This blog, like so many others, devotes a lot of its efforts to questions arising from the Israel-Palestine conflict. Open any newspaper and you’ll find hectares of news and opinion about the current tension between Israel and the United States. The death of one Thai worker in Israel yesterday, killed by a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip, has made the front pages of today’s New York Times and the Times of London, to name just two of the many important papers that have prominently covered it.
And yet the amount of human suffering caused the the Israel-Palestine conflict is relatively small. Conflicts that produce a vastly greater number of dead and injured receive scant or no coverage in the media. The reasons for this imbalance and its grim consequences are the subject of a notable essay by Noah Bernstein at Open Democracy. Here’s a quote:
Differentiating - and prioritizing - a certain type of conflict over another ignores the fundamental concept of human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Fourth Geneva Convention: a civilian oppressed or killed in any part of the world under any illegal circumstances represents a human rights violation. Every individual is entitled to the same protection under international human rights law, international humanitarian law, and international criminal law regardless of the intensity or breadth of the conflict causing their deadly or oppressive circumstances. This includes the 150,000 Liberians killed in the civil war of 1999-2003, the 300,000 North Koreans starved or worked to death in gulags since 2005, and the 37,000 Kurds killed by Turkish forces since 1984. Yet there were few protests in European and North American cities over Liberia, nor have any UN resolutions been passed on behalf of the North Koreans, and there have been no calls for divestment of Turkish assets. The fact that none received media coverage proportionate to that of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, despite vastly higher casualty numbers and thoroughly oppressive conditions, conveys a clear message to these victims: their human rights are secondary to the rights of more favoured individuals.
Now go and read the complete essay.
Well Eamonn, I for one am more vocal against Israeli human rights abuses because certain things make them unique among other unsavoury regimes. Firstly, I don’t think we hear other regimes routinely lauded as a ‘beacon, ‘democracy’, ‘light unto the nations’ etc. Secondly rarely if ever do hear we so called intellectuals in the west provide excuses for and attempt to defend the human rights abuses of those other unsavoury regimes. Unfortunately, excuses is one area where Israeli apologists excel at. Oh and the is the little matter of the aid, militarly, financially and diplomatically which Israel recieves, compared to other humans rights abusers. Perhpas if there wasn’t so much hypocrisy with regard to all the above, people wouldn’t be as vocal. But this question routinely pops up, even though the answer is so easily understood. The people posing the question, the apologists, simply seek to infer something more unsavoury bubbling away underneath, that must explain the frequency of articles and debate surrounding ‘the only jewish state in the world’.
Oh and on a personal note, as Im from Ireland (like yourself), i also take a keen interest in this conflict because it has Britain’s fingerprints on it as well (the odious Balfour and botched mandate etc), we know too well the crime of colonization and disposession here in Ireland. Pity some of us tend to ignore our own history, isn’t it Eamonn?