Pollak on the Human Rights Delegation

Joel Pollak had an article 2 days ago in the Cape Times, which appeared alongside a piece from one of the organisers of the Human Rights Delegation to Israel, Nathan Geffen.

Pollak has himself been on many of the tours that the delegation went on. His human rights credentials in the region are noteworthy - Pollak volunteered for the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) last year.

It's an excellent article so I am reproducing it in its entirety.

South African mission went wearing blinkers and predictably found what it was looking for By Joel Pollak If nothing else, the recent South African "fact-finding" mission to Israel and the West Bank will be remembered for its speed. The participants arrived on a Sunday and left before the end of the week, having discovered the truth of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in just a few short days - a truth that has eluded Israelis and Palestinians themselves for decades. Their task was made easier by the fact that most of the participants had declared their conclusions well in advance. Only a month before, for example, mission organiser Doron Isaacs had called on Nadine Gordimer to boycott a writers' conference in Israel. Mondli Makhanya, editor of the Sunday Times and fact-finding delegate, had previously declared Israel to be "one of the world's most oppressive regimes". Yet another participant, Nathan Geffen of the Treatment Action Campaign, had spoken out against Israel on several occasions. In 2006, for example, he co-signed a letter blaming Israel for the human tragedy of the Second Lebanon War - and saying nothing about Hezbollah, which started it. The participants saw what they expected to see. Theirs was a fact-finding mission in the narrowest sense - a scavenger hunt, a propaganda pilgrimage on which the faithful ticked off stations on the Via Dolorosa of Palestinian suffering. I know, because I have been to the same places, on the same tours. I even worked as a legal intern for the Association of Civil Rights in Israel, learning first-hand about the suffering of Palestinians and the positive role played by the Israeli judiciary in upholding human rights. I saw many things that troubled me deeply. I saw the terrible effects of conflict and extremism on both sides, and I witnessed suffering that cannot be explained away. But I also saw how some guides carefully selected the "facts" they served up to gullible foreign visitors- - translating anti-Arab graffiti in the Hebron market, for example, to show how hateful Israelis could be, while ignoring pro-peace slogans scrawled in Hebrew on the same walls. I saw how some human rights activists found it convenient to forget there are two sides to the conflict when they played to foreign audiences eager to experience righteous outrage against the Jewish state. I have also been to places that the South African fact-finding mission did not go - the border communities near Gaza, for example, where Israeli civilians have suffered thousands of rocket attacks in the past several years, and where many struggle with post-traumatic stress as a result. I have been to the bomb shelters of the north, where Arab and Jewish children cowered together during the war as Hezbollah rockets rained down on their homes. These were facts the mission did not find, because they were not looking for them. It's interesting to note the participation of Judge Dennis Davis on the mission. Davis is a former chair of the Cape Council of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies. I remember well Davis's principled stand in defence of openness and diversity of opinion in 2003, when I and several others went to Israel on a media trip organised by the Israeli foreign ministry and partially subsidised by the Cape Town Jewish community. A fellow delegate and I insisted on visiting the West Bank with the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem, to hear the other side of the story. In the controversy that followed, Davis took our side. But I must ask: where is that principled stand now? Why did he not suggest a detour from this fact-finding mission's embarrassingly one-sided itinerary? A morning with the shell-shocked residents of Sderot, for example? A visit to the Jerusalem yeshiva whose calm was shattered earlier this year by an Arab terrorist who killed eight students and wounded 15 others as they read the Jewish holy books? Or would such detours have forced the fact-finding mission to reconsider their prefabricated opinions, and to see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the complex phenomenon it is? It was a parliamentary fact-finding mission back in July 2001 that created the backdrop for Minister Ronnie Kasrils's "declaration of conscience". The debate in South Africa about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has not progressed much since then. In the West Bank, I've found that what you conclude depends on the questions you dare to ask, as well as who you ask. The city of Hebron, for example, which the group visited, is split between Arabs and Jews, with the Palestinian Authority controlling most of the area. Did delegates ask why this is so? Did they bother to study the Hebron Agreement of 1997? Did they ask about the suicide bombing of 2003? The bloodshed of years before? It is interesting to note the presence of a large contingent of Treatment Action Campaign activists on the mission. It reminds me of an episode during our breakaway visit to the West Bank with B'Tselem. On the drive back to Jerusalem, our Palestinian guide peppered us with questions about life in post-apartheid South Africa. He seemed especially interested in the HIV/Aids pandemic, and had a rather bizarre suggestion to offer. "You should put all the people with Aids in a separate city, all by themselves," he declared earnestly. "That way, they won't be able to infect everybody else." His Israeli counterparts were horrified. "A concentration camp?" one asked indignantly. It was a stark reminder to us of how difficult it is for even human rights activists to see beyond their narrow, particular experiences and perspectives. The reality that has emerged for me from my visits to the West Bank is that Israel is far from perfect, but at least it has human rights organisations that are able to operate freely. On the Palestinian side, there is no comparable human rights culture. Only a handful of activists - such as Bassem Eid, who left B'Tselem to become the first to document the Palestinian Authority's abuses against its own people - are brave enough to speak out and face the danger of arrest or violent reprisal by Palestinian groups. But as Eid told me in his office in East Jerusalem last year, Israel is not the problem. The real stumbling block is the failure of Palestinians to build a successful state and stable civil society institutions. Nation-building is where the South African mission could have offered some useful advice to Palestinians. But then, of course, there's plenty of trouble with nation-building back home. Perhaps Israel should send a fact-finding mission to South Africa. Pollak is the author of the forthcoming book "The Kasrils Affair: Jews and Minority Politics in Post-Apartheid South Africa", from UCT Press. Published on the web by Cape Times on August 4, 2008. http://www.capetimes.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=4542328

Update: Just realised that Joel has resumed blogging at Guide to the Perplexed.

Comments

[graeme]

this is not balanced reporting
it is just a bunch of point counter point propaganda notes
balance means BOTH sides issues are explored...if you look for anti-israel, do you also look for anti-palestinian
shmuck
ten li shalom not bullshit

[Steve]

"ten li shalom not bullshit"

err...excuse me sir, but that is bullshit.

Please do send me anti-Palestinian diatribe from the local press in SA and I will gladly write about it.

Shmuck.

[BLACKLISTED DICTATOR]

Steve,
What if the Chief Rabbi's wife were to read this "shmuck" stuff??

[BLACKLISTED DICTATOR]

Guys,
Joel has received quite an accolade in Tony Leon's autobiography. We are not the only ones to be impressed by Joel Barry Pollak!