as any other state. We shouldn’t demonize Israel.

Henry Morgentaler: Canadian Abortion Rights Pioneer

Henry Morgentaler (right) with NDP leader Jack Layton (left), 2005,
Wikimedia Commons

Henry Morgentaler died this week at the age of 90. Morgentaler was a hero of Canada’s abortion rights movement. A medical doctor, he began giving safe, clean and relatively inexpensive abortions in his office in Montreal in the late 1960s, at a time when all abortions were illegal. He opened abortion clinics in Montreal, Toronto and elsewhere when abortions became legal but only under very restricted conditions: women had to go before a board of three doctors (usually all men, since there were very few women doctors in those days). He underwent numerous legal battles to enlarge women’s rights to abortion on demand, without the humiliation of going before three doctors for approval. Three juries in the province of Quebec refused to convict him of illegally providing abortions. In 1988, the Supreme Court of Canada outlawed all restrictions on abortions, although abortions are still provincially regulated and subject to doctors’ codes of ethics. During this long battle, Morgentaler even spent a brief stint in jail.

I remember well what it meant for women to have no rights whatsoever to abortion. I was an undergraduate student at McGill University in Montreal from 1965 to 1969.  From 1965 to 1967 I lived in McGill’s extremely strict women’s residence, Royal Victoria College, where there were curfews, no men were allowed in your room, and the woman in charge of us all was called the “warden.”  In my first year there, one of the girls down the hall from me was caught by police in a raid, in the middle of her abortion. The warden expelled her from the residence, which meant she was expelled from the university too, and her friends were told not to come back the next year.

Henry Morgentaler during a December 1983 freedom of
choice rally in Ottawa
Source: Vancouver Sun, http://www.vancouversun.com/news/
commitment+womens+right+choose/8453944/story.html

Later that year another girl I knew told me she was pregnant. I tried to help her by calling the local Unitarian Minister for information: he gave me Dr. Morgentaler’s name, which I passed on, but my friend didn’t follow up. Eventually she went for a back street abortion.

In 1968 another girl I knew needed an abortion. I went with her in a taxi to an address she had been given: she went into the house but came right back out again, saying the place was filthy. Then, fortunately, someone reminded me of Morgentaler again. My friend went to him instead: the price was $300, his clinic was clean and safe, and there was a nurse there to help. My friend came back with an expression of great relief on her face and nothing but praise for Morgentaler and his nurse.

I mention the price because Morgentaler was a Jew, a survivor of Auschwitz who arrived in Canada in 1950. Occasionally I’ve heard or read accusations about how his clinics were dirty (not true) or about how he was in the abortion business to make money. These are common stereotypes about Jews, and it’s a shame to see the debate about abortion sullied by these untrue accusations.

I’m not happy that women still have to have abortions. I think abortion is a social tragedy, and I would much rather live in a world in which no woman or girl ever had to have an abortion.  Among other things, the more rights women have, and the more access both males and females have to sex education and birth control, the fewer unwanted pregnancies—hence the fewer demands for abortion. But we certainly don’t live yet in a world where all these conditions obtain, and even if we did, women are always subject to coerced sexual relations. Until we do, women need the right to abortion on demand.

 So I, for one, am extremely grateful not only for the clean, safe and relatively inexpensive abortion services Henry Morgentaler provided, but also for his willingness to engage in legal battles and even go to jail on behalf of women’s right to abortion. I know he didn’t do this alone: it took decades of feminist activity to obtain this right in Canada, and we are still in danger that it will be revoked. But I will always remember the relief my friend at McGill felt after her safe, clean, and compassionate treatment at Henry Morgentaler’s clinic in 1968.

Property Rights of West Bank Palestinians

Property Rights of West Bank Palestinians

A rather neglected aspect of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights is Article 17,  “Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others: No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.” This is a right that the state of Israel has denied to Palestinians in the occupied West Bank since 1967.



Israeli Separation Wall to West Bank. The graffiti is German for "I am a Berliner", a reference to US President John F. Kennedy's 26 June 1963 speech in Berlin where he expressed solidarity with West Berliners over the Berlin Wall which separated West and East Berlin (1961 to 1989), Wikimedia Commons

I’m interested in this problem because I am working on causes of the high rate of malnutrition among Palestinians, as part of my larger research project on the right to food (other case studies are North Korea, Zimbabwe and Venezuela).  According to figures from the Food and Agriculture Organization, the percentage of people in the Occupied Palestinian Territories who were undernourished increased from 18 in 1990 to 31 in 2010; the percentage of people who suffered from food inadequacy (a measurement of food deficiency for normal physical activity) increased from 26.6 in 1990 to 42.4 in 2010.  One reason for this malnutrition is that Israeli authorities and Jewish settlers have taken over Palestinian farmlands in the West Bank.

