Exposed: The racism of anti-Israel ‘human rights’ organizations

Adalah (‘Justice’ in Arabic), a Palestinian “human rights” group based in Israel, says it “only helps the Palestinians who are suing the State of Israel.”

By: Judith Bergman, MIDA

The numerous foreign funded “human rights” organizations who operate in Israel do not actually care about human rights. In fact, recent events have shown that they do not seem to care about human beings as such, either. Instead, they are what most Israelis have always suspected them of being, namely political actors, who have organized themselves cleverly in benign sounding “rights” organizations in order to better pursue their nefarious agendas of destroying the state of Israel through “lawfare.”

Last summer, the Jerusalem District Court determined that the Palestinian Authority (PA) was responsible for the kidnapping, torture and murder of dozens of suspected Arab “collaborators” within Israel, several of them with Israeli citizenship, between 1995 and 2002. The court proceedings unveiled grueling testimonies of Arabs who had been subjected to the most heinous torture in the cellars of the PA’s detention centers.

The PA naturally denied all allegations, but the presiding judge ruled that the accumulation of evidence made it clear that the PA was guilty of severe torture, as well as murder. The torture included the so-called shabah position — widely used in PA prisons — in which the victim is hung from the ceiling for several hours and beaten all over his body.

According to the verdict, the torture also included electric shocks, the pouring of boiling plastic on the body, tearing out nails and breaking teeth, sterilization, sleep deprivation, food and drink deprivation, sexual assault and the rape of family members. The PA also asked doctors to worsen the conditions of the prisoners, such as injecting urine into the prisoners’ blood veins.

The verdict concluded that the PA is responsible for the torture and therefore liable for damages to the victims, whose lives it ruined. However, in order to realize the compensation, the victims need to provide medical evaluations of their conditions by medical experts, which is a very costly procedure.

15 Groups Refuse Plea from Torture Victims

According to a report by Israel Hayom, attorneys Barak Kedem and Aryeh Arbus turned to 15 human rights organizations to obtain their assistance in paying for the costly evaluations. “These are broken people in their bodies and souls, who…cannot afford to pay for professional opinions, which cost thousands of shekels for every opinion,” the attorneys wrote in their plea to the 15 organizations.

Among the 15 organizations were Adalah, Amnesty International, B’Tselem, the New Israel Fund, Rabbis for Human Rights, Yesh Din, Physicians for Human Rights and the Committee for the Prevention of Torture. Only the last two offered assistance, whereas the rest either ignored the plea or responded negatively.

Adalah said that the organization “only helps the Palestinians who are suing the State of Israel.” Amnesty International said that “the organization does not have the professional tools to address the needs” of the victims, whereas Yesh Din expressed “feelings of anger and pain,” but explained that they could not help because they “represent victims of violations when they are harmed by Israeli authorities or Israeli citizens.”

Let us properly digest this information: “Human Rights” organizations that the EU, Western European governments and other foreign bodies lavishly fund, ostensibly in order to fight for the human rights of Arabs, callously disregard the heinous violations of those very human rights, when the violations are perpetrated by the PA.

By so openly showing that they discard human beings as worthless of assistance, when they are not the “victims” of Jews, these human rights organizations have finally proven that Arab lives mean nothing to them, unless they can exploit them to further the political agendas that their European and other sponsors are funding them to pursue.

Treating Human Beings as a Means to an End

It is rare to see such cynical instrumentalization of human lives, especially coming from organizations whose very raison d’etre is supposed to be about caring for those lives. Treating human beings as means to an end constitutes a particularly foul kind of racism.

Notably, there has been no outrage on the part of these organizations’ funders, just as there has been no outrage over the actual heinous torture. There have been no threats by European and other governments to halt all aid to the PA in the face of the “shocking” revelations that it engages in torture on an almost unimaginable scale. The EU and its member states, clearly, could not possibly care less.

It is the exact same mechanism, which is at work in the international media’s deliberate refusal to report on PA human rights violations in general. Reports about torture of detainees in PA prisons do not attract the interest of the overwhelming number of journalists who cover the Israeli-Arab conflict and hence the mainstream media never write about it.

Foreign governments do not care one wit about the human rights violations that occur in the PA because it has never been about Arab lives, who are destroyed everyday all over the Arab world with the world community barely blinking. It was always about one thing: destroying the Jewish state.

Judith Bergman is a columnist and political analyst.