Rosa Parks has died, having been blessed with longevity and an activist spirit. Her act of defiance on an Alabama bus in 1955 will no doubt be reviewed and celebrated by mourners and observers this month. But it?s not only Americans who should recall the lessons taught during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Nor are the ethical imperatives of civil rights confined to the struggle for racial equality; so too can the Middle East stand to contemplate her legacy. The problem remains that the rights of humans ? and of the groups we create for ourselves ? too often appear contradictory in their claims. Security or sovereignty? Symbols or self-determination? And most basically, my rights or yours?
Zionism emerged at the end of the nineteenth century as a collective solution to a human rights problem, though its framers did not speak in the language of human rights, that peculiarly twentieth-century construction. A self-perceived parasitic existence coupled with anti-Semitism within host countries, culminating in the Holocaust, led Zionists to frame the problem of national displacement in the context of collective regeneration ? both mental and physical. And while much ink has been spilled in debating the route to the creation of the State of Israel and its regional effects, certainly it is widely agreed that Israel?s appearance on the world stage created a massive Palestinian refugee problem, whether a product of malicious intent or willful ignorance.
Fast forward twenty years to the 1967 Six Day War and another almost four decades of West Bank (and until two months ago, the Gaza Strip) occupation, and the language of civil rights has taken on a new tone. The problem in the Israeli-Palestinian nexus is that both sides view their human rights as intrinsically trod upon by the other, and, as Yossi Alpher has written concerning the different meanings of violence in the Middle East, neither side can agree on what constitutes rights in this context. It is clear that Palestinians lack a state, a passport, and the intellectual freedom borne by participating in the project of national sovereignty. And, at the more day-to-day level, Palestinian autonomy is curtailed by closures and checkpoints punctured by harsh Israeli military reprisals and random acts of settler violence. For extremist Palestinians, fuelled by the Islamic movement, the existence of Israel itself constitutes a violation of collective Palestinian civil rights ? couched in the language of absolutist religion — that must be redressed. For Palestinian moderates, the occupation represents a curtailment of national human rights, and must be ended and replaced with a Palestinian state ? already one that will have represented a mere fraction of what would have been the case had historic Palestine become a sovereign Arab state in the post-colonial period, rather than a Jewish one.
Israelis, for their part, focus on security as a human right: at its most basic, the freedom of being able to go about day-to-day affairs without the haunting fear of being a victim of a suicide bombing. Certainly, the global climate in the wake of 9/11 and the subsequent attacks on Madrid and London have made not only Israelis fearful of terrorism, but it is Israel that has experienced the concentration and frequency of attacks that almost no other state has faced. For most Israelis, the ongoing occupation of the West Bank and the erection of a fence to curb Palestinian attacks is considered a necessary response to Palestinian violence spurred by rejection of Israel?s legitimacy. Yet for some, the Israeli presence in the West Bank is an expression of God?s will; and for others, it is a moral scourge eating away at the fabric of society.
While both sides conveniently couch their claims in the language of 21-century international politicking ? sovereignty, security, human rights, violence, terrorism, neither has a copy of the other?s dictionary. Palestinians think that Israel?s existence represents a violation of the historical claim of Palestinians to their birthright; Israelis think that Palestinians? rejection of the Jewish state is simply an expression of hatred.
Even the land-for-peace mantra promoted by successive U.S. Administrations is understood differently by both sides: Israelis feel that withdrawal from the territories represents a concession; Palestinians feel that accepting their dispossession from pre-1948 Palestine is a concession. The problem in the halting peace process is that neither side is willing to truly listen to the position of the other, for fear of the potentially slippery slope leading from listening to past wounds to acknowledgment of past guilt. Human rights may be the sine qua non of this conflict, but until each side can recognize the other?s fundamental self-perceived needs ? no less the other?s humanity, a solution will be far off. And the civil rights lessons that Rosa Parks taught will be sadly confined to the American south, far from those areas of the world that need them just as urgently.