Israeli and other Jews settle in the West Bank because of their beliefs in political Zionism, because they believe that the West Bank is actually Jewish holy land, or simply because housing is cheaper in the West Bank than in Israel proper. By 2011 it was estimated that 325,000 Jewish settlers lived in the West Bank. The Israeli government actively encourages these settlements, although it sometimes tears down ones that it considers illegal. For example, it offers tax exemptions, grants and loans to settlers.

These arbitrary settlements and expropriations mean that West Bank Palestinians enjoy no property rights. Without property rights, their farms, grazing lands, citrus and olive groves are routinely expropriated without any compensation. Subsistence cultivation is thus undermined. Land seizures also affect Palestinians who cultivate food for commercial purposes, exporting it and using the earnings to feed their families.

Since 2000 things have become worse, as Israel has built a wall to separate Israel—and illegally settled Jewish territory—from Palestinians. In 2004 the International Court of Justice declared it illegal for Israel to build this wall on Palestinian territory, but Israel paid no attention. The wall meanders through Palestinian territory, often cutting off Palestinians from their own farms. There’s also a “seam zone” between the legal borders of Israel and the wall, and Palestinians living in that zone are cut off from their land. Segregated Jewish-only settlement areas, and highways on which Jewish residents of the West Bank can travel but Palestinian residents can't, also take over land and cut off Palestinians from their farms.

Yet expropriation of private property by an occupying power is illegal except for military needs. The 1907 Hague Convention, Article 46, states “Private property cannot be confiscated.” Although the Israelis claim otherwise, The Hague conventions are part of international customary law, meaning that they are binding on all states. Nor is the Israeli argument that settlements improve Israel’s security, and are therefore legal, acceptable under international law, although many settlements are built on hilltops and thus serve the function of surveillance over Palestinian lands below.  

The 1949 Geneva Convention further outlaws destruction of property in the occupied area. Settlements and any purchase of land by settlers are illegal, even if the settlers purchase land from an individual who was ostensibly willing to sell. Moreover, the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits transfers of part of the occupiers’ civilian population into the territory it occupies. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court describes “extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly” as a war crime. It also states that “the transfer, directly or indirectly, by the Occupying Power of parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies” is a war crime.  Israel, though, is not a party to the Rome Statute.

Some people think it is anti-Semitic to criticize Israel’s policies in the Occupied Territories. It isn’t. Israel is a state: like any other state, it must obey international law. Many Jews, both in Israel and elsewhere, are opposed to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and its brutal treatment of Palestinians.

          For more on the right to own property, see my forthcoming “Reconsidering the Right to Own Property,” in Journal of Human Rights, vol. 12, no. 2 or 3, 2013. Or email me at hassmann@wlu.ca for a copy. In this article my examples are Zimbabwe and Venezuela, not Palestine.

The Magdalene Laundries: Forced Labor by the Irish Catholic Church (or was it Slavery?)

The Magdalene Laundries: Forced Labor by the Irish Catholic Church (or was it Slavery?)

This post is about what used to happen to young women who were thought to be, or in danger of becoming, promiscious. In Ireland, such young women were called "Magdalenes" and were locked up in Roman Catholic institutions.

When I was a teenager, there were “good” girls and “bad” girls. Bad girls had sex before marriage, and if they became pregnant they were often sent away in shame to have their babies in secret (this happened to a couple of women I know, now both professors). Or, the girl and the father were coerced into marriage. There was no welfare available then for unmarried mothers, so pregnant girls who didn’t marry normally had to give up their babies for adoption (abortion was illegal as well in those days, as was birth control for unmarried women). Really “bad” girls, if I remember correctly, were considered promiscuous and incorrigible, and some were institutionalized to keep them out of harm’s way. That was right here in southern Ontario, Canada, where I still live.



Magdalene Laundry in Ireland, Wikimedia Commons

 Three months ago in Ireland, on February 19, 2013, the Taoiseach (Prime Minister) apologized to women who suffered a far worse fate than the “bad” girls who were around when I grew up in Canada. You can find his apology at the political apologies website that my research assistants and I maintain, at
http://political-apologies.wlu.ca/details.php?table=doc_press&id=835 .

The Catholic Church of Ireland maintained institutions known as the Magdalene Laundries (Mary Magdalene was an important follower of Jesus Christ, but for centuries she was thought to have been a “fallen woman,” a repentant prostitute, and was pictured as such in much Western art: the fact that Jesus respected her was ignored by the same misogynistic Western culture). Girls and women were sent to live and work at the Magdalene Laundries if the authorities, either secular or Church, thought they had been, or were in danger of becoming, sexual deviants: that is, women who had sexual relations outside of marriage. Others were referred to the laundries because they had played truant from school or came from dysfunctional families. In general, the Laundries were a safe place to store women who didn’t conform to the restrictive social norms of Catholic Ireland.

I heard one survivor of incarceration in these laundries interviewed on As It Happens, a radio program of the Canadian Broadcasting Company. She was incarcerated in the laundries merely because she had a boyfriend and the Church thought she might have sexual relations with him outside of marriage. Apparently it didn’t occur to the Church that she and the boy were in love and might get married. She used to see her boyfriend out the window of the laundry but she couldn’t speak to him. She is one of about 800-1,000 women still in Ireland who are survivors of the Laundries.

The girls and women incarcerated in the Magdalene Laundries were forced to work all day long doing laundry for hotels, restaurants, and prisons. They weren’t paid; the money they made went to the Church. If they escaped, they were easily recognizable in their uniforms and would be returned to the Laundries, which were overseen by nuns. Not that the nuns would have benefitted much from this system either, since they had to turn the money over to the Church.

So this was undoubtedly forced labor. These girls and women were incarcerated against their will, they couldn’t escape, they had to work whether they wanted to or not, and they were not paid. The Irish government has recognized this and intends to pay them compensation, as well as erecting some sort of memorial to them. This is the right thing to do.

But I wonder if rather than referring to the inmates of the Magdalene Laundries as forced laborers, we shouldn’t call them slaves? The Forced Labor Convention of 1930 defines forced labor as “all work or service which is exacted from any person under the menace of any penalty and for which the said person has not offered himself voluntarily.” This seems to describe the Magdalenes, who did not offer themselves voluntarily for unpaid work in the laundries.

The 1926 Slavery Convention, still the most relevant legal document, defines slavery as “the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised.” The Catholic Church didn’t claim to own the Magdalene woman, but it did exercise de facto ownership. Not only were they forced to work without pay, some of the women spent their entire lives in the laundries, never released. The government, moreover, was complicit in their incarceration, handing them over to the authority of the Catholic Church. You might object that they weren’t sold, but being available for sale isn’t a necessary aspect of slavery; you can be enslaved without being part of the slave trade.

Nowadays, we know a lot about sex slavery and human trafficking, a huge problem in the globalized world and one of the worst consequences of poverty. The Magdalenes were enslaved to keep them away from sex, not to force them into it (though since everywhere else that people were institutionalized by the Church, in every country of the world,  a lot of sexual abuse went on, it probably did in the Laundries too). It’s not clear when forced labor morphs into slavery, but the treatment of the Magdalenes certainly raises the question.

There’s a great 2002 movie, the Magdalene Sisters, about the laundries. It’s fiction, but the DVD I saw it on included a documentary featuring some of the real Magdalene survivors. It’s useful to keep this shameful episode in Ireland in mind when we read about the treatment of “fallen” women in other parts of the world today.  

Book Note: Izzeldin Abuelaish's I Shall Not Hate

Book Note:

 Izzeldin Abuelaish’s I Shall Not Hate

This past month I started research on the causes of the high rates of malnutrition in Gaza and the West Bank and decided to read Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish’s I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor’s Journey (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2011). Abuelaish is an obstetrician/gynecologist who has practiced in Israel with Jewish Israeli colleagues: currently he lives in Canada.

As you might remember, Israel fought a brief war in Gaza in 2008-09, in which from about 1150 to 1450 Palestinians were killed, according to the Abuelaish and the Goldstone Report on the war. Abuelaish stayed at home in Gaza during this war with his eight children and various relatives (his wife had died of leukemia a few months earlier). In the afternoon of January 15, 2009, several of his daughters and nieces went to their bedroom to read and do homework. Suddenly, a rocket hit their room. Three daughters and a niece ware killed. Abuelaish saw his daughters’ body parts all over the room; one daughter was decapitated. Another daughter was alive, but standing with one eye on her cheek and and one finger dangling from its skin. Because of his contacts with the Israeli media and his medical colleagues, Abuelaish was able to get his daughter and one of her injured cousins to hospital in Israel and save his daughter’s eyesight. Most Palestinians were not as fortunate.  Abuelaish describes in horrifying detail what it’s like to live under bombardment, afraid to go out, afraid at any moment that one will be attacked.

Abuelaish also describes the day-to-day humiliation and harassment of Palestinians from Gaza trying to live ordinary lives. Even as a doctor who, as the border guards knew, worked in an Israeli hospital, he was frequently harassed, forced to spend hours waiting before he could cross into Israel each Monday and return home each Thursday. When his wife was dying, he was in Europe.  Obliged to return earlier than expected, he had to get multiple new travel permits. As a Palestinian, he was not allowed to fly directly into Israel and had to go to Jordan instead, then cross the border. What should have been a very short journey took him hours and hours, as various guards and officials calmly ignore his pleas to get to his wife’s bedside as soon as possible.

I usually find bromides such as “the torturer is degraded as much as the tortured”  irritating.  I think there are a lot of people out there who live very happy lives despite the awful work they do, as Robert Jay Lifton explained in 1986 through his concept of “doubling” which explained why SS doctors could oversee the mass murder of Jews every day, then happily go home to a normal family life in the evening (see Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors; Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, New York: Basic Books, 1986).  But I think the Israeli-Arab conflict has indeed degraded Israeli soldiers. Yes, there is a genuine problem of security because of suicide bombings and rockets sent from Gaza into southern Israel (both of which Abuelaish opposes). But there are also people trying to cross from Gaza to Israel to obtain emergency medical treatment, detained for hours at a stretch, and women giving birth at the border post because they can’t get across to the Israeli hospital. Abulaish’s intimate description of the humiliating treatment with which he had to put up, even as a doctor, gives only a hint of what less well-known Palestinians must experience. The Israeli guards sound arrogant, cruel, and full of hate; they seem to enjoy causing unnecessary suffering.  This is indeed degradation, and one wonders what its long-term effects are on Israelis, since so many people spend some time in compulsory military service when they are young. (Super-religious Jews don’t have to serve in the military, but that’s another story).

In my last post I wrote about Holocaust reparations, and how fragile reconciliation can be. The Israeli government admitted that the attack on Abuelaish’s house had been a mistake, and promised him compensation for his daughters’ deaths, but as of the time of publication of his book he had not received anything. And the Israeli government did not apologize: it should have. It is amazing that Dr. Abuelaish can say, “I shall not hate.” In his circumstances, I certainly would.

I will write more on Israel/Palestine as I learn more.

How (Not) to Pay Reparations

How (Not) to Pay Reparations

APRIL 17, 2013. IMPORTANT MESSAGE TO READERS: PLEASE READ THIS WHOLE POST. IT TURNS OUT HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS DO NOT HAVE TO PAY TAXES ON THEIR REPARATIONS MONEY TO GERMANY: I AM GRATEFUL TO DR. ANJA MIHR FOR FIGURING THIS OUT FOR ME.

A few weeks ago I was having a conversation with an acquaintance about reparations from Germany for the Holocaust. Miriam (not her real name) was still recovering from the death of her husband Jake (not his real name either) a few months earlier. Jake, who was Jewish, had been a child spy. At the age of nine, he saw his father shot dead in the street. Then his mother and sister fled and he was taken to live in the forest, where he stayed for 18 months, sometimes visiting his Polish home town during the day to gather information about the German occupiers. Later, Jake was taken in by a Czech officer in the Red Army and continued his career as both a child spy and a child soldier. When the SS captured him and tortured him to give up the location of his Red Army unit, he instead led 120 Germans into an ambush.

Jake received reparations from the German government. A few weeks ago, out of the blue, Miriam received a letter from German authorities telling her that Jake’s estate owed taxes on the reparations, going back to 2005, when apparently a law had been passed that recipients of reparations now had to pay taxes on them. Miriam received a lot of paperwork, all of it in German except one piece of paper in English describing how to pay the taxes. A friend of Miriam’s received the same notification of back taxes.

Needless to say, Miriam was outraged. She reacted the way every Jewish person who received this notification probably reacted, “He’s already paid!”  Every surviving victim of the Holocaust receiving reparations could cite family members killed, starvation and torture endured, property lost, and so on. I doubt that anyone ever expected to be taxed by the Germany government on money it owed to victims of the Nazis.

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin Wikimedia Commons

Incensed, Miriam telephoned Germany twice: both times the people on the other end refused to speak English to her. Perhaps they didn’t know English. But that doesn’t explain the employee of the German Embassy in Ottawa who also told Miriam she should speak German, since she was “taking” money from the German government. Miriam pointed out that the Embassy was in Canada, where the official languages are English and French.

What does this tell us about how not to pay reparations? Despite all the talk these days in the human rights community about transitional justice and reconciliation, it takes an awfully long time to “reconcile,” to build up trust between the former perpetrators and the former victims of genocide. Time may pass, but to the victims it’s as if everything happened yesterday.

Apologies by perpetrators to victims of mass atrocities are an important part of reconciliation. I’ve published an on-line, open-access article called “Official Apologies” in Transitional Justice Review, (vol.1, no. 1, 2012) which you can find here http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/tjreview/vol1/iss1/9. In it, I argue that the chief function of an apology is “the restoration of civil relationships between the apologizer and recipients.” This is a thin form of reconciliation: the former perpetrators and the former victims can get along in the public sphere, in work, in the marketplace, in schools, and so forth.  But even to get along on this thin level, certain steps must be undertaken.

An important part of reconciliation is acknowledgement of the crime that was committed: the perpetrators must acknowledge their actions. The Embassy employee who told Miriam that she was “taking” money from Germany “de-acknowledged” the Holocaust. As a representative of the German government, she should have known about the Nazi crimes and she should have been trained to treat every Jewish person who contacted her about reparations with respect.  Perhaps she was young, and considered the Nazi period ancient history.

If reconciliation is to last, it’s also important that the former victims be able to trust the representatives of the former perpetrators. All German governments since 1945 have been successor governments to the Nazis. The people who work for these successor governments are responsible to try to rectify the Nazi crimes as best they can. I don’t know if Miriam or the other people who received letters about back taxes trusted the German government before they received them, but my guess is that it’s hard for them to trust it now. The Germans have broken an implicit apology and promise: we know we harmed you, we are sorry, we want to make amends and we will do so in part by paying you reparations for all that you have lost. A real apology contains remorse, but the German bureaucrats—and especially the Embassy employee--who refused to respond to Miriam in English were not at all remorseful.

My guess is that it is not only Miriam who has lost trust in the German government; every Jewish person she told this story to has also lost trust. Survivors of the Holocaust have already paid the Germans, a thousand times over. Reparations are supposed to repair damaged relationships: The German expression is “wiedergutmachung,” making things good again. For Miriam, her friend, and other Jewish people who received the tax letter, the German government is making things bad again; it’s turning pain and suffering into a taxable financial transaction.

So this is an example of how not to reconcile and how not to pay reparations.

IMPORTANT UPDATE AND CORRECTION

After I posted the entry above, I sent it to a German colleague and scholar of human rights, Dr. Anja Mihr, www.anjamihr.com. . She very kindly did some research and sent me the following information:

“[T] German parliament has changed laws for all people receiving money from German pensions funds, regardless whether they live in Germany or abroad. Pensions are taxed nowadays for everybody. Thus all people receive these letters in German and since Holocaust victims get their compensations out of the German pension funds…these letters were sent in German. Victims of the Holocaust and forced labor, survivors of concentration camps and others are exempted from this tax but need to write an exemption clause to the embassy. A quick look at the website explains, in English and French.

http://www.canada.diplo.de/Vertretung/kanada/en/02/pension/compensation/compensation__taxation.html#topic10  “

Dr. Anja Mihr, www.anjamihr.com

Thus, the good news, as Anja explains, is that people receiving reparations for the Holocaust or forced labour don’t have to pay taxes on them after all. I will certainly tell Miriam this and explain to her how to get an exemption. But this still doesn’t explain the insensitivity of the whole affair. Why did the German pension administrators send these letters to survivors in the first place? Surely they have a master list of survivors who receive reparations. Instead of frightening survivors with correspondence in German which seemed to suggest they had to pay taxes, they could just have consulted this master list and not send letters to these people. (Anja also told me that normally, the German foundations that administer reparations communicate with recipients in their own languages, whatever they may be.) And why weren’t all employees at the Ottawa Embassy instructed to assist survivors or family members who telephoned about these tax letters?  I’ve just tried to access the website Anja pointed me to, without success: most survivors are much older than I am and would probably find accessing a website more difficult than I do (if they know how to do this at all.)

Miriam’s reaction to the letter she received was “He’s already paid.” She was extremely angry and hurt because—she thought—the German government was taxing the reparations Jake had received. Perhaps it would be a good idea for the German Government to remedy this affair by being pro-active. It could simply delete the names of all recipients of reparations from the list of pensioners obliged to pay taxes, instead of expecting these elderly people to figure out the correspondence they received. Then the Embassy in Ottawa could send letters to all survivors who’ve received these letters explaining in languages they understand—presumably English or French for most in Canada—that they do not have to pay taxes after all. And the German government could apologize for putting the survivors and their families through this upsetting procedure.